INIM VIII came out yesterday, the 8th compilation by the >Implying Noise Is Music crew! For this one, participants were assigned a mythical beast, and had to compose a track that evokes the same feelings the creature’s lore invokes in the composer. I got the Futakuchi-onna, a Japanese yokai, a lady with a second mouth on the back of her head. I recorded this in my studio while my pal was tidying stuff, and performed it with my back to him; I gave my best attempt at playing two harmonicas, one on the back of my head. I also dropped some fat rhymes. It unintentionally came out as two tracks, which turned out to be quite fitting!
TRANSLATION: two-mouthed woman
HABITAT: usually occurs in married women
DIET: as a normal person, only twice as much
APPEARANCE: Families which notice their food stocks are shrinking at an alarming rate while the women in their houses rarely eat a bite may be the victims of a futakuchi onna infestation. Futakuchi onna appear just as a regular women until their terrible secret is revealed: in the back of their skulls, buried beneath of long, thick hair, is a second mouth, with large, fat lips, and full of teeth. This second mouth is ravenous, and uses long strands of hair like tentacles to gorge itself on any food it can find.
ORIGIN: In the folk tales of Japans eastern regions, futakuchi onna are most often thought to be shapechanged yama-uba posing as young women. In the western regions they are frequently shapechanged kumo, or magical spiders. In the other tales they are the result of curses brought about by wicked deeds, similar to rokuro-kubi. In each story, regardless of its true nature, this yokai is used as a punishment upon a greedy man or woman for wickedness and extreme parsimony.
LEGENDS: In a small rural village in Fukushima there lived a stingy miser who, because he could not bear the thought of paying for food to support a family, lived entirely by himself. One day he met a woman who did not eat anything at all, and he immediately took her for his wife. Because she never ate a thing, and was still a hard worker, the miser was thrilled with her. However, his stores of rice were steadily decreasing, and he could not figure why, for he never saw his wife eat.
One day the miser pretended to leave for work, but instead stayed behind to spy on his new wife. She untied her hair, revealing a second mouth on the back of her head, complete with ghastly lips and teeth. Her hair reached out with tentacle-like stalks and began to scoop rice balls into the second mouth, with cooed out with pleasure in a vulgar, raspy voice.
The miser was horrified and resolved to divorce his wife. However, she learned of his plan before he could act on it, and she trapped him in a bathtub and carried it off into the mountains. The miser managed to escape, and hid in a heavily-scented lily marsh, where the futakuchi-onna could not find him.
Listen/purchase: INIM VIII by INIM
