Folklore is not something from museums and history textbooks

Demons are not born in forests. They are born on the boundary between what is known and what has just begun to be ordinary but has not yet been named. A human being can endure a great deal – hunger, war, poverty – as long as the world can still be told as a story. When the world starts changing faster than language can keep up with naming it, something settles in the cracks between old words and new reality. A fear without a name. And then the collective imagination does what it has always done: it composes a face out of small elements. It gives it eyes, a mouth, a way of walking. It assigns a name. It releases it into circulation. This is how folklore works when it is alive. Not as a museum relic, but as a sense through which a society perceives what it otherwise cannot say.

Winter of 1979. Sony has just put the first Walkman on the market. Honda is exporting passenger cars to Europe. In Tokyo, the new Yūrakuchō metro line begins running. At the same time, in Gifu Prefecture, an elderly woman from a farming family sees behind her house the figure of a tall woman with a mouth brutally slit all the way to her ears. The neighbors listen. The rumor moves. On 22 January the "Nagoya Times" gives the matter a brief mention; on 26 January the local "Gifu Nichinichi Shinbun" publishes a column piece. On 23 March the weekly "Shūkan Asahi" – one of the most serious magazines in the country – devotes twelve pages of reportage to the case. In April, schools in Kushiro introduce group escorts of children home under teachers' supervision. In May, principals in Niiza do the same. In June, in Himeji, the police detain a woman in a surgical mask carrying a kitchen knife – she wanted to scare the neighborhood kids. In the background, the fresh memory of the execution of Kiyoshi Ōkubo still echoes through the newspapers – a serial killer of eight women from Gunma Prefecture. Six months. That was enough for the rumor to travel from a single old woman in Yaotsu to a hundred million mouths, covering all forty-seven prefectures.

This is the year 1979. Not Heian 1079, not Sengoku 1579, not even Edo 1779. The demon does not crawl out of a paper scroll or down from a mountain monastery. It emerges on the shoulder of a road in the countryside, between the headlights of cars stuck in a traffic jam, in the shadow of the booming private evening-cram-school industry and the first decade of mass plastic surgery. It is the daughter not of a thousand-year tradition, but of a specific date on a modern calendar. It is also – more importantly – the daughter of a particular method of producing fear that Japan was already using in the 10th century and has never abandoned. The mechanism is the same; the ingredients are fresh.

Folklore is not only a product of distant epochs – it goes on, it works every day. And its contemporary works speak not of ancient superstitions, but of us, of our anxieties and our desires, the ones we often refuse to admit to. Let us see what kuchisake-onna can teach us.

Winter 1978 in Gifu Prefecture

The earliest traces of the story go back to December 1978. In the small town of Yaotsu in Gifu Prefecture, an elderly woman from a farming household stepped out one evening to the outhouse standing apart from the main building. In the corner of the garden, in half-shadow, she noticed a female silhouette. In the pale moonlight she made out the contours of the face – mouth brutally cut all the way to the ears. The old woman fell to her knees. She screamed. The figure vanished. No one would ever have heard the story had it not been for the neighbors she told. Within a few weeks the rumor was circulating through the surrounding villages, carried on children's lips and in overheard adult conversation.

The first press mention appeared on 22 January 1979 in the "Nagoya Times" from neighboring Aichi Prefecture. Four days later, on 26 January, the local daily "Gifu Nichinichi Shinbun" published a longer feature in its editorial column "Henshū yoki" (編集余記, "Editorial margins"). It was written by the journalist Murase Mutsumi, who described a story circulating among children about a beautiful middle-aged woman, said to resemble around the eyes the popular actress Yamamoto Yōko, approaching passersby in the dark and pulling down her mask. Those were the first sparks. Within two months the story crossed the boundary of local media.

On 23 March of the same year, the weekly "Shūkan Asahi" – one of the most respected in the country – devoted twelve pages of reportage to the affair. The title read Kuchisake-onna densetsu no Tōkaidō-naka hizakurige (口裂け女伝説の東海道中膝栗毛, "Pilgrimage of the legend of the woman with the slit mouth along the Tōkaidō road"). The piece was compiled by journalists under the direction of Kaneuchi Teruo. That was the breakthrough. Because when "Shūkan Asahi" writes about something on twelve pages, it means one thing: the phenomenon has been recognized as national. On 5 April the rival "Shūkan Shinchō" published a similar piece. The weeklies competed for new accounts. And the accounts arrived from every successive prefecture like carefully filed reports from a wildfire.

