Kuchisake-onna (口裂け女, くちさけおんな) means “slit-mouthed woman.” She is the masked ghost of a modern Japanese urban legend who stops children on the street, asks “Am I pretty?”, then lowers her mask to show a mouth cut from ear to ear. In 1979 the rumor spread from Gifu Prefecture across Japan and sent schoolchildren home in escorted groups.
A Question on an Empty Street
It is late. A child is walking home alone down a quiet suburban street. A tall woman stands ahead under a streetlight, a surgical mask over the lower half of her face, a long coat, hair falling past her shoulders. She steps into the child’s path and asks, gently, “Am I pretty?”
The child says yes, because what else do you say. The woman reaches up and pulls the mask down. Her mouth has been cut from ear to ear, a red gash of a smile. “Even like this?” she asks.
This is the Kuchisake-onna (口裂け女, pronounced koo-chee-SAH-keh OWN-nah), the Slit-Mouthed Woman, and she is one of the most frightening figures in modern Japanese folklore. Not a dusty legend from a scroll, but a story that emptied streets within living memory.
What the Name Means
The name Kuchisake-onna is beautifully, horribly literal. It breaks into three parts: 口 (kuchi) means “mouth,” 裂け (sake) means “split” or “torn,” and 女 (onna) means “woman.” The split-mouthed woman. The name is the wound.
She is what folklorists call a modern urban legend, or toshi densetsu (都市伝説) in Japanese, a story spread by word of mouth in schoolyards and on street corners rather than passed down through ancient texts. That freshness is part of why she frightens so deeply. She does not haunt a distant castle. She haunts the walk home.
The Kuchisake-onna Story
The core of the tale follows a cruel script, and knowing the script is the only defense the legend offers.
The Kuchisake-onna approaches, usually a lone child or a young person, often at dusk or after dark. Her mask, once a common enough sight in Japan for illness or hay fever, hides the horror beneath. She asks her first question:
“Watashi kirei?” (私、綺麗?) which means “Am I pretty?”
If you say no, she is said to kill you on the spot. If you say yes, she removes the mask, reveals the slit mouth, and asks again: “Kore demo?” (これでも?), “Even like this?” Answer no, and she attacks. Answer yes, and in many versions she takes her scissors or long blade and cuts your mouth to match her own, so that you become like her. In others she lets you go, then follows you home and comes for you that night.
The 1979 rumor gave her a costume children could describe down to the shoes. She is tall, usually put at 175 to 180 centimeters, with long hair and a large mask. Some schools dressed her in a long coat, others in red from beret to high heels. She carries long scissors, though the weapon shifts with the teller: a kitchen knife, a sickle, a scalpel.
There is no safe answer, only a clever one. The Kuchisake-onna is a riddle that punishes both fear and flattery, and rewards only the person quick enough to refuse the game.
Why Her Mouth Was Cut
Every version needs a reason, and the 1979 rumor offered several. In the most common Japanese telling she was a woman whose cosmetic surgery went wrong. Another made her one of three sisters, each disfigured in a different way, by a failed operation, a traffic accident, and jealousy.
The samurai version, in which a jealous husband cuts the mouth of his unfaithful wife, is the one most English retellings lead with. It is mostly a Western telling. Japanese sources file it as a version from abroad, and the schoolyard rumor of 1979 never needed it.
How to Escape Kuchisake-onna
What fascinates me about this legend is that it comes with built-in survival tricks, the kind of countermeasures children traded like currency during the panic. That practical, almost playground quality is very telling.
Start with what does not work. You cannot outrun her. The rumor gave her a speed of 100 meters in six seconds, faster than any human sprinter, so every trick is about making her stop.
| Your answer | What she does |
|---|---|
| “No” | Kills you on the spot |
| “Yes” | Pulls down the mask and asks, “Even like this?” |
| “Yes” a second time | Cuts your mouth to match hers, or follows you home |
| “No” the second time | Attacks with her scissors |
| “Futsu” (average) or “so-so” | Hesitates, and you run |
The most common escape routes include:
- Give a neutral answer. Instead of yes or no, reply “futsu” (普通, “average”) or “maa maa” (so-so). Confused, she is said to hesitate long enough for you to run.
- Turn the question back. Ask her, “Am I pretty?” The unexpected reversal buys time.
- Throw candy or money. Toss hard candies, coins, or fruit at her feet. The candy with a name is bekko-ame (べっこう飴), an amber sugar candy said to be her favorite. She stops to eat it, and you slip away.
- Say a magic word. Repeating “pomade” (ポマード) three times drives her off. The Japanese explanation is specific: the surgeon who botched her operation wore heavy hair pomade, and she cannot stand the smell.
- Get upstairs. Some versions say she will not follow you above the ground floor of a building, and others that the kanji for dog, 犬, written on your palm keeps her away.
