The Futakuchi-onna and "The Wife Who Doesn't Eat": A Second Mouth Under the Hair

Follow the story of the futakuchi-onna, and you soon arrive at the folktale "Kuwazu Nyobo," or "The Wife Who Doesn't Eat." Both are about a woman who supposedly doesn't eat, yet hides a second mouth. One is a yokai drawn in an Edo-period picture book; the other is a folktale passed down in villages. Put them side by side, and you'll see the same "second mouth" told with a completely different flavor.

The folktale of the wife who doesn't eat

Long ago, there lived a very stingy man. He kept saying, "I want a wife who works hard and doesn't eat." One day a woman came to his door and said, "I don't eat rice." Delighted, the man married her.

True to her word, the wife ate nothing and worked hard. And yet, for some reason, the rice in the rice chest kept running low. Puzzled, the man pretended to go out and secretly peeked into the house. There was his wife, cooking a whole pot of rice and making heaps of rice balls. Then she let down her hair, and a huge mouth opened on the top of her head. She tossed the rice balls in, one after another. That's the central scene of the story.

The details vary from place to place, but the shock is always the same: the wife who wasn't supposed to eat was secretly eating mountains of food.

A mouth on top, a mouth at the back

In "The Wife Who Doesn't Eat," the mouth is usually said to be on the top of the head, under the hair, and the wife is really a yamauba mountain hag, an oni, or in some regions a spider. It's a story about something from the mountains, not human to begin with, coming into a human home.

The futakuchi-onna of Ehon Hyaku Monogatari ("Picture Book of a Hundred Stories"), on the other hand, has her mouth on the back of her head. And the woman in that story was once an ordinary person. The mouth appeared, it's said, as payback for not giving her stepchild enough to eat. The same "mouth under the hair," but in one tale it belongs to a mountain woman hiding her true self, and in the other to a human woman whose own deeds have taken shape. That's the big difference between the two.

For more on the different faces the yamauba shows in other folktales, see our story "The Two Faces of the Yamauba."

Saved by irises and mugwort

The second half of "The Wife Who Doesn't Eat" turns into a chase. Found out, the wife puts the man in a big wooden tub, hoists it onto her back, and heads for the mountains. Along the way the man grabs a tree branch, escapes, and hides in a patch of irises (shobu) and mugwort (yomogi). The wife comes after him, but she can't stand irises and mugwort, so she can't get close, and at last she gives up and goes home.

The story often ends like this: "And that's why, at the May festival, people tuck irises and mugwort under the eaves to keep evil away." This refers to Tango no Sekku, the early-May festival now known as Children's Day. A scary folktale doubles as the origin story of a seasonal custom.

The fear of a second mouth to feed

What links the two tales is food. For an old household, rice quietly disappearing was serious trouble. "The Wife Who Doesn't Eat" also pokes fun at the man's selfish wish for a wife who eats nothing. In the futakuchi-onna's tale, meanwhile, a woman who wouldn't feed a child ends up with a mouth that cries out for food. Both seem to show what goes on in people's hearts around food, in the shape of a second mouth.

The rokurokubi, whose neck stretches at night, is also said to live as an ordinary woman by day. You'll find the futakuchi-onna's look and the story from Ehon Hyaku Monogatari on her Yokaipedia page, and the legends of the mountain woman on the yamauba's page.