Kuchisake-onna

A figure of the modern Japanese oral record, documented during the panic of 1978 and 1979 in Gifu prefecture and across the country before subsiding. She approached children at dusk wearing a surgical mask, asked the question *Watashi, kirei?* — am I beautiful? — and on the answer being given, removed the mask to reveal a mouth slit from ear to ear. The folklorist Michael Dylan Foster (*Pandemonium and Parade*, University of California Press, 2009) records the contemporary news coverage in the *Asahi Shimbun* and the regional papers, and traces precedent figures in older Japanese tradition where mouth-mutilation appears as a marker of unfinished spirits.

The countermeasures recorded during the panic were verbal: the recitation of the word pomade three times, said to be the unguent the spirit feared because of the cosmetic-surgery story attached to her in some versions. The school authorities of the period circulated warnings. The figure entered the older tradition rapidly, and now sits among the yokai of the post-war period as if she had always been there.