Kuchisake-onna

Kuchisake-onna, the “slit-mouthed woman,” is modern Japan’s best-known urban legend. In the standard version she is a tall woman with long black hair and a surgical mask who approaches a child at dusk and asks, “Watashi, kirei?” – “Am I pretty?” If the child says yes, she pulls down the mask to show a mouth cut wide across her cheeks and asks again, “Even like this?” Every answer seems to be the wrong one, but schoolchildren traded escape tricks: tell her she looks “average,” say you are late for an appointment, toss her a handful of hard candy, or repeat the word “pomade” three times.

Unlike most ghosts, her rise can be dated almost to the week. Folklorists trace the rumour to Gifu Prefecture in late 1978. The local newspaper Gifu Nichi Nichi Shimbun mentioned children’s talk of the masked woman on 26 January 1979, and from March national weeklies including Shūkan Asahi and Shūkan Shinchō picked it up. Through spring the story raced from Gifu to Aomori in the north and Kagoshima in the south, carried by children at school and cram school. By June parent–teacher groups in some towns were walking pupils home, police cars patrolled school routes in several cities, and schools sent children home in groups. In Himeji that summer a woman was arrested after frightening people while dressed as the figure. Then the school holidays began in August, the playground network went quiet, and the panic faded.

Where did she come from? Each telling supplied an origin – a botched cosmetic operation, a jealous sister, a samurai’s punishment of an unfaithful wife – but none rests on a real event. Edo-period ghost books do contain women whose mouths are split to the ears, often foxes in disguise, and writers such as Matthew Meyer see the 1979 figure as their descendant. Others, including the literature professor Iikura Yoshiyuki and folklorists who study school ghost stories, regard her as essentially a creation of the 1970s, born from children’s rumour amplified by the mass media.

The legend travelled. In South Korea a version called the “Red Mask” spread among schoolchildren from the 1990s, and the Korea JoongAng Daily has linked its popularity to parents’ real fears about violence against young people, who used the story to hurry children home before dark. She has since become a stock figure of Japanese horror, a yōkai in Shigeru Mizuki’s encyclopedias and a regular in films, manga and games.

Children reported a tall woman in a white surgical mask, often in a long coat, waiting at street corners or near schools at dusk and asking passers-by if she was pretty. She was said to be inhumanly fast. Variants gave her two sisters, a red mask, or a fondness for (or fear of) candy and tofu. No encounter has ever been verified.

Not one place: the rumour placed her near schools, alleys and walking routes home all over Japan in 1979, and later in South Korea. The story began in Gifu Prefecture in central Honshu.

Kuchisake-onna inspired films such as Kōji Shiraishi’s Kuchisake-onna (2007, released in English as Carved), appears in Studio Ghibli’s Pom Poko (1994), and is a staple of manga, anime, games and school ghost-story books. The 1979 scare is studied as a textbook case of a modern urban legend.