Futakuchi-onna

Also Known As: 二口女, “two-mouthed woman”; plate 2-8 of the Ehon Hyaku Monogatari, also titled Tōsanjin Yawa, c. 1841; routinely and wrongly merged with the folktale bride kuwazu-nyōbō, 食わず女房, “the wife who does not eat”
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Undead/Cursed Beings
Mythical Attributes: A second mouth with lips, teeth and a tongue has opened in the back of her skull, and it aches for food on a schedule and eventually speaks.
Role in Mythos: She is late Edo moral instruction given a body, a woman whose cruelty grows an organ on her that will not stop confessing what she did.
Relation to Humans: She is a human being, a wife and mother keeping her own house, not a creature that stalks or hunts anyone. The only person she harmed is the stepchild she starved, and the harm that comes back to her arrives from inside her own head.

The axe came down wrong. It was firewood weather in Shimōsa, cold enough that split pine breathed a little steam when it opened, and the man working the chopping block never heard his wife come up behind him. The blade caught the back of her head on the upswing. She lived, and everyone in the house agreed that this was luck.

The wound closed badly. Over the following weeks the two edges of the split drew back and thickened into something with a definite shape, and the shape was lips. A shard of skull worked forward and set itself in the gap like a row of teeth. A strip of flesh underneath went red and supple and began to move when nothing else about her did. By then it had been forty-nine days since they buried the other child, which is the exact span a soul is given to settle where it goes next.

That child was the husband’s daughter by his first wife. The second wife fed her own girl and let the other one go without, a bowl at a time, week after week, until the stepdaughter starved. Nobody in the story calls it murder out loud. The mouth does that later.

At first it only hurt. The pain arrived at a fixed hour, sharp enough to fold her over, and it stopped the instant food went into the opening. So she fed it, and the household rearranged itself around the feeding, and the thing at the back of her skull took whatever she could get to it. Then one evening it made a sound. She held still and the people near her leaned in, and out of the wound came a small clear voice saying that she had killed the first wife’s child through a mistaken heart, and that she had been wrong.

That is the whole of it as the Ehon Hyaku Monogatari has it, eighth plate of the second volume, published around 1841. The book sets the events in Shimōsa, the old province that is now Chiba, and that framing is the first thing to hold at arm’s length. Nothing of the kind was ever collected there. The author wrote as Tōsanjin, given in the preface as Tōka Sanjin, and is usually identified as a late Edo writer of popular fiction, most often Tōkaen Michimaro. He was producing entertainment with a moral spine, and the two-mouthed woman is his invention rather than his transcription. His own text half admits it. He sets her beside the jinmensō, the human-face sore, a growth that opens on a body and talks and demands to be fed, and which the period treated as an affliction that appeared on people who had done something unforgivable. In that book she is not a monster. She is a diagnosis.

The picture is another matter, and the picture is what everyone remembers. Takehara Shunsen drew her kneeling with her hair unbound, and the hair is not behaving like hair. Long strands lift and curl and carry rice balls back over her shoulder to the mouth in her skull, moving with the blind deliberate purpose of eels. None of that appears in the text he was illustrating. Not one word of it. The most famous feature of the futakuchi-onna is a decision an artist made on the page, and it has outlived the story it was pinned to by nearly two centuries.

Underneath all of this sits something older and genuinely collected. Across Japan, storytellers tell the kuwazu-nyōbō, the wife who does not eat. A miser wants a bride who costs nothing to keep. One arrives, works hard, touches no rice, and the rice barrel empties anyway. He makes a show of leaving for work, climbs into the roof space instead, and watches her cook an enormous pot, roll the whole of it into rice balls, and untie her hair. There is a mouth in the crown of her head. The rice balls go in one after another and do not stop going in.

When he tries to send her away she drops the performance. In the eastern provinces she is a yamauba or an oni; in the west she is usually a spider; elsewhere she proves to be a tanuki, a frog, a kappa, a snake. She puts him in a wooden tub, often because he is a cooper and the tub is his own work, hoists it onto her back and starts for the mountains. He catches an overhanging branch, lifts himself clear, and she walks on carrying nothing. Where he drops is a wet ditch thick with iris and mugwort, and the smell of the crushed leaves is what stops her at the edge of it. Tellers finish by pointing at the eaves of the house, where those same two plants hang every fifth day of the fifth month, and saying that this is why.

The two are constantly welded together and they are not the same thing. Yanagita Kunio and Seki Keigo both catalogue the wife who does not eat as a tale type with national spread, regional variants and a fixed narrative shape. The futakuchi-onna has one telling, one author and one date. The confusion is easy to forgive, since the images line up so neatly, and it is still worth refusing.

What she can do is narrow and awful. The second mouth eats, and it eats far past what the first one takes, so a household with her in it runs short of food without anyone able to account for where it went. In Shunsen’s version the hair fetches for it, which means she can be fed while she sleeps, while she works, and while she holds a conversation with her face. And it speaks. Not often and not at length, but it says the one true sentence she has spent her life not saying, in a voice that is recognisably her own and entirely outside her control.

The limits are the limits of a body. She has no lair and no curse that the right words could lift. The pain returns on schedule and food only postpones it. The wound cannot be closed, because it has stopped being a wound and become an organ. She can cover it with her hair in company and keep her back to the wall, and neither buys her more than an evening. No monk arrives with a sutra, no exorcism is attempted, no cure is even floated, because the mouth is doing precisely what its author built it to do, which is keep talking. The folktale wife at least has proper weaknesses and a proper ending: iris, mugwort, a branch at the right height, a man quick enough to take it. The two-mouthed woman is given none of that. She keeps her house, her husband, her surviving daughter and her second mouth, and the story simply stops with the voice still coming out of the back of her head.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Futakuchi-onna?

Futakuchi-onna is a Japanese yokai: a woman with a second mouth in the back of her skull, complete with lips, teeth and a tongue. It appears in the Ehon Hyaku Monogatari of about 1841, where it forms from an axe wound and then demands food and speaks on its own. From the front she looks like any other woman of her time.

How did the Futakuchi-onna get her second mouth?

She starved her husband’s daughter by his first wife, feeding her own child and withholding food from the other until the girl died. Forty-nine days after the burial, her husband was splitting firewood and his axe struck the back of her head by accident. The wound healed into a mouth, with a fragment of skull for teeth and a strip of flesh for a tongue.

Is the Futakuchi-onna’s snake-like hair part of the original story?

No. The writhing hair that carries food to the second mouth comes entirely from Takehara Shunsen’s illustration and appears nowhere in the text it accompanies. The written account describes only a wound that aches, eats and eventually talks. The hair is the single most reproduced detail of the entity and it is an artist’s addition.

Is Futakuchi-onna the same as the Kuwazu-nyōbō?

They are different and are constantly confused. Kuwazu-nyōbō, the wife who does not eat, is a widespread traditional folktale in which a bride with a mouth hidden in the crown of her head turns out to be a yamauba, an oni or a spider, and it is documented across Japan by folklorists including Yanagita Kunio and Seki Keigo. Futakuchi-onna is a single literary entry by one author, framed as a case of moral affliction rather than a disguised monster.

Was Futakuchi-onna a real folk belief in Shimōsa?

There is no evidence that the story was ever told in Shimōsa, the province the book assigns it to. It is regarded as a creation of the author Tōsanjin, who presented invented material in the manner of collected local lore. The Ehon Hyaku Monogatari groups her with the jinmenso, the human-face sore, and uses her to preach that cruelty surfaces on the body of the person who committed it.