The Slit-Mouthed Woman (口裂け女)

In the winter of 1978, the first whispered sightings stirred in a farming village in Gifu. By the following spring, the rumour had spread from child to child, mouth to mouth, and by summer it had seeped into every corner of the Japanese archipelago. Police cars were dispatched, children were escorted home in groups, and even adults grew wary of walking alone after dark — such was the panic sown by the story of a woman in a single white mask.

She appears only after dusk. A young woman, her mouth concealed behind a clean surgical mask, approaches a child on the way home and asks, quietly: "Am I pretty?" No answer changes what follows. Say "yes," and the mask comes away to reveal a mouth split open to the ears. Say "no," and the blade she has kept hidden is drawn. The question itself is the trap; the moment it is spoken, there is nowhere left to run.

Several shadows converge on Gifu, the place said to be her origin. It is told that the resentment of farmers punished during the Hōreki Gujō uprising settled like sediment into the land of Shirotori, and in time took the shape of a disfigured woman. Woven into her outline, too, is an older tale from the Meiji era: a woman who crossed the mountain pass each night to reach her lover, smearing white powder on her face to frighten off wild animals and clenching a carrot between her teeth as she walked.

The Slit-Mouthed Woman, as an urban legend, fell silent in the summer of 1979 — the children stopped gathering, and the circuit of rumour broke down. Yet there are those who say it was only the spreading that ceased, not the existence. In 2004 similar stories surfaced in South Korea, and later in Chinese-speaking regions as well. She may not be bound to any particular soil.

Even now, when a masked woman walks the night road, there is no way to know whether she is merely human. And the moment you try to find out, the question comes.