The masked woman who asks 'Am I pretty?'
The kuchisake-onna's question has no safe answer. A young woman in a large surgical mask stops a child on the way home from school and asks, 'Am I pretty?' Say yes, and she pulls the mask down on a mouth slit ear to ear and asks, 'Even like this?' Say no, or run, and she catches you; rumor gave her a hundred meters in six seconds and a pair of scissors to cut your mouth to match hers. Children traded countermeasures: say 'pomade' three times, or throw hard candy and flee while she stoops for it. Her origin varied by prefecture, the most common being plastic surgery gone wrong.
The panic can be dated and placed. Around December 1978 a rumor spread in Gifu prefecture that an old farm woman had seen a slit-mouthed woman standing in the corner of her yard; the Gifu Nichi Nichi Shimbun printed the first newspaper account on 26 January 1979. Over the following six months the story traveled nationwide through schoolyards, cram schools, and local media. Elementary schools organized escorted walks home, police stepped up patrols, and at least one adult dressed as the woman was taken into custody. When summer vacation began in August 1979 the rumor collapsed, and that clean epidemic curve made the kuchisake-onna a standard case study for Japanese folklorists and social psychologists of rumor.
As postwar Japan's first truly national urban legend she keeps returning, in Shiraishi Koji's 2007 film Carved among many others, with localized variants in Korea and Vietnam. The everyday surgical mask has carried a faint shadow in Japanese horror ever since.
