Is Kuchisake-onna real? The Slit-Mouthed Woman legend, explained

What the Kuchisake-onna legend says

A woman in a face mask stops a child on the way home from school and asks, "Am I pretty?" If the child says yes, she takes off the mask to show a mouth slit wide towards each ear and asks again: even like this? Answer no, and she attacks with scissors or a knife. The Kuchisake-onna story is built on that trap, and the folklore that grew around it is mostly about how to escape. Nippon.com's interview with the folklorist Iikura Yoshiyuki lists the standard set: she can run 100 metres in six seconds, she hates hair pomade, and she can be bought off with bekkō-ame, a hard amber candy. Yokai.jp adds the ambiguous answer, telling her she looks average, and the rule that she will not follow you above the ground floor.

Those counters are what make the slit mouthed woman a children's legend rather than a ghost story. They turn the figure into a game with rules, which is also why the rules differ by region: say pomade three times in one town, six in another, write it on your palm somewhere else.

Where it started: Gifu, winter 1978

The best-documented origin is a rumour, not an event. Iikura, an associate professor at Kokugakuin University, told Nippon.com that around the end of 1978 a story went round that an old woman from a farming family in Yaotsu, Gifu Prefecture, had seen a slit-mouthed woman standing in the corner of her garden, and that a local newspaper printed an item about it. Yokai.jp, which compiles the Japanese paper trail, identifies the earliest print mention as a column in the Gifu Nichinichi Shimbun on 26 January 1979 describing a rumour among Gifu children of a beautiful woman who resembled an actress. Nikkan Gendai, looking back in 2020, also traces the whole affair to that regional paper's local item.

The writer Yoshida Yuki, in a 2022 essay for Bunshun, argues that the figure was older than the boom: by the mid-to-late 1970s a slit-mouthed woman who merely frightened people by showing her mouth was already being talked about, and the version that cuts children became standard only around 1979. The precise date the first child told the first friend is unrecoverable; what is recorded is that by January 1979 a newspaper in Gifu thought the rumour worth a column.

How the 1979 panic spread

Kuchisake-onna 1979 is the part that actually happened. Iikura credits cram schools, which gathered children from different districts and let a Gifu rumour jump between neighbourhoods, then telephone calls to relatives in other cities, and finally newspapers and television. Within about six months the story was national. Yokai.jp's timeline has the weekly Shūkan Asahi running its first piece on 23 March 1979 and a long feature on 29 June 1979, which it treats as the peak, with police cars dispatched in Kōriyama and Hiratsuka, children sent home in groups in Kushiro and Niiza, and school-route patrols stepped up nationwide in April and May. Nippon.com confirms that teachers and parents organised patrols and group walks home.

Then it stopped. Nippon.com dates the fade to the start of the 1979 summer holidays, and Yokai.jp to August, with the same explanation: once schools and cram schools closed, the children's word-of-mouth network was cut and the rumour had nowhere to travel. Nikkan Gendai makes the point that matters most for this file: there were no victims, and nearly every account was second-hand, someone who had heard it from someone who had seen her.

Which details hold up: Edo tales, the film, Korea

The claim that Kuchisake-onna is an Edo-period legend is half true. Yokai.jp lists several Edo-era collections, among them Kaidan Oi no Tsue and Ehon Sayo Shigure, that feature a woman whose mouth tears open to her ears, usually revealed as a fox in disguise. But it also states that no academic link between those tales and the 1979 rumour has been established, and that the scholars Tsunemitsu Tōru and Iikura treat 1979 as an independent post-war event. The folklorist Michael Dylan Foster devotes a chapter of Pandemonium and Parade (University of California Press, 2008) to Mizuki Shigeru and Kuchisake-onna; a 2009 review in the Journal of Folklore Research Reviews summarises his argument that the figure was fixed in the public mind mainly through media images, especially Mizuki's drawings, rather than through old tradition.

The 2007 film holds up as a date. Carved: The Slit-Mouthed Woman, directed by Shiraishi Kōji and starring Satō Eriko and Katō Haruhiko, opened in Japan on 17 March 2007, runs 90 minutes and spawned sequels in 2008, 2012 and 2016, according to Yokai.jp; the British site Hysteria Lives, reviewing it, notes that the film draws on the late-1970s newspaper reports of sightings.

South Korea has its own version. Sports Kyunghyang reported in August 2005 that the Red Mask story had circulated in Korea in the 1980s and 1990s and again in 2004, centred on Pohang and the Busan area before the internet made it national, with fifteen Red Mask storybooks and comics published between June and August 2004 alone; it cites the Chung-Ang University folklorist Kim Jong-dae and traces the tale to Japan's 1979 Slit-Mouthed Woman. Weekly Kyunghyang in 2009 placed the Korean spread around 2004, mainly among primary-school children, with a revival in 2006 and local additions such as a blue-masked boyfriend. Iikura notes the Korean figure wears a red mask and is said to be unable to turn corners.

Verdict

Kuchisake-onna explained in a sentence: a children's rumour from Gifu that newspapers, magazines and cram-school networks carried across Japan in the first half of 1979, then a figure that manga, film and the internet kept alive. The patrols and the police cars were real; the woman was not, and nobody was ever hurt by her. Because the Kuchisake-onna true story is the story of a rumour, Real or Legend files the legend itself as fiction.