Futakuchi-onna

Also Known As: (二口女, “two-mouthed woman”); the folktale form is known as Kuwazu nyōbō (食わず女房, “the wife who doesn’t eat”)
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Undead/Cursed Beings
Mythical Attributes: A second mouth opens in the back of her skull, complete with lips, teeth and tongue, and her hair reaches out to feed it.
Role in Mythos: She is a punishment made flesh, the household sin of starving another person returned as an appetite that cannot be starved.
Relation to Humans: She is not a creature from the mountains or the sea but a wife, a stepmother, a woman already inside the house, which is what makes her the most domestic horror in the Japanese catalogue. Her victims are the people she lives with, and her first victim is always herself.

The rice went down faster than one mouth could account for. The miser noticed it early, because noticing was what he did: the sacks in the storeroom slumping week by week, the warm smell of cooked grain hanging in a house where, by his own strict arithmetic, nobody was eating at all. His wife took nothing. She had said so the day she arrived, and he had married her on the strength of it, the way another man might buy a horse on the promise that it would not need hay.

So he told her he was going to work, and he did not go. He crouched outside and watched through the gap in the door while she banked the fire and set the pot on and cooked enough rice for a household of six. Then she turned her back to him and let her hair down. The hair parted. The skull under it parted too, all the way across the nape, and what opened there had lips, and teeth behind the lips, and a tongue that moved. The hair itself came alive, the long strands curling down into the pot like a nest of thin snakes, gathering the rice into balls and posting them one after another into that second mouth, which chewed, and swallowed, and wanted more.

That is the story as most of Japan told it, and it is old. By 1686 the scholar Yamaoka Genrin was fielding questions about it in his critique of the hundred-tale tradition, where a student asks him whether it is true that a mountain hag can take the shape of a wife, and whether such a woman is real. He was answering a story everybody already knew.

The version that fixed her image in print is crueller and more precise. In the 1841 Ehon Hyaku Monogatari, illustrated by Takehara Shunsensai and written by Tōkaen Michimaro, the two-mouthed woman is not a disguised monster at all. She is a stepmother. She hated her husband’s child by his first wife, and she withheld food from that child until the child died of it. Then she bore a baby of her own. And after the birth, a mouth opened on the back of her neck, and the mouth said that it wanted to eat. The strands of her hair turned to serpents at the tips and fetched food to it. When she could not feed it, or would not, it repaid her in pain.

She starved a child. Now something in her own skull is starving, and it lives on the side of her body she cannot see, and it will not be reasoned with.

The Edo woodblock print shows her from behind, hair swept aside, the composition doing the work of the whole tale in one image: the domestic interior, the turned back, the wet red seam in the scalp. There is no monstrous body to look at. That is the point of her. From the front she is a woman doing chores. The horror is entirely a matter of angle.

Her appetite is where the folktale variants pull away from the printed one. In the tale the folklorists collected as Kuwazu nyōbō, the wife who eats nothing is a yamauba in a beautiful shape, a mountain hag who has come down into the village wearing a young woman’s face. When the man discovers her, she drops the disguise. She stuffs him into a wooden tub, swings it up onto her head, and runs for the mountains with him inside it. He catches an overhanging branch as she goes under it and pulls himself out of the tub, climbs down, and hides in a stand of mugwort and iris. She circles back. She finds him, and can do nothing, because those plants are poison to her and she cannot cross them. He throws them at her, and she dies in the weeds. The whole of her monstrous strength is undone by two common herbs growing where anyone might have walked past them.

What she can do is straightforward enough. The second mouth speaks, in a voice that is not hers, and it mumbles spite at her, and it screams when it is not fed, and the pain of it is described as unbearable. Her hair works as a set of hands. She can carry a man off bodily in the folktale form, and she can pass, indefinitely, as an unremarkable wife.

What she cannot do is hide the appetite. That is the flaw built into her by whatever cursed her, and it is the flaw that ends every version of the story. The mouth must be fed, and feeding it costs rice, and the rice is counted, and the counting is what brings the husband home early. She is undone by the arithmetic of a household. The miser who wanted a wife who would not eat gets one, and she eats him out of house and home behind his back, and in the folktale she very nearly eats him too.

The moral was never subtle and was never meant to be. Two of the three ways a woman becomes futakuchi-onna are about food withheld: the wife who eats nothing to please a stingy husband, the stepmother who lets a child go hungry. The third is an accident, an axe blow to the head that will not close over. In the first two, the curse is precisely proportionate. Deny a mouth, and grow one.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a futakuchi-onna?

A futakuchi-onna is a Japanese yōkai, a woman with a second mouth hidden at the back of her head beneath her hair. The second mouth has its own lips, teeth and tongue, and it is ravenously hungry. Her hair reaches out like a nest of snakes to gather food and feed it.

How does a woman become a futakuchi-onna?

She is cursed for a sin involving food. In the best-known printed version, the 1841 Ehon Hyaku Monogatari, a stepmother starves her husband’s child to death, and after she gives birth to a child of her own a mouth opens on the back of her neck demanding to eat. Other tellings blame a miser’s wife who claimed to eat nothing, or a stingy woman struck in the head by her husband’s axe, whose wound never healed.

What does the second mouth do?

It eats, constantly, and it talks. The mouth mumbles spiteful and threatening things to the woman it lives on, and if it is not fed it shrieks and causes her terrible pain. Because the woman’s own lips take no food, the mouth on the back of her head consumes far more than a person normally would.

How is a futakuchi-onna defeated?

In the folktale form, known as Kuwazu nyōbō, she is killed with mugwort and iris. A man carried off by her escapes and hides among the plants, and when she comes for him she cannot reach him because they are poisonous to her; he throws them at her and she dies. In the domestic tellings there is no defeat at all, only discovery, and the husband running from his own house.

Is the futakuchi-onna related to the yamauba?

Yes, closely. In the Kuwazu nyōbō folktale the two-mouthed wife is a yamauba, a mountain hag, who has taken the form of a beautiful young woman to get herself fed. When she is found out she reveals her true shape and carries the man toward the mountains in a tub balanced on her head.