Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we focus on the Slit-Mouth Demon of Japan. Monday we were introduced to the world’s worst Butterface. Wednesday we gave you sure fire tips to avoid her wrath.

I still don’t feel like I’ve completely managed to twist my mind around Kuchisake-onna. By extension, it’s likely that you haven’t either. If you’re deeply familiar with Japanese culture and society, you probably feel as though I’ve only brushed the surface of the legend, regurgitating all the requisite facts – slit mouth, surgical mask, vain inquisition and murder – without arriving at any real interpretive narrative insight save for another bogeyman rant and some tired Women’s Studies rhetoric that, itself, was plucked from an American curriculum. If, like me, your understanding of Japanese culture and society is wrested from a pack of cultural stereotypes and loose associatives – anime, game shows, Samurai and academically motivated suicides – Kuchisake-onna probably remains, quite literally, a ghost, a fanciful story, untethered from any definitive cultural prerogative or fixed history. I can confidently link the Bermuda Triangle to the New Age movement, to the UFO mania that began in the 1950s and to a curious fixation on Atlantis. Kuchisake-onna? All I can do is tell the story.

Even the intrepid, if over-confident, know-it-alls over at our English-language Wikipedia have desperately tried to resolve the slit-mouthed woman through a Western lens. The “See also” column provides links to Bloody Mary, which is described as “a similar apparition in Western urban legends” (they’re both women who terrorize children, but, otherwise, I’m missing the connection), La Llorona (which I covered in November 2009) and the Glasgow smile, the popular Western (more specifically Scottish) term for the wound caused by the slitting of a victim’s mouth from ear to ear (think the Black Dahlia and/or Ledger’s Joker). Of course, run the Japanese Wikipedia page for Kuchisake-onna through Google translate, and you don’t get any of that. In fact, the page alludes (I’m sure in Japanese it flat out says, but the auto-translate made the syntax all wonky and there’s enough subject/verb disagreement to constitute a full-on armed conflict) to clashing histories and varied folkloric iterations of the legend, all of them re-shaping the grinning specter through the susurrus murmurs and whisperings rising up out of individual prefectures.

All of the treasures of Japanese Wikipedia lie AFTER THE JUMP…

There’s the Two-Mouthed Woman, who carries an extra mouth on the top of her head, and the Cracked-Mouthed Woman, who, rather than bloodying her hands cutting her victims, curses them so that three days later, their cheeks crack open and split up to the ears. There are versions where Kuchisake-onna has a sister. Or two sisters. Or her wounds were the product of a botched plastic surgery. Versions packaged in loaded accounts of peasant uprisings and the war with Korea. There are versions where she floats in the air, where she outruns motorcycles, where she lurks in school nurses’ offices and where she circles victims’ houses at night, wrapping on the shutters and lacing the wind with sweetly spoken threats and trick questions.

In Japan, the legend of Kuchisake-onna shoulders deep cultural significance and immense historical weight. But I don’t have the background to decode it, or demystify it, or wrestle it down onto a vivisectionist’s table and lay bare its throbbing present-tense heart or the glinting, white bones of the past. And that’s refreshing. After all, what good to me is el chupacabra when it’s just a wayfaring panther or mange-afflicted wolf? What good to me is the Loveland Frog when it’s a flood-fleeing hobo, bindle in hand, signaling nothing stranger than the coming demise of the American railroad? Yes – there’s academic fascination, and cultural truths and beautiful, ear-ready narratives tucked away in the most recent of my neurological filing drawers – “things for my future children” – but there isn’t any mystery. Kuchisake-onna, in being just a story, is, for me, just that – a mystery. Even if, in my disenchanted, over-calculating mind, it isn’t the type of mystery that these types of stories used to represent – goosebumps and closet checks and wary, fearful glances out beyond the campfire into the dark copse of trees painted in flickering shadows – it’s still exciting. It’s books left to read, history left to learn, and monsters left to grapple and subdue. I wouldn’t go as far as to call it bliss, but this particular ignorance does feel pretty good.

A final experiment: While poking about Japanese Wikipedia, I decided to run a search on the Jersey Devil. The page cites the expected pop cultural references (“X-Files,” “The Last Broadcast,” et al.), but then goes on to offer this version of the actual legend:

Some siblings find a strange egg in the forest. They take it home and go down into the basement, hoping to avoid parental intercession. They light a fire and warm the egg. It hatches. The kids decide to nurture the strange, sinister-looking creature, and keep it as a pet. By the time their parents finally discover the animal, it’s become large and unwieldy. It bites one of the children and refuses to obey any commands. Though the adults attempt to exterminate the beast, it charges up the basement steps and escapes into the woods.

I gotta say… that – whatever the hell that is – makes me feel a lot better about the extent to which I almost certainly mangled the story of Kuchisake-onna, the slit-mouthed woman, a devil who, as proven by my ignorance, exists well outside the details.

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