“My Husband Thinks the Child Is His” — Inside the Double Life of a Wife Living Between Marriage and an Affair

After 10 Years of Trying to Conceive, She Finally Became Pregnant—With Another Man’s Child

Have you ever heard the term “takuran” (paternity fraud)?

Originally, it refers to the behavior of birds such as cuckoos, which lay their eggs in other birds’ nests and have them raised by different parents. By extension, the term has come to describe a situation in which a woman conceives a child with the person she truly loves and then raises the child with her financially stable husband.

However, the woman interviewed for this article became pregnant for reasons that fall outside that typical narrative.

Recently, Reiko Hase (37, pseudonym), who had just given birth to her first child and appeared to be surrounded by happiness, smiled while holding her baby and said:

“Actually, this child isn’t his.”

“In modern terms, I guess you’d call me a ‘takuran wife.’ My husband believes this is his child, but there’s absolutely no chance that it is. This baby is my boyfriend’s.”

Reiko and her husband had been married for ten years and had never used contraception.

“From the time we got married, we’d always talked about wanting children, but it just never happened. My husband wanted children too, but he refused to undergo serious fertility treatment, so we never found out why I couldn’t get pregnant. I had started to think we might spend our entire lives as a childless couple.”

Carrying unresolved frustration, Reiko became absorbed in dating apps and services catering to women.

“I was only engaging in what you’d call ‘improper relationships with men,’” she says with a laugh.

“No matter how many times I had sex with my husband, I never got pregnant. We wanted a child, but we weren’t investigating the reason why it wasn’t happening. We weren’t getting divorced either. I just kept working, spending my days with my husband, and looking at pregnancy tests that came back negative month after month. I think I was trying to escape reality.”

She maintained what she considered loyalty to her husband by never seeing the same man twice—except for one person.

“He was the president of a company that did business with my workplace. It was a small company, though. We’d met many times at work-related drinking parties, and one day, after drinking too much, we ended up having that kind of relationship. Since it would have been a disaster for both of us if anyone found out, oddly enough that made me feel secure.”

About a month after they began meeting at hotels, he made a proposal.

“He knew I was married, so we were using protection. But he complained that it was uncomfortable. He said he wanted to have sex without a condom and asked me to take birth control pills instead. I enjoyed being with him, and since I couldn’t get pregnant with my husband anyway, I thought, ‘Well, why not?’ and started taking them.”

About six months after they began seeing each other regularly, he told her he had something important to discuss.

“He was married too, and he had children. Since he was just a business contact and I wasn’t personally interested in his private life, I had no idea,” she says with a wry smile. “He told me, ‘What started as something casual has become serious for me. If you’re okay with dating a married man, I’d like us to be together for real.’ He said his marriage was essentially a friendship marriage, that he and his wife had stopped having sex after their child was born, and that both of them were fine with extramarital relationships. Apparently, his wife also has a partner.”

Reiko accepted the proposal because, as she put it, it made our positions equal.

Although the two officially became lovers, arguments became more frequent due to side effects from the birth control pills.

“The pills didn’t suit my body, and they made me emotionally unstable. He also had depressive tendencies, and when he wasn’t doing well, he’d say things that would deliberately shake my mental state. What really irritated me was that he’d bring our fights into work. He’d suddenly cancel meetings with my company or engage in little acts of harassment to control me. It was awful.”

She secretly stopped taking the pill

However, saying, “I still loved him, so I couldn’t leave him,” she took an unexpected course of action: she stopped taking birth control pills.

“I wanted his child. I wanted to experience being a parent. I was tired of work too. There were all sorts of emotions involved, but the biggest one was that I wanted to get pregnant and make things difficult for him. I was still having sex with my husband occasionally, so even if I got pregnant, it wouldn’t necessarily be a problem. I was also curious about how he would react if I had a child.”

Two months after stopping the pill, she discovered she was pregnant. Her husband was ecstatic, but her boyfriend immediately demanded that she have an abortion.

“He said, ‘I’ll cover all the abortion expenses,’ and made me call multiple obstetrics and gynecology clinics right in front of him. I kept making excuses like, ‘The procedure is too expensive,’ or ‘They’re fully booked,’ and then told him a fake abortion date, saying, ‘I’ll take care of it properly.’ At that point, I was 15 weeks pregnant.”

He apparently cried and apologized, saying, “This is for our own good,” and tried to make up for it by sending letters filled with loving messages. Yet, unbelievably, the day before the fictitious abortion date, he made Reiko stand in line at a toy store for hours to buy a doll that was popular at the time.

“He’s a psychopath, isn’t he?” she laughs. “When my morning sickness became unbearably severe, I suddenly thought, ‘I want him to experience this suffering too,’ so I told him, ‘Actually, I didn’t have the abortion.’ He completely lost his temper. He shouted, ‘I’ll never see you again!’ and ‘I don’t even know you!’ Deep down, I think I had been waiting for him to say he was happy, so it was a little sad.

On the other hand, my husband was already excited to meet the baby before it was even born. My husband saved me. He was so happy that it almost made me wonder how he could go all these years without us having a child and never once suspect anything.”

One might think the relationship would simply fade away after that, but she laughs and says, “He kept sending me LINE messages every three days or so and threatening me.”

“He said, ‘I’m a company president, and I have some assets. Even if my marriage is basically a friendship marriage, having a child with someone else is a different matter.’ He said that if his wife found out about our relationship and learned about the child, she’d probably demand compensation and that I should make sure to pay it. My response was basically: shouldn’t you be the one paying?”

However, Reiko says even this situation was within expectations. She brushed off his threats and spent her maternity leave peacefully with her husband. When she posted a photo of her child, born on the due date, on Instagram, she received a LINE message from him saying, “I want to come visit.”

“I wondered what had gotten into him. But when I chose a day when my husband absolutely couldn’t come because of work, he showed up carrying my favorite cake. He looked at the baby’s face with an expression I couldn’t quite describe, then touched the baby’s cheek and said, ‘My child, huh.’”

Nothing particularly significant was said that day, but their relationship naturally resumed. Even after giving birth, she leaves the child with her husband and enjoys occasional rendezvous with her lover.

“My husband is astonishingly supportive when it comes to childcare. About once a week, he’ll tell me things like, ‘Go refresh yourself,’ or ‘Why don’t you go to the hair salon?’ and encourage me to get out of the house. He’s basically a highly capable stay-at-home babysitter,” she laughs. “When I go out, I meet my boyfriend at a love hotel.

We created a private Instagram account together, and we exchange direct messages there before immediately deleting them. Unless something really extraordinary happens, I don’t think we’ll get caught.”

One day after bathing the baby, her husband suddenly asked:

“Do you know Mr. A from Company ○○?”

Mr. A was the name of Reiko’s boyfriend.

“For a moment, it felt like the world in front of me warped. I wondered, ‘How did he find out?’ But I calmly replied, ‘He’s a business contact.’ It turned out he was talking about the possibility that my husband’s company might end up doing business with him in the future. It really reminded me how small the world is.”

When asked whether she was afraid of her husband finding out, Reiko looked puzzled and replied:

“Life is a game. Even when I run into trouble, I just think about how to clear the stage. If I get caught, I get caught. I’m curious about what kind of expression my husband would make if he found out. Even if he divorced me, I have enough savings to get by for a while, and I have professional qualifications, so I could just change jobs and move somewhere else.”

During the interview, while showing the writer photos of her child, Reiko displayed a curious sense of confidence.

“Look, the baby looks just like me, right? My boyfriend and my husband even have the same blood type, so unless someone orders a DNA test, nobody will ever find out.”