In April, May, and June the rumor traveled the entire archipelago. In Kōriyama in Fukushima Prefecture, someone called the police: a report of an attacker with a knife. A patrol drove out, found nothing. In Hiratsuka in Kanagawa Prefecture – the same: a squad car, sirens, an empty street. In Kushiro on Hokkaidō, school principals introduced shūdan gekkō (集団下校), the collective return of children from school under the supervision of teachers. The same was ordered in Niiza in Saitama Prefecture. In some smaller towns, afternoon classes were canceled for several days. Parents' patrols circulated through neighborhoods. Local police stations kept registers of reports. Not a single one was ever confirmed.

On 21 June in Himeji in Hyōgo Prefecture, the police detained a twenty-five-year-old woman. She was walking around in a surgical mask, in a long coat, holding a kitchen knife. It was a joke – she wanted to frighten the neighborhood kids. She was arrested under the statute on illegal carrying of a bladed weapon. A small mention in the paper. But it was good testimony to the scale of the phenomenon: the legend had infected not only victims but provocateurs as well. Folklore had become a script that someone could now perform.

And then something strange happened. In August 1979, the phenomenon went out. As if someone had flipped a switch. The folklorist Tsunemitsu Tōru (常光徹) – at that time a primary school teacher, later a professor at the National Museum of Japanese History and Folklore in Sakura – would later record it as a classic example of summer-holiday quieting. The summer break severed the circulation of the rumor. The children no longer met daily on the school playground, no longer exchanged variants of the story, no longer built up the tale. Kuchisake-onna required an audience that gathered at a certain hour of the day in the same place. Without that, she vanished as fast as she had appeared.

Six months. That was enough for a ghost to travel from an old woman in Yaotsu to a hundred million mouths.

A question with no good answer

The anatomy of the legend in its basic form was simple. A surgical mask, large, covering the lower half of the face. Beneath it, a beautiful woman. She asks a child walking alone:

私、綺麗？

(watashi, kirei?)

– "am I pretty?"

Whatever the child answers, it ends badly. If they say "no" – the woman pulls out shears, a sickle, or a kitchen knife and kills them on the spot. If they say "yes" – the woman pulls down the mask and asks a second time: "And now?". If the child answers "yes" again, they will simply be mutilated to look like her. If they start screaming – death.

The genius of this structure – and it is a brilliant structure, even if it was (probably) created by children – lies in the fact that there is no good answer. Every possible response leads to a harsh punishment. The child has no card in hand. They can try to bargain, but every word is a trap. Some versions provided ways of escape, but all of them required keeping a cool head in a situation that ruled out keeping a cool head.

The first of those ways was to blurt out the word "pomade". A version circulated in which Kuchisake-onna had been the product of a failed plastic surgery – the surgeon had pomade in his hair, the smell of which sent the maimed woman into fits of rage; so the word itself worked like a spell. The second method was the sweet amber caramel bekkō-ame (べっこう飴) – the woman would stop, take it from the child's hand, and vanish in the course of sucking on it. The third was the subtlest: to say "I have an appointment already" or "I'm late getting home". Kuchisake-onna was supposed to be polite enough to apologize for delaying you and walk away. The fourth: to say maa-maa desu (まあまあです), "you're so-so" – neither "yes" nor "no" – and the question stopped working.

These details say more than they appear to at first glance. Pomade – as a trace of the new profession of plastic surgeon. The caramel – as an appeal to the child's small power over what is offered as a treat. Lateness – as exploitation of Japanese politeness, the sanctity of punctuality. "So-so" – as escape from the dichotomous trap by refusal to play the game. Each method of escape was the product of children's sociology. Children themselves intuitively understood at which points the adult world's mask cracks.

Variants multiplied quickly. In some versions, Kuchisake-onna was supposed to be the youngest of three sisters – the two older ones had had successful surgeries to enlarge their eyes and noses, her own had failed. In others, she was the wife of a certain samurai: convinced of her infidelity, he cut her mouth with a razor, shouting: "who will call you beautiful now?". In still others, she was the victim of family cruelty, a car accident, a fire. Each village equipped her with a local etiology.

The fastest-expanding element was her physicality. In the first reports Kuchisake-onna walked. By April she was running. By May she covered a hundred meters in six seconds – faster than any human being on Earth. This detail matters. Because she ceased to be a human figure at exactly the moment she ceased to be a local one. From a peasant woman emerging from behind an outhouse in the villages of Gifu, she became a metaphysical force, traveling across all of Japan at a speed that made escape impossible.

