Kuchisake-onna: The Rumour That Terrified Japan in 1979

Who is Kuchisake-onna?

Kuchi is mouth. Sake is split or torn. Onna is woman. Kuchisake-onna is the woman with the split mouth.

She is not an old yokai. She is a rumour, and a modern one. In 1978 and 1979 it spread through Japanese elementary and middle schools so fast and so widely that newspapers, magazines, and broadcasters covered the panic itself. The National Diet Library’s reference records date the nationwide spread to the spring and summer of 1979.

The core

Almost every version shares one scene. A woman with long hair, her mouth hidden by a large mask, stops someone on the street and asks: Watashi, kirei? — “Am I pretty?”

What happens next depends on who is telling it.

Every other detail

The International Research Center for Japanese Studies holds more than twenty recorded versions, collected in the 1980s and 1990s from across the country, and they disagree about nearly everything.

In one from Sendai, she is a patient who escaped from a particular hospital and frightens people in the street. In one from Kitakata, in Fukushima, she is a beautiful woman in her twenties whose cosmetic surgery went wrong; the only thing to do is run. In one from Kagoshima, she was a woman who killed herself after being rejected. In Iwate she carries a sickle and is too fast to outrun; in Tokyo, a knife, or a kitchen knife for groups of three.

Other versions add sisters, a fear of pomade, a weakness for a particular sweet, a set distance she can run in seconds. Each one spread because it was new, and each one contradicted the last.

How it spread

The rumour travelled first by word of mouth between children — at school, on the way home, from older siblings. A study of a 1979 questionnaire suggests that part of the appeal was the pleasure of being scared and passing the fear on. Then local news, radio, magazines, and television picked it up, and the coverage sent it everywhere at once.

NHK’s broadcasting research institute still cites it as the classic case of an urban legend that exploded among schoolchildren in 1978–79.

Appearance

A woman, usually young, with long hair and a large surgical mask — a common sight in Japan, which is part of why the rumour worked. Accounts vary on her clothes and age. Our illustration keeps her masked throughout, on an ordinary street at dusk.

Behavior and abilities

• She asks a question. The one element that does not change.
• Everything else varies. Weapon, speed, motive, and what she does with the answer are different in almost every record.

Weaknesses and countermeasures

Every school had its own answer, and the answers contradict each other: say she is average, offer a particular sweet, say a certain word, run in a certain direction. None is the original, because there was no original.

Rumour and later imagery

Documented rumour. A nationwide rumour among Japanese schoolchildren in 1978–79, with a stable core — a masked woman asking “Am I pretty?” — and dozens of mutually contradictory versions recorded in folklore journals in the 1980s and 1990s.

Later imagery. Kuchisake-onna has since become a fixture of horror films, manga, and international lists of Japanese urban legends, often presented as an Edo-period ghost or given a single fixed origin story.

The record is more interesting than any single story. Nobody wrote her. A country’s schoolchildren built her together in a few months, and each of them added one more detail before passing her on.