Futakuchi-onna: The Second Mouth and the Story Told About It

What is Futakuchi-onna?

Futa is two. Kuchi is mouth. Onna is woman. The name is a description: a woman with two mouths, one where you would expect it and one hidden under the hair at the back of her head.

The picture most people know comes from Ehon Hyaku Monogatari, the “Picture Book of a Hundred Stories,” written by Tōsanjin and illustrated by Takehara Shunsen, published in 1841. But the book does not own the hidden mouth, and elsewhere it does not belong to a woman who is being punished.

The 1841 tale

The Ehon Hyaku Monogatari sets its story in Shimōsa province, east of Edo. A second wife refuses food to her husband’s child from his first marriage, and the child dies of it. Forty-nine days later — the end of the Buddhist mourning period — the woman receives a wound at the back of her head, and the wound becomes something like a mouth. It must be fed, or it causes her agony.

The illustration adds the detail that made the creature famous: her hair moves on its own, like arms, carrying food up to the mouth behind her.

It is a punishment tale with a very clear shape. A woman withholds food; her body becomes a mouth that can never be refused. The book is not describing a species of monster. It is describing a sentence.

The wife who eats nothing

Across Japan, folklorists recorded a very different story, usually called kuwazu nyōbō or meshi kuwanu nyōbō — “the wife who eats nothing.”

A stingy man wants a wife who will not eat. One arrives. She never touches food, and his rice keeps disappearing. He hides and watches.

In a 1948 record from Iwafune in Niigata, a cooper sees his wife empty a whole bale of rice through a mouth at the back of her head. She is a snake. In a 1939 record from Nishiiwai in Iwate, the mouthless bride has her mouth on top of her head, and when she is found out she becomes an oni and chases him; he survives by hiding among iris and mugwort. In a 1977 record from Kanagawa, the bride is a spider.

These women are not being punished for anything. They are something else wearing a wife’s shape, and the hidden mouth is how you find out.

Appearance

Both lines share the one image: an ordinary woman from the front, a mouth where no mouth belongs. The 1841 illustration gives it hair that works like hands. The folktales give it the top or back of the head and leave the rest to the listener.

Our short keeps the body non-realistic. It shows her from behind, and the hair doing the work.

Behavior and abilities

• The second mouth must eat. In the 1841 tale it demands food and causes pain when denied. In the folktales it eats in secret, enormously.
• The hair serves it. In the 1841 picture, strands of hair carry food like hands.
• It is hidden. Every version depends on a moment of being seen by someone who was not meant to see.

Weaknesses and countermeasures

The 1841 woman has no escape; the mouth is the consequence, and the book offers no cure. The folktale husbands fare better. In the Iwate account the man runs into a stand of iris and mugwort and is saved there — plants that also hang from Japanese eaves at the Boys’ Festival to keep evil out. In the Niigata version the cooper leaves rice grains threaded on needles, and the snake wife and her young eat them and die.

Documented tradition and later imagery

Documented tradition. Ehon Hyaku Monogatari (1841) tells a Shimōsa punishment story in which a stepmother who starved a child is given a second mouth at the back of her head, fed by her hair. Separately, twentieth-century records of the “wife who eats nothing” folktale from Niigata, Iwate, and Kanagawa describe a bride with a hidden mouth who turns out to be a snake, an oni, or a spider.

Later imagery. Modern Futakuchi-onna usually merges the two: a wife who eats nothing in front of her husband, with the 1841 mouth and hair. It is presented as a single creature with a single origin, which it has never had.

Both sources judge a woman by what she eats and whether she hides it. The 1841 book punishes her for not feeding a child; the folktales unmask her for feeding herself. Which of the two mouths is the monster depends on who is telling the story.