Children never wrote this script consciously. Each child passed one version to a classmate, each classmate passed an altered version to a cousin. The versions crossed on the school playground. This is how folklore is born. Not by authorial decision, but by mutation.

Goryō. The same recipe was already used once, in 903

There is a temptation to see Kuchisake-onna as something unprecedented. Modern. Other. That is how the folklorist Nomura Jun'ichi (野村純一) thought of her in the early 1980s, when he began systematically collecting variants from all over Japan. That is how Tsunemitsu Tōru thought of her later, classifying her among "school horror tales". That is how Professor Iikura Yoshiyuki (飯倉義之) of Kokugakuin University thinks of her today, calling her simply "the first purely Japanese urban legend". A closer look, however, reveals something else. The mechanism of her birth is exactly the one Japan was already using in the 10th century.

The pattern of goryō-shinkō (御霊信仰), the cult of vengeful spirits, in its classical form consisted of four elements. First: social anxiety – an epidemic, a drought, political instability, disaster. Second: a victim wronged by the world – someone to whom an injustice had been done before death. Third: a communicative medium capable of gathering and preserving the rumor. In the Heian period these were court diaries, chronicles, scroll painting. Fourth: a collective imagination ready to give the elusive fear a face (more on goryō in Heian here: Administration by Dread: Official Appeals of Vengeful Spirits (onryō) in Heian Japan ).

In 903, a certain imperial minister died in exile in Dazaifu, the victim of a court intrigue. I have written about him before, in essays on Tenjin and on the wind. What matters here is not the biography but what happened after his death. The ingredients assembled quickly: an epidemic, lightning over the Seiryōden palace on 21 July 930, the deaths of several high-ranking Fujiwara nobles, earlier the death of the crown prince. The court had a choice: regard it as coincidence, or regard it as revenge. It chose the second. In 947, forty-four years after the minister's death, the court founded Kitano Tenmangū shrine. It built him an altar, restored his titles, entered him onto the list of deities. This is how deification through fear works. Not from love, but from the need to stop further calamity.

The four ingredients of Kuchisake-onna line up in parallel. Social anxiety: the end of high growth, the oil shock, mass urbanization, the dissolution of neighborhood networks, children studying until evening, forced into nighttime returns from supplementary classes. The victim: a woman maimed by a jealous husband, by an incompetent surgeon, by an accident. The medium: the school playground, juku (塾, "private supplementary school"), the local press, and then the national weeklies. The collective imagination: children unprepared for a new, urban fear, looking for a face for what gripped them in the stomach on the walk home.

The only difference was infrastructure. In 947 the communicative medium cost years of work by scribes and master painters. In 1979, all it took was for children to meet daily on a playground. The time scale was different – the essence of the mechanism identical.

A yōkai is not a relic of the past, because it never was one. A yōkai – as I wrote long ago in the essay on the kanji 妖怪 – is not a species of creature but a state, in which wobbly reality ceases to be self-evident. In the 10th century, that state took the shape of an exile with lightning in his hand. In the 20th – of a woman in a mask with a question on her lips. The same grammar, but a different vocabulary.

The 1970s had their own fear

Every decade has its demons. The 1970s in Japan were no exception. One has to look at the period more closely than through GDP statistics in order to understand why precisely in 1979, in Gifu Prefecture, into the mouth of an injured woman in a mask, a mass of scattered fears was projected.

The era of high growth, running since the early 1950s, ended abruptly in 1973. The first oil shock struck Japan harder than any other OECD country. A country almost entirely dependent on oil imports saw a sudden price spike, panic buying of toilet paper (yes, really – not just a Polish habit; check: 1 November 1973, the Daimaru Peacock supermarket in Senri New Town in Osaka Prefecture) and queues for fuel. Japan's GDP fell in 1974 by one point two percent – the first decline since wartime. After twenty years of unbroken growth, it was a shock. Children born in the mid-1960s, growing up in an atmosphere of constant optimism, suddenly saw worried parents, quiet dinners, belts tightened. Something had ended. Something new, unknown, troubling was beginning.

At the same time, Japan was urbanizing on an unprecedented scale. In 1955 three-quarters of the population lived in the countryside or in small towns. By 1979 two-thirds already lived in cities. Villages emptied out, apartment blocks rose, resettlements changed the social fabric. The old networks of neighbors vanished. Children grew up in environments where the adult from the next stairwell could be a complete stranger (which at the time still felt odd).

