Urban Legends

' Futakuchi-Onna '

This is a Japanese Urban Legend.

In Japanese mythology and folklore, the Futakuchi-Onna belongs to some class of stories as the Rokurokubi and Nukekubi, Kuchisake-Onna, and the Yama-Uba, who are all women afflicted with a curse or supernatural disease that transforms them into yōkai. The supernatural nature of the women in these stories is usually concealed until the last minute, when the true self is revealed. The origin of a Futakuchi-Onna's second mouth is often linked to how little a woman eats. In many stories the soon-to-be Futakuchi-Onna is a wife of misery and rarely eats. To counteract this, a second mouth mysteriously appears on the back of the woman's head. The second mouth often mumbles spiteful and threatening words to the woman and demands food. If it is not fed, it can screech obscenely and cause the woman tremendous pain. Eventually the woman's hair begins to move like a pair of serpents, allowing the mouth to help itself the the woman's meals. While no food passes through her normal lips, the mouth on the back of her head consumes twice what the other one would. In another story, the extra mouth is formed when a stingy woman is accidentally hit in the head by her husband's axe while he is chopping wood, and the wound never heals. Other stories have the woman as a mother who lets her stepchild die of starvation while keeping her own offspring well fed; presumably the spirit of the neglected child lodges itself into the stepmother's, or surviving child's, body to exact revenge. Families which notice their food stocks are shrinking at an alarming rate while the women in their houses rarely eat a bite may be the victims of a Futakuchi-Onna infestation. Futakuchi-Onna appear just as a regular women until their terrible secret is revealed: in the back of their skulls, buried beneath long, thick hair, is a second mouth with large, fat lips and full of teeth. This second mouth is ravenous, and used long strands of hair like tentacle to gorge itself on any food it can find.

This story basically has it's origins.