Kuchisake-onna

The story

In 1979, at school, nobody talked about anything else.

No one knew who had said it first. Somebody had heard it from a cousin, who had heard it from a friend who lived in another city. The rumour had passed from class to class, from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, and each time it passed it grew a little more precise. A woman in a face mask. A long coat, straight black hair. She appeared at the hour when the daylight is already gone and the streetlamps are not quite on, and she stopped in front of anyone walking alone.

“And then?” someone always asked.

“Then she asks a question.”

The boy, who was thirteen, laughed about it. In Japan, when colds are going round, half the city wears a mask. “If a mask was enough to be scary,” he said, “I'd have to be scared of my mother.”

The others laughed, but not too much. Because there was always someone who knew one more detail. A classmate's sister had met her, or almost: a friend of hers had, two streets from the school. She had answered no, and nobody had talked about it since. Someone else swore that all you needed was the right word. Everyone had their own rule, and the rules never matched: perhaps that was what made the story so hard to forget.

That Tuesday he came out of his after-school club later than usual. It was already dark, a bluish dark, and the smell of dinner drifted from the windows of the flats. The way he walked every evening ran behind the school, along a stretch with no shops, where there was a single streetlamp that buzzed and every so often went out for a moment. The boy walked with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the tips of his shoes. He thought about his maths homework, about dinner, about anything except that week's story. He could hear his own footsteps. Then he realised that, apart from his, there were no others: no distant car, no television, no dog. The street was holding its breath.

Under the streetlamp stood a woman.

A long coat, the colour of sand. Straight black hair falling on either side of her face. Over her face, a white mask, the kind you buy at the chemist's. She stood still, arms by her sides, looking in his direction. There was no telling how long she had been there.

The boy slowed down. Then he kept walking, because stopping would have been even worse. Three metres. Two.

“Excuse me,” said the woman.

Her voice was low and kind. The voice of a neighbour.

“May I ask you a question?”

He stopped. He did not decide to: his body did it on its own.

“Am I pretty?”

The streetlamp went out, for a second. When the light came back, the woman was one step closer, though he had not seen her move. Above the mask, two dark, staring eyes.

The boy remembered what they said at school. That if you answer no, something bad happens. That if you answer yes, something happens anyway, only later. He opened his mouth. Only a thread of voice came out.

“Yes.”

“Really?” said the woman. And there was a strange joy in her voice. “Even now?”

With two fingers, slowly, she took off the mask.

Underneath, her mouth did not end where a mouth should end. It opened in a long, thin line that ran across her cheeks from one side to the other, almost to her ears: a smile drawn by a hand that was too long. And the woman held it like that, perfectly still, two steps away from him, without blinking.

“And now?” she whispered. “Am I pretty now?”

The boy felt the blood drain to his feet. He remembered the boy who shared his desk, the day before, who had written a single word on the back of his exercise book and underlined it twice. Average. “If you don't know what to say,” he had said, “say that. She doesn't understand it.”

He spoke with a dry throat.

“You're... average.”

The woman did not move.

“Average,” she repeated, softly.

She tilted her head, as if she had heard a foreign language. For a long moment, on the empty street, there was nothing but the buzzing of the streetlamp.

“Average...” she said again, and her open mouth moved uncertainly around the word. She was thinking. The boy understood that this was the only chance he would get.

In his coat pocket, under a handkerchief, was the sweet his grandmother had given him. He pulled out his hand and held it out to her, shaking. “Here. If... if you'd like it.”

The woman looked at the sweet. Then at him. Then at the sweet again, her head still tilted to one side, and she reached out to take it with a slowness that was almost gentle.

The boy ran.

He ran as he had never run before, without looking back, without breathing, his school bag banging against his back and his shoes skidding on the frozen tarmac. Behind him, further away with every step, he could hear a voice repeating the same word, over and over, in a strange rhythm, like a little girl learning to read.

“Average. Average. Average...”

He reached home gasping. His mother, who was cooking, looked up.

“What's wrong? You're pale.”

“Nothing,” he said. “I was running.”

That night he did not sleep. He lay staring at the ceiling, with the light from the hallway coming under the door, counting the seconds between one noise and the next. The next morning at school nobody asked him anything: everyone had their own story to tell, and at the end of lessons the teachers told the pupils to go home in groups, never alone. In some areas, in those weeks, children walked home in lines, escorted by groups of parents.

The boy told no one what had happened to him. Not the boy who shared his desk, not the teachers, not his mother.

He had heard something as he ran. Something he never told, not even when he was grown up.

At a certain point, behind him, the voice had changed. It no longer said “average”.

It had become a question. And the question was: “And you?”