And that is exactly when something arrived that Iikura Yoshiyuki regards as the direct catalyst. The juku boom, private evening cram schools. In an era of rising competition for places at prestigious universities, relatively well-off families sent their children to supplementary classes after six in the evening. The children walked home at eight, at nine, sometimes at ten in the evening. Alone. On foot. Through neighborhoods they did not know. They passed adults they had never seen before: women going to work in the night sector, in hostess clubs and bars. Drunken men returning from company dinners. Taxi drivers waiting for customers. The entire underworld of the night city, invisible to children walking home from school at four o'clock, was becoming reality for them.

"Children saw adults they had never seen before" – says Iikura in his interview with the Nippon.com portal. Women heading to work in clubs. Drunks coming back from bars. This fueled an anxiety about the presence of people who could hurt them. And the anxiety, having no name yet, found itself a shape: a woman in a mask standing under a streetlight.

Three years earlier, in 1976, news of the execution of Kiyoshi Ōkubo, a serial killer, spread through all of Japan. Ōkubo had lured, raped, and killed eight young women in Gunma Prefecture between 1971 and 1972. The youngest victim was sixteen. The case dominated front pages for months. The social trauma was deep. For the first time in decades, Japanese people began speaking of "the unknown adult" as a real, not theoretical threat to children. Three years later Kuchisake-onna appeared. Public imagination had already been prepared for her.

Another fresh ingredient was plastic surgery. In 1975 – four years before the panic – plastic and reconstructive surgery became in Japan an officially recognized medical specialty. It was a new profession. Few people knew it. It still carried an air of taboo – the traditional Japanese canon, deeply tied to the Confucian belief in the inviolability of the body given by one's parents, had long kept cosmetic interventions on the margins. Now suddenly plastic surgery began to be legalized and to spread. Women had their eyes, noses, chins operated on. Men spoke of it in whispers. The first decade of mass plastic surgery in Japan was a decade of gossip: how many women have had work done, whether this actress had, whether that one. Fear of a successful operation mixed with fear of a botched one. Out of that mixture, anecdotes were born. Out of anecdotes – legend.

"Pomade in the surgeon's hair" – just that one detail is enough to see that Kuchisake-onna is a product of a specific era, not an eternal specter. Pomade is a hairdressing cosmetic gaining popularity in the Japan of the 1960s and 1970s. A surgeon with pomade in his hair – hygienically improper, careless, new to the profession. A detail placing this legend in time with considerable precision.

And one more element of the stagecraft, prompted by the context of 1979: the surgical mask. That decade brought to Japan a culture of mass-mask-wearing. The reasons were prosaic. A cold – politeness toward one's neighbor on the train. Allergies to the pollen of Japanese cryptomeria, planted en masse after the war to restore the forests, became an epidemic in the 1970s. The mask ceased to be a rare sight reserved for hospitals. It became a banal, everyday object. And for that very reason ideal for horror. Because fear is not born of the exotic. Fear is born of what is already everywhere, but at which we have never looked closely.

The mothers must also be mentioned. The 1970s were the first decade of a clear rise in the divorce rate in postwar Japan. Single mothers, women abandoned or abandoning, began to appear in social visibility in a way unknown to their grandmothers. They raised their children alone, often worked evenings, their image in the press and in social gossip was ambivalent: between sympathy and stigma. Kuchisake-onna bears all the marks of this woman as seen by conservative neighbors: wronged by her husband, alone at night. In one reading, the rumor about her was a rumor about single mothers.

The 1970s had their own fear. They simply did not know how to name it. The modern, plastic anxiety – urbanization, the woman going out to work, the child alone on the street at eight in the evening, the female body "improved" by the surgeon's scalpel, the mask covering the neighbor's face. Then Japan did what it has been doing for a thousand years. It assembled a face from these ingredients and gave it a name.

Returns. The mask that would not vanish

August 1979. The summer holidays. The rumor goes quiet. September, October – the children return to school, but the story does not return with the same force. Something has worn out. New legends arise: Hanako-san in the school toilets, akai kami, aoi kami (red paper, blue paper) in the same toilets, later Teke-Teke – a woman cut in half by a train, dragging herself along on her elbows. Every successive wave of children's folklore has its own character. Kuchisake-onna stays in the imagination as the first, the strongest. The most recent wound.

