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, come back Wednesday and Friday for more!

Ancient, feudal Japan’s legends of proud warriors and disgraced Samurai haven’t always mixed well with contemporary urban legends and trendy pop cultural fads. The harakiri-inducing “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III,” for example, found its titular rubber-suited pizza fetishists travelling back to 15th century Japan, where they pose as demons, fight an evil warlord and learn a valuable lesson about self-esteem. The legend of Kuchisake-onna, the grotesque and reviled slit-mouthed woman, however, gets the job done in both timelines. Bonus: some newer versions of the story sprint so far into left field that, by the time you realize the entire business is just another cautionary tale engineered to keep the ladies demure and the unaccompanied minors from running roughshod over the pachinko arcades, they’ve collided with the outfield wall.

Kuchisake-onna is, on initial inspection, a beautiful woman, save for her surgical mask – a not-uncommon Japanese urban accessory worn for protection against airborne viruses. She’s tall and graceful, with dark eyes and, often, a black umbrella. Most of the stories begin on a foggy night, just as a school-aged dawdler, procrastinating his way home, passes by the mysterious woman, who is standing in a circle of streetlamp light. As the boy glances up at her, she approaches him and asks, in a soft voice, “Do you think I’m beautiful?” He looks her up and down in his best, ignorant approximation of his horny uncle’s notorious roving-eyed strip leer. “Yes.” He replies. The woman’s response is not the anticipated, blushing “Arigatou.” Instead, Kuchisake-onna tears of her mask to reveal a hideous, gaping mouth that’s been slit open ear to ear. For some reason (probably because she’s evil), she has rows upon rows of razor-sharp teeth. “Do you think I’m beautiful now?” cackles the poo-grinning -Onna. The child freezes. He stammers. He swallows once and attempts a double-time version of the top-to-bottom ocular hump.

Who the hell is this lady?

Find out… AFTER THE JUMP…

For just a moment, let’s take leave of our sniveling youth, whose second bod scan of the mystery woman’s slender figure has inadvertently target locked on the puffed, scarred edges of the toothy grin, and fire up the Time Scepter (on loan from the aforementioned turtles).
The first modern version of the Kuchisake-onna legend, which germinated throughout the 1970s, gave the slit-mouthed woman a tragic, if simplistic, back story: An ignoble, jealous Samurai, who also was in love with / married to / performing the nasty on (there are a buncha versions) the beautiful and much-lusted-after Kuchisake, slit his lover’s face open in a fit of unjustified / justified jealousy, shouting “Who will think you’re beautiful now?” / ”Why so serious?” After her death, the disfigured Kuchisake-onna became a vengeful ghost hell-bent on, well, doing this:

Desperate to escape from the woman’s terrifying smile, and overcome by his natural rosy-cheeked charm, our trembling schoolboy once again replies “Yes.” Without hesitation, Kuchisake-onna produces a giant pair of used-car-lot-grand-opening-style scissors and snips the kid a mouth extension identical to her own / follows him home and kills him like in “The Dead Zone” (the part with scissors… not the part with the hypothermic drowning). If you’re thinking that maybe it was some weird girl trap and he was supposed to answer “No.” the second time, it aint like that. Say “no” and get an immediate, on-the-spot skewering.

Obviously, as mentioned above, these early versions of the tale do that behavior modification via irrational fear induction thing we’re always talking about. The slit-mouthed woman’s feudal days would have gone better if she – being a woman – hadn’t be so vain or cheaty or otherwise morally independent, and her inquisitive latter day ghost wouldn’t have any victims if kids were sure to come straight home from school, feed their Bulbasaurs and do some homework.

Additionally, I feel like this story is an obvious riff on the ol’ Vagina Dentata classic. Kuchisake-onna outwardly appears a paragon of iconic feminine beauty, but is ultimately revealed hideous through the uncovering of her slit. Her gash. The story manages to both propagate the male fear of unbridled (read: unrepressed) female sexuality, while also reinforcing the notion of the vagina as something unclean, unattractive and antithetical to the strict cultural ideals of superficial feminine beauty. It’s this enduring stigmatizing shame that has led to things like waxing and labioplasty in an attempt to extend socially mandated ideals of beauty beyond facial makeup and weight limits. (Granted, I’m interpreting this through the lens of Western culture, so it’s right possible she really is just a bog-standard closet monster.)

Buck up! It’s not all murdered children and oppressive patriarchy! Wednesday, from the country that brought you pillow marriages, panty vending machines and “Yatta” – Kuchisake-onna evasion techniques: out-thinking and undoing Japan’s most notorious butterface.

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