A housewife eats almost nothing, and yet the household's rice keeps disappearing. Her husband grows suspicious, then watches, then one day sees her hair part on its own at the back of her skull, revealing a second mouth that talks, demands, and swallows bowl after bowl on its own. This is the picture most people know as the futakuchi-onna, 二口女 — literally "two-mouth woman." It actually joins two different stories. Only one of them is the Edo-period yokai, and it begins with a crime.
What does a futakuchi-onna look like?
By day she looks entirely ordinary: a wife or mother going about her chores, her long hair worn up or loose in the usual style of the period. The second mouth sits at the back of her head, under the hair, and stays hidden until it wants something. When it opens, the surrounding strands of hair are often described moving like living things — thin tendrils that reach out, snake toward food, and stuff it into the hidden mouth without the woman's hands ever touching it. The picture everyone copies comes from the 1841 Ehon Hyaku Monogatari, illustrated by Takehara Shunsensai: hair fanned out like snakes, carrying food to a mouth at the back of the skull. The image has changed very little since.
A mouth that talks back
The ordinary mouth stays polite. The second one does not. In modern retellings, it complains when it isn't fed, and she can't fully control it. It seems to have a will of its own, as if something else had taken up residence in her skull.
The stepmother's curse
The story is first printed in the Ehon Hyaku Monogatari ("Picture Book of a Hundred Stories"), published in 1841. It is set in Shimōsa Province, today's Chiba.
A man remarries. His new wife loves her own daughter, but not the girl from his first marriage. She gives the stepdaughter almost no food, and the child starves to death.
Forty-nine days later, the husband is splitting firewood. He swings the axe back, and it strikes his wife, who is standing behind him. The blade opens the back of her head.
The wound does not heal. Its edges grow into lips. Bits of skull push out like teeth, and the flesh inside moves like a tongue. At certain hours it aches badly, and the pain stops only when food is put inside. Then one day a small voice comes out of it. It says that killing the first wife's child was a terrible mistake.
The book does not call this magic. It calls it a disease earned by cruelty. It compares the wound to jinmensō, a sore shaped like a human face that demands food in older tales of punishment. The second mouth is the starved child's hunger, returned to the woman who caused it.
The snake hair is the illustrator's
Look closely, and the famous picture and the printed story disagree. The text describes a wound that talks and eats. It never says the hair moves.
The moving hair comes only from Takehara Shunsensai's illustration. In his picture, the strands rise like snakes and feed the mouth by themselves. Modern artists copied the picture, not the text. That is why almost every futakuchi-onna today has living hair.
The wife who eats no rice is a different story
Many English pages blend in a second tale. A stingy man wants a wife who eats nothing. A woman arrives who never touches her rice, yet the rice store keeps emptying. He spies on her and sees a mouth open on top of her head.
That tale is a widespread folk story, known in Japanese as Meshi Kuwanu Yome, "the wife who eats no rice." In it, the wife is not a cursed woman at all. She is a yamauba or another monster in disguise, and the husband has to escape her. Japanese reference works treat it as a separate story from the 1841 one: one is a monster in a wife's shape, the other is a human wife punished for a crime.
Where it comes from
Folklorists generally read the futakuchi-onna as a story about hidden appetite and hidden guilt — what a household doesn't want to see about the woman running it, made literal. She belongs to a small family of Edo-period yokai built from ordinary women transformed by something unspoken: the long-necked rokurokubi is her closest relative, another housewife whose body reveals a secret at night that her waking self would never admit to. Both are cautionary figures from a domestic world, not the mountains or crossroads that produce most yokai — hauntings that start at the dinner table.
One more detail matters. The book places the story in Shimōsa, but Japanese researchers point out that no such local legend has been found there. It was most likely written by the book's author, who signed himself Tōsanjin, as a moral tale. Unlike many yokai, futakuchi-onna does not appear in Toriyama Sekien's four famous books. Her fixed form starts with this one 1841 page.
Go deeper
Where Japanese ghosts come from.
- Yūrei: The Japanese Ghost →Zack DavissonWhere Japanese ghosts come from, told through old paintings, kabuki and ghost stories.
- Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things →Lafcadio HearnThe classic 1904 collection of Japanese ghost stories that shaped how the West first met kaidan.
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Futakuchi-onna today
She remains a minor fixture of Japanese ghost-story anthologies and yokai encyclopedias, the kind of illustrated compendia that catalog regional monsters rather than invent new ones. Video games and manga that draw on the full roster of Edo-period yokai — rather than any single studio's original characters — have kept the design in circulation, usually leaning on the same detail every artist reaches for first: hair that moves on its own, parting to reveal a mouth that was never meant to be seen.
