The Futakuchi-Onna: The Woman with a Second Mouth
The story begins, as the sharpest Japanese stories so often do, with a man congratulating himself on a bargain. He is a miser — in the classic telling, a miser of the deep-grained, proverb-quality kind, a man who had never married because a wife eats — and at last he finds the impossible woman: beautiful, industrious, sweet-tempered, and possessed of the one virtue he prizes above all others. She does not eat. Truly: she sits with him at meals and takes nothing, or a grain or two of rice for politeness; the storehouse stays full; the miser is in paradise. And yet — the rice is going. Sack by sack, the stores dwindle, faster than one hearty eater could account for, let alone a wife who touches nothing. So the miser does what misers do: he spies. He pretends to leave for the day, creeps back, and watches his wife through a crack — and sees her undo her long black hair. And the hair parts itself — and at the back of her skull, where no face should be, a second mouth opens: huge, red-l...