Japanese Urban Legends

Futakuchi onna

Families who notice that their food stocks are shrinking at alarming rates, while the women in their house hardly eat, may be a victim of futakuchi onna. Futakuchi onna appear as regular women until their secret is revealed: in the back of their head, buried beneath their long black hair, is a second mouth, twice as big as the first one. The second mouth is insatiable. It uses long strand of the women hair like tentacles to eat anything that it can find.

Urban legend:
1. In a small rural village in Fukushima there lived a stingy miser. Because he could not stand the thought of paying for food for his family, the miser lived alone. One day, though, he met a woman who didn't eat anything at all, and he took her as his wife as soon as he could. However, though, his stores do rice would steadily decrease, and he could not figure out why, as he never saw his wife eat.

One day the miser pretended to leave for work, but in truth he stayed behind to watch his wife. As the miser watched hidden away, his wife untied her hair,  and revealed a second mouth on the back of her head. Her hair reached out with tentacle like like stalks and began to scoop out rice balls into the second mouth, which sounded out in pleaser.

The miser was horrified of his revelation, and decided to divorce his wife as soon as he can. However, she discovered his plans before he could act on it, and trapped him in their bathroom before carrying him off into the mountains. The miser managed to escape and hid in a lily marsh where the futakuchi onna could not find him.

2.Legend
This story tells of a stepmother who always gave her daughter plenty of food, but never gave enough to her step daughter. Over time the stepdaughter became sick from lack of nourishment, and eventually starved to death. Forty nine days after her death, the stepmother experienced a terrible headache. The back of her head had split open, and the new mouth had formed. Her new mouth aches terribly with pain unit it was fed, and would shriek in the voice of the dead stepdaughter. From then on the stepmother always had to feed both of her mouths, and felt the pain from her deceased stepdaughter endured.