In 2007 the feature film Kuchisake-onna, directed by Shiraishi Kōji and distributed abroad as "Carved: The Slit-Mouthed Woman", arrives in theaters. The film moves the figure from the register of children's menace into psychological horror for adults. It also transforms the mechanism: in Shiraishi's hands, Kuchisake-onna is the product of domestic violence, a mother who killed her own children, now returning as a ghost. The legend acquires a sociological face. From a children's fear it becomes a commentary on domestic violence, which Japan is beginning, ever more cautiously, to call by its name.

Earlier, in 2004, something still more surprising happens. A rumor about a woman with a red mask, identical in structure to the Japanese original, appears in the schools of Seoul and Busan. They simply call her ppalgan maseukeu yeoja (빨간 마스크 여자), "the woman in the red mask". In the Korean version she has a boyfriend in a blue mask, cannot climb stairs, sometimes is afraid of peaches. Those are Korean details, because in Korea everything happens in high-rise blocks, and the peach has traditional power against spirits in Korean shamanism. The legend adapted to its geography. A yōkai knows its territory.

Then comes 2020. The pandemic. Masks everywhere. All of Japan walks around in a surgical mask from morning to evening, on the streets, on trains, in shops (they had been very popular before, but in 2020 there were practically no exceptions to be seen on the street). One would think these are perfect conditions for the return of Kuchisake-onna. But Kuchisake does not come back with a new blow of horror. She comes back in a… meme – a sign of the times, one might say. Jokes appear: "we never know if we're walking beside her". Ironic comics appear. A T-shirt shop appears. Cosplay appears. The mask, which in 1979 inspired terror in a child, in 2020 is a banal, everyday accessory. It lost the capacity to terrify. Fear has moved elsewhere.

This is paradoxical, but logical. A yōkai needs not only ingredients but also a communicative network ready to receive it. In 1979 the network was children's whispers on the school playground and the local press fanning the topic. In 2020 the network is the internet – but the internet already knows, distances, parodies. The pandemic produced its own demons. Their names were not Kuchisake. They were called the Chinese conspiracy, the microchip in the vaccine, the murky fear of the neighbor sneezing on the train. The ingredients the same: victim, rumor, network, collective imagination. A different face.

A yōkai does not die that easily. It just enjoys changing costumes.

Can the story of a woman with a slit mouth teach us anything?

Folklore is not a relic of the past. Folklore is a mechanism of the present. That is the first, most obvious conclusion.

Every society carries within itself a layer of anxieties it cannot name. The anxiety may concern plague, climate, technology, working women, single mothers, migration, artificial intelligence, the child's body in social media. Whatever it is, when it accumulates, it presses against the boundary of the nameable. Then society creates a figure. It chooses a victim – someone wronged, capable of carrying guilt. It chooses a medium – a child's rumor, a court's rumor, a post on social media. It chooses an attribute – a mask, a sickle, a lightning bolt, a bloodied face, anything will do as long as it stirs the imagination. And from this it composes a face.

Sugawara no Michizane in 903 was a lightning bolt over the imperial palace. Kuchisake-onna in 1979 was a woman in a mask on the shoulder of a road in Gifu. For the inhabitants of Heian the lightning was an opaque everyday occurrence – they did not know physics, did not distinguish a spiritual disaster from a meteorological one. For the child in Gifu in 1979 the unfamiliar adult in a mask was an opaque everyday occurrence – they knew the modern city but did not yet know its nighttime side. A yōkai always grows at the seam between what is known and what is not yet named.

Iikura Yoshiyuki, in his 2024 interview, calls Kuchisake-onna "the first purely Japanese urban legend". That is an important formulation. Not the first urban legend in Japan. The first purely Japanese one. Which means: born fully out of Japanese modernity, without folkloric loans from the West, without an ancient genealogy holding up the narrative. She is the daughter of her own era – the oil crisis, juku, the surgeon with pomade in his hair, the neighbor in a mask, the single mother returning from work at eleven. In other words: she is ours (or our parents', or our grandparents', depending on which generation you belong to). A creation of contemporary society in its most recognizable shape.

And that means we are not yet done with yōkai. We are only done with those from paper scrolls. The next ones are still to come. Their ingredients are already in our cities, their medium already hums in our pockets, their first victims already whisper to each other in school corridors and in group chats. Perhaps they are already amplified through AI hallucinations. Perhaps they are sprouting in innocent corners of less well-known social media. The only question is what face we shall give them. Because we always do.

And what is interesting – what face they will give us in return. Because I have no doubt that, when we look at them, we shall learn no small thing about ourselves. And quite possibly – nothing flattering.