These tricks are the folklore’s own reassurance. Every truly frightening children’s legend seems to grant its listeners at least a sliver of power, some ritual that makes the darkness survivable.
Is Kuchisake-onna Real? The 1979 Panic
Here is where the Kuchisake-onna leaps out of ordinary storytelling and into recorded history.
No, there is no slit-mouthed woman, and no attack by one was ever documented. But the panic she caused was real, the national press covered it, and it can be dated almost week by week.
It began in rural Gifu Prefecture in December 1978, when an elderly woman from a farming family said she had seen a woman with a slit mouth by her house and collapsed from fright. The first printed report ran in the Gifu Nichi Nichi Shimbun on 26 January 1979. By spring the national weeklies had it: Shukan Asahi on 23 March and Shukan Shincho on 5 April.
The rumor traveled through cram schools, the evening juku where children from different neighborhoods sat side by side, and within about six months it covered the country. Police sent patrol cars out in Koriyama and Hiratsuka. Schools in Kushiro and Niiza sent children home in supervised groups. On 21 June 1979, police in Himeji arrested a 25-year-old woman who had dressed as the Kuchisake-onna and was carrying a kitchen knife.
Then it stopped. In August 1979 the rumor collapsed almost at once, because the summer holidays began and the schoolyard network that carried it went quiet.
Think about that. A story with no author, no book, no film to start it, moved through a modern industrialized nation and changed how children got home from school. It is an urban legend behaving like a living thing, mutating and spreading through pure word of mouth. The folklorist Iikura Yoshiyuki of Kokugakuin University has called her the first purely Japanese urban legend, and Michael Dylan Foster tied the 1979 wave to the beauty industry and the women’s weekly magazines that fed it in a 2007 paper for the journal Signs.
The 1979 wave gave the legend its enduring shape: the mask, the question, the scissors, the escape tricks. In 2004 the rumor crossed to South Korea.
Kuchisake-onna Origins: Edo Period Roots
Although the Kuchisake-onna feels thoroughly modern, with her surgical mask and suburban streets, her roots may reach back much further.
Split-mouthed women do appear in the story books of the Edo period (1603 to 1868). In Kaidan Oi no Tsue (怪談老の杖), a man in Okubo Hyakunincho, today part of Shinjuku in Tokyo, meets a woman whose mouth is split to her ears. In Ehon Sayo Shigure (絵本小夜時雨), published in 1801 by Hayami Shungyosai, the encounter happens in the Yoshiwara pleasure quarter, with a courtesan whose mouth opens to the ears. In Edo tellings the usual culprit was a fox in disguise, the kitsune playing one of its crueler tricks.
Modern folklorists are careful here. They treat the 1979 rumor as its own event rather than a direct descendant, because nothing links the children of 1979 to these books. What the Edo stories show is that the image, a beautiful woman hiding a terrible mouth, was already waiting in the culture.
In that sense the Kuchisake-onna sits at the end of a long line. She carries the emotional charge of the onryo, the vengeful ghost driven by a grudge, and she wears the sorrow of the yurei, the restless female spirit of classic tales. In some versions of her story she is explicitly a woman disfigured by a jealous husband or a botched procedure, a wound turned into wandering rage, which is pure onryo logic dressed in modern clothes.
What the twentieth century added was the setting. She traded the moonlit temple for the streetlamp, the burial kimono for the trench coat and mask. The fear is ancient. The costume is new.
Kuchisake-onna vs Hanako-san, Teke Teke and Aka Manto
She is the eldest of a whole family of school-age horrors. Each one owns a place, sets a test, and comes with a rule for surviving it, and together they make up the core of our Japanese urban legends guide.
| Kuchisake-onna 口裂け女 | Hanako-san トイレの花子さん | Teke Teke テケテケ | Aka Manto 赤マント | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Who | A tall woman in a mask with a slit mouth | The ghost of a schoolgirl in a red skirt | A woman with no lower body | A masked figure in a red cloak |
| Where | The street on the walk home | The third stall of a third-floor school toilet | Railway tracks, stations, dark roads | A school toilet stall, often the fourth |
| The test | “Am I pretty?” | Knock three times and ask if she is there | She chases you on her hands | “Red paper or blue paper?” |
| How old | Gifu, December 1978 | Traced to the 1950s, peak in the 1980s and 1990s | A postwar legend | A schoolyard rumor by the 1930s |
| Survival rule | A confusing answer, candy, or “pomade” | Do not open the door | Few versions offer one | Refuse to choose |
What sets her apart is the street. The other three live in toilets and on railway lines. She waits on the walk home, the one stretch of the day no teacher could supervise.
Kuchisake-onna in Film and Anime
A legend this strong does not stay confined to schoolyards, and the Slit-Mouthed Woman has become a fixture of Japanese horror media.
