Kuchisake-Onna: The Slit-Mouthed Woman

She appears at night, alone on a quiet street, face half-hidden behind a mask, and she wants to know if you think she’s beautiful.

That is the encounter. It has been reported across Japan for centuries, sparked a nationwide panic in 1979 that sent police into the streets and schools home in groups, and has since spread to South Korea, the West, and anywhere the internet reaches. Kuchisake-Onna, the Slit-Mouthed Woman, is one of the most documented and widely recognized supernatural figures in Japanese history. She is classified as an onryō, a vengeful ghost of a woman who suffered a violent death, and more recently as a contemporary yokai. Whatever she is, she keeps being reported. And whatever you answer, there is no safe response.

Quick Facts

Also Known As: Slit-Mouthed Woman, The Masked Woman
Type: Onryō (vengeful spirit) / Yokai
Region: Japan (nationwide); South Korea
First Reported: Disputed — Edo period (1603–1867) antecedents;   modern form documented January 1979
Status: Folkloric / Urban Legend
Key Witnesses: Widespread anonymous reports; 1978–1979 panic accounts

Description and Appearance

Kuchisake-Onna is most often described as a tall woman, somewhere between 5’7 and 5’9, with long straight black hair, pale skin, and white hands. She is considered conventionally beautiful in appearance, except for the wound that defines her. She conceals the lower half of her face behind a surgical mask, a cloth, or a fan. The exact covering shifts across accounts and eras. She appears at night to lone travelers on dark streets and alleys.

When she stops someone, she asks: “Watashi, kirei?” — “Am I pretty?” If the answer is yes, she removes the mask. Beneath it, her mouth has been cut open from ear to ear in a permanent, grotesque grin. She asks again: “Kore demo?” — “Even now?”

If her victim answers no, or screams, she slashes them from ear to ear in an imitation of her own mutilation. If they answer yes a second time, accounts vary: some versions say she lets them go, others say she follows them home and kills them in the night. She is consistently described as carrying scissors, a knife, or some other sharp object.

Origin and History

The question of where Kuchisake-Onna actually comes from is genuinely contested among scholars, and that debate is part of what makes her interesting.

Author and folklorist Matthew Meyer has described the legend as having roots in Japan’s Edo period, which spanned the 17th to 19th centuries, while Japanese literature professor Iikura Yoshiyuki believes the figure as we know her dates from the 1970s. The most commonly cited physical evidence for an earlier version is an 1801 illustrated book, Ehon Sayo Shigure, by artist Hayami Shungyosai, which contains a depiction of a slit-mouthed female figure. During the Edo period, encounters with the figure were often blamed on shape-shifted kitsune, supernatural foxes known for playing tricks on humans, rather than on a vengeful ghost.

Scholars like Michael Dylan Foster have argued that folklorists Noboru and Shigeru Mizuki tied Kuchisake-Onna to earlier mythological women not merely to suggest a shared archetype, but to position her as an inheritor of a specific genealogical line of demonic women in Japanese tradition. This framing effectively made her an eternal figure of folklore rather than a product of the 1970s, muddying the question of her true origins in ways that have persisted in popular reporting.

Some of the survival folklore also hints at older roots. The pomade trick may connect to earlier traditions: pomade historically contained mugwort, a plant used as a ward against malevolent spirits, and chanting a word three times echoes Shinto ritual practice. Even the candy distraction appears in earlier stories involving the ubume, spirits of pregnant women who, in some versions, sought sweets for their unborn children. These borrowings suggest the modern legend was assembled from existing folkloric materials rather than invented whole.

The more cautious reading is that something resembling Kuchisake-Onna existed in Edo-period oral tradition, but the figure as widely recognized today, masked, scissor-bearing, targeting children on urban streets, emerged in 1978 in Gifu Prefecture and spread rapidly from there.

The 1979 Panic

The earliest media record of the legend appeared on January 26, 1979, in the Gifu Shimbun, which reported on a rumor tracing back to early December 1978: an elderly woman in the rural Yaoizu area of Gifu Prefecture had encountered a slit-mouthed figure and fainted from shock. The legend was subsequently reported in the weekly publication Shukan Asahi on March 23, 1979, and in the news magazine Shukan Shincho on April 5, 1979.