SOURCES

1. Iikura Yoshiyuki (飯倉義之), interview "Nihon no toshi densetsu: Kuchisake-onna kara Kisaragi-eki made" (日本の都市伝説 ― 口裂け女から如月駅まで, "Japanese urban legends – from Kuchisake-onna to Kisaragi Station"), Nippon.com, January 2024.

2. Nomura Jun'ichi (野村純一), "«Kuchisake-onna» sono ta" (「口裂け女」その他, "«The woman with the slit mouth» and others"), in: Nihon no seken-banashi (日本の世間話, "Japanese neighborhood tales"), Tōkyō Shoseki, Tokyo 1995, pp. 21–56.

3. Reider, Noriko T., Japanese Demon Lore: Oni from Ancient Times to the Present, Utah State University Press, Logan 2010.

4. Tsunemitsu Tōru (常光徹), Gakkō no kaidan: Kōshō bungei no kenkyū I (学校の怪談 ― 口承文芸の研究Ⅰ, "School horror tales: studies in oral literature, vol. I"), Mineruva Shobō, Kyoto 1993.

5. Yamaguchi Bintarō (山口敏太郎), Gendai yōkai zukan (現代妖怪図鑑, "Atlas of contemporary yōkai"), Kasakura Shuppan, Tokyo 2008.

6. "Gifu Nichinichi Shinbun" (岐阜日日新聞), 26 January 1979, column Henshū yoki (編集余記, "Editorial margins") by Murase Mutsumi.

7. "Shūkan Asahi" (週刊朝日), vol. 84 no. 12 (continuous no. 3176), 23 March 1979, Kuchisake-onna densetsu no Tōkaidō-naka hizakurige (口裂け女伝説の東海道中膝栗毛), pp. 35–46, Kaneuchi Teruo et al.

A footnote

Kuchisake-onna in the form we know from 1979 is a 20th-century invention – she appears as a figure in her own right, not as the incarnation of something older. But folklore works by recycling: motifs travel, get repurposed, modified, stitched back together. The ingredients used to build Kuchisake had been present in the Japanese imagination for a long time:

– "Konjaku monogatari shū" (今昔物語集, early 12th century) – a collection of tales in which women transform into kijo (鬼女), demonesses with unsettling faces, often lying in wait for solitary travellers.

– "Genji monogatari" (源氏物語, early 11th century) by Murasaki Shikibu – the figure of Rokujō no Miyasudokoro, whose jealousy releases an ikiryō (生霊), a living spirit that kills her rivals. The archetype of a beautiful woman whose resentment turns into murderous force.

– The hannya mask (般若) in nō theatre – the visual embodiment of that same transformation: a beautiful face that, beneath a layer of rage, becomes demonic.

– "Shinchomonjū" (新著聞集, 1749) – a she-cat transforms into a woman with a mouth slit from ear to ear. – "Kaidan Oi no Tsue" (怪談老の杖, c. 1789) – a kitsune (trickster fox) takes the form of a woman with the same deformity.

– "Ehon Sayo-shigure" (絵本小夜時雨, early 19th century) – in Yoshiwara, a customer calls out to a courtesan; she turns around, her mouth slit all the way to her ears, the customer faints and never returns to the brothel.

– A note: a version circulates on the English-language internet claiming that Kuchisake-onna originates in the Heian period, the original story supposedly concerning a samurai who slit his unfaithful wife's mouth. This is a piece of pop-cultural confabulation with no support in Japanese sources – no surviving Heian text (794–1185) contains such a figure or such a plot, and the earliest literary variants of the "woman with the slit mouth" date only from the Edo period, six hundred years later. Setting aside the fact that the Heian period had no samurai.

The difference is just one, but it is fundamental. In the whole tradition up to 1978, "a mouth slit to the ears" signalled that this was not a human being – that beneath the mask sat a fox, a cat, an oni, or a kijo. Kuchisake-onna in 1979 stands, for the first time, on her own. She is no one's mask. She no longer needs a bestiary to exist.

"Strong Japanese Women"

see book by the author

of the page

    未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

  Mike Soray

   (aka Michał Sobieraj)

未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

Mike Soray

(aka Michał Sobieraj)

Write us...

Ciechanów, Polska

dr.imyon@gmail.com

___________________

inari.smart

Would you like to share your thoughts or feedback about our website or app? Leave us a message, and we’ll get back to you quickly. We value your perspective!