She reached the screen fast. A monster modeled on her appeared in episode 29 of the superhero series Battle Fever J in 1979, the year of the panic. Studio Ghibli slipped her into Pom Poko (1994), and she is mentioned in Hideo Nakata’s Ring (1998).
The film most people mean is Carved: The Slit-Mouthed Woman (口裂け女), directed by Koji Shiraishi and released in Japan on 17 March 2007, with Miki Mizuno as the woman in the mask. Carved 2: The Scissors Massacre and The Slit-Mouthed Woman 0: The Beginning followed in 2008, and Kuchisake-onna Returns in 2012.
In manga and anime she turns up in Hell Teacher Nube, which gave her a sympathetic story, and more recently in Jujutsu Kaisen, Dandadan and Mob Psycho 100. In the game Ghostwire: Tokyo she is a scissor-wielding enemy, white coat and mask in her first form, red coat and bare mouth in her second. Her instantly readable image, the mask, the coat, the scissors, the question, makes her a gift to visual storytellers.
She belongs to a broader family of modern Japanese frights, standing alongside towering horrors like the gashadokuro, the giant skeleton of the unmourned dead, and older transformed spirits like the nekomata. Yet she remains distinct, because her terror is so intimate and so social. She does not lurk in a haunted house. She waits on the corner and asks you a question, and your own answer decides your fate.
Sources and Further Reading
- Japanese Urban Legends from the Slit-Mouthed Woman to Kisaragi Station, Nippon.com cram schools, six months, Iikura Yoshiyuki
- Kuchisake-onna, YOKAI.JP the 1979 timeline, Edo-period precedents, escape methods
- Kuchisake onna, Yokai.com "Kore demo?", fox culprits in the Edo period
- Kuchisake-onna, Wikipedia the Gifu Nichi Nichi report, weekly magazines, Ehon Sayo Shigure, films
- 口裂け女, Japanese Wikipedia the Himeji arrest, patrols, pomade and bekko-ame
- Carved: The Slit-Mouthed Woman, Wikipedia 2007, Koji Shiraishi, Miki Mizuno
- Michael Dylan Foster, Wikipedia his 2007 Signs article on the legend
- Toire no Hanako-san, Yokai.com 1950s roots, third stall
- Teke teke, Yokai.com the postwar railway legend
- Aka manto, Yokai.com the red or blue paper question, 1930s
FAQ
What does Kuchisake-onna mean?
The name Kuchisake-onna translates literally as “the slit-mouthed woman” or “the mouth-torn woman.” It comes from three Japanese words: kuchi (mouth), sake (split or torn), and onna (woman). The name directly describes her defining feature, a mouth cut open from ear to ear, usually hidden behind a surgical mask.
What is the question Kuchisake-onna asks?
She asks, “Watashi kirei?” meaning “Am I pretty?” If you answer yes, she pulls down her mask to reveal her slit mouth and asks, “Kore demo?”, “Even like this?” In the legend, both a plain yes and a plain no can get you killed, which is why the escape tricks focus on giving her a confusing or neutral answer instead.
How do you escape the Kuchisake-onna?
Answer “futsu” (average) or “so-so,” which confuses her long enough to flee. You can also throw hard candy, especially the amber sugar candy bekko-ame, or coins to distract her, turn the question back by asking whether you are pretty, or repeat the word “pomade” three times, because the surgeon who scarred her wore it. Running is no use: the rumor says she covers 100 meters in six seconds.
Is Kuchisake-onna real?
No. There is no slit-mouthed woman and no attack was ever documented, but the panic was real. The rumor began in Gifu Prefecture in December 1978, was first printed in the Gifu Nichi Nichi Shimbun on 26 January 1979, and spread nationwide that spring. Police stepped up patrols, schools sent children home in groups, and in June 1979 a woman dressed as her was arrested in Himeji.
What is Kuchisake-onna’s backstory?
The 1979 Japanese rumor usually made her a woman whose cosmetic surgery went wrong, which is why the smell of the surgeon’s pomade repels her. Another version made her one of three disfigured sisters. The version most English sites tell, a samurai who slit the mouth of his unfaithful wife, is mostly a Western telling. Edo-period books blamed a disguised fox for split-mouthed women.
Is the Kuchisake-onna an old legend or a modern one?
She is a modern urban legend that exploded in 1979, but her roots reach back further. Split-mouthed women appear in Edo-period books such as Ehon Sayo Shigure (1801), and her vengeful, sorrowful nature echoes classic spirits like the onryo and yurei. She is an old ghost-story wound retold for the age of the surgical mask and the suburban street.
What movies and anime feature Kuchisake-onna?
The best known film is Carved: The Slit-Mouthed Woman (2007), directed by Koji Shiraishi, with sequels in 2008 and 2012. She also appears in Studio Ghibli’s Pom Poko (1994), Hell Teacher Nube, Jujutsu Kaisen, Dandadan, Mob Psycho 100 and the game Ghostwire: Tokyo.