By summer of 1979, it had become a national event. Schools in multiple prefectures, including Koriyama in Fukushima and Hiratsuka in Kanagawa, dispatched police in response to reports. In Kushiro and Niiza, students were dismissed in groups rather than allowed to walk home alone. In the most severely affected areas, classes were suspended entirely.

The panic spread in large part through cram schools, which gathered children from different neighborhoods and school districts into the same building, creating a cross-city rumor network that had not existed in earlier generations. Iikura Yoshiyuki, an associate professor at Kokugakuin University who studies oral literature, has noted that before cram schools became widespread, it was rare for a rumor to cross from one school district to another at all.

On June 21, 1979, a 25-year-old woman in Himeji City was arrested for dressing as Kuchisake-Onna and walking the streets carrying a kitchen knife, in violation of Japan’s Swords and Firearms Control Law. By August 1979, the panic had largely subsided. The legend had not.

Survival Tactics

The folklore surrounding Kuchisake-Onna is unusually detailed when it comes to methods of escape, which itself reflects the depth of cultural anxiety the figure generated. Survival tactics across various versions of the legend include describing her appearance as “average” rather than beautiful or ugly, which reportedly buys enough time to run. Saying that one is running late causes her to apologize and step aside. Throwing hard candies, particularly the caramelized sugar variety known as bekko ame, works because she will stop to pick them up. Saying the word “pomade” three times is also widely cited, though no account offers a fully satisfying explanation for why that word specifically would work.

The variety of proposed escapes, and the way they shift across regions and time periods, suggests a legend that was actively being worked on by its tellers, elaborated, tested, and passed along as a kind of collaborative survival manual for an encounter no one could confirm had ever been survived.

Skeptical Perspectives

The dominant skeptical explanation for the 1979 panic is mass hysteria. The timing is consistent with it: a culture already primed for ghost stories, an efficient new rumor network through cram schools, and media amplification that may have accelerated the panic rather than resolved it. Some researchers have suggested the legend tapped into anxieties specific to 1970s Japan, including concerns about beauty and self-image tied to the fashion and beauty magazines of that era. Another theory holds that some families used the legend deliberately, telling children there was a slit-mouthed woman on the streets at night to discourage them from attending expensive cram schools.

What skeptical frameworks struggle to account for is the breadth of consistent detail across completely separate communities, the Edo-period antecedents, and the documented speed with which an essentially uniform legend spread across an entire country before the internet existed.

Spread Beyond Japan

In the 21st century, the legend reached South Korea in 2004 via the internet, sparking another wave of reports and public anxiety. South Korean accounts described a woman wearing a red mask rather than white, frequently seen chasing children. The South Korean version acquired additional regional features, including accounts that the figure cannot turn corners or climb stairs, and reportedly gained a male companion with a similar disfigurement. The same essential figure, adapted to fit a different geography.

The legend’s arrival in the West followed the broader spread of Japanese horror culture online in the early 2000s, carried alongside J-horror films and the growing international appetite for creepypasta and urban legend content.

Cultural Impact

Kuchisake-Onna’s classification as a yokai was formalized by historian and manga author Shigeru Mizuki, who included her in his yokai encyclopedia. According to Zack Davisson, a translator of many of Mizuki’s works, her inclusion in that encyclopedia was the moment she was officially considered a yokai. Most yokai carry ancient origins. She earned her entry by persisting.

Her media footprint is substantial. She appears in the 1994 Studio Ghibli animated film Pom Poko and is referenced in Hideo Nakata’s 1998 horror film Ring. The 2007 film Carved: The Slit-Mouthed Woman, directed by Kōji Shiraishi, was followed by two sequels in 2008. More recently she has appeared in the manga and anime series Dandadan and Jujutsu Kaisen, and in the video game Ghostwire: Tokyo. She remains a fixture of Japanese schoolyard folklore and continues to be reported, discussed, and adapted across cultures.

See Also

• Bell Witch
• Onryō (vengeful spirits in Japanese folklore)
• Shadow People