In Japanese myth and folklore, there are countless spirits and monsters, but many of them were written about and drawn in illustrations of the feudal era. Here is one such spirit/creature: a Futakuchi-onna.


In form, it is essentially a woman who has grown a monstrous mouth on the back of her head. As the mouth gains power, it gains control of the hair around it, creating snake-like appendages which it uses to grab food and feed itself!


There are a supposedly a number of reasons why an ordinary woman would grow into such a monster. It was thought that if a woman was married to a stingy and neglectful man, a man who didn't allow his wife to eat much because he didn'tt want to pay for the food, then the woman would despise him for it. Her hateful thoughts would grow and grow until they erupted in a gaping mouth from the back of her head, muttering spiteful words and curses and gobbling up any food it could find to get revenge on the stingy man. Others thought that this creature arises when a step-mother refuses to care for her step-child. If she refused to feed the child and the child died, it's spirit would cling to her, forming a mouth on the back of her head that would always remind her of what she did, and would eat all of her food before she or her family could.