6 - Tale of the Japanese Cemetery - The Slit-Mouthed Woman

Miu held her candle. The white kimono seemed to reflect the light, so that she almost glowed in the dark. With her left hand, she gestured around at the shrine, the stones with their carved Japanese characters.

"This cemetery is older than the town of Dagon's Hollow," she said, her voice soft and slightly muffled through the white cloth mask she wore. "When the railroad came through, many workers from Asia helped to cut through the hills. Many died. This group were mainly Chinese, who had come in from California, and some of them with their wives and children. When the railroad moved on, they stayed behind to tend the graves. Their descendants are still here, and we remember the old stories. This is the story of Kuchisake-onna—"

THE SLIT-MOUTHED WOMAN

In Edo, Kenjiro had once seen the kuchisake-onna. He had been walking along a canal, late at night; where prostitutes were apt sometimes to cut through on their way back to Yoshiwara, the brothel district. A drunk woman, heavy with coin, could be weak to a handsome face and strong young body, a warm smile and a soft but insistent hand. Kenjiro had enjoyed many a woman's charms he had not been able to afford that way.

The bastard son of a samurai family might, with luck and effort, achieve a comfortable life for himself. If the other children of the family did not survive to adulthood, they might even be recognized or adopted. The bastard son of a bastard son, however, has nothing to look forward to. He lived by his wits or by drudgery, and Kenjiro's knife had cut more than one purse, and more than one whore.

In truth, there was something fundamentally broken in Kenjiro. It was a violent house where he grew up, and his father was a violent man who surrounded himself with violent men and loose women. It was not strange in those days to see a woman's face cut for an insult, or to see such a woman sell herself for the price of a bottle of wine.

When he was young, Kenjiro had cut cats to pieces. His father, drunken as he was, beat the boy. When that did not work, he apprenticed the boy to an anatomist. The doctor had seen a sickness in his soul that had turned into Kenjiro's salvation. For those who studied Western medicine in secret, even at the very highest levels of government, needed fresh corpses for anatomical studies. Kenjiro helped supply them, and part of his payment was that he was allowed to watch the slow disassembly of the body, his dark eyes alight and skin sheened with sweat as he saw the beauties of Yoshiwara slowly flayed and cut apart.

There were women in Edo who bore scars from when handsome Kenjiro had gotten too excited during lovemaking, and he had reached for his knife. Those were the lucky ones. The unlucky ones ended up as medical lessons.

Tonight, there was a tall woman dressed in white by the canal. There had been no moon, and the smoke of Edo blocked out the stars, but there was light enough that he could see her clearly on the bank of the canal, with long, easy strides that were deceptive in the ground they covered, so he had to almost run to catch up to her.

Too late did he see how tall she was—unnaturally so, eight feet in height—and one dainty white hand held a fan in front of her face so he could only see that it was painted white, but that the eyes glimmered wetly.

"Am I beautiful?" she asked, cutting off the clever words he had for her. From her sash, she drew a heavy pair of iron scissors.

Their eyes met. Something, I think, passed between them. An understanding. Kenjiro was no fool. He had heard the stories of the kuchisake-onna, the slit-mouthed woman.

"Yes," he said. Because it was true, and because he wanted to see.

She lowered her fan, and closed it with a snap.

The cut ran from the left lobule meets the cheek down to the left corner of her mouth. It was old, puckered, and black teeth showed as she opened her mouth. The cut continued on the other side, to her right ear, so that when she opened her mouth her chin almost seemed to fall away, and a warm, sweet breath fell upon him.

To poor Kenjiro, she was the dark thing he had been seeking all of his life. Without waiting for her next question, he had stood up on his toes and pressed his tongue into that mouth.

The boat to the United States was a kind of hell that Kenjiro had never known. Even a steamship took days and weeks to make the crossing. His anatomist had talked too freely one night, the authorities were after him, it was exile or ****. So he left behind a night of horror that he could still taste on his lips, and came to California.

The railroad man had lied about the kind of work, and the conditions. English came not easily to Kenjiro, nor Spanish. Yet it was the old Mexican sailor, who was teaching them Spanish and English, that told him of the Comprachicos, who kidnap children and deform them in hideous ways, then sell them to freak shows. The way the old Mexican told it over the campfire was enough to make the Japanese Christians cross themselves.

Kenjiro only looked into the fire. What he saw there, no one knew.

Dagon's Hollow is far from Edo. Across the ocean, and the mountains, and the desert. Along an iron road it lies, one more stop between two seas. Shortly after the cemetery was built, the brothel went up.

A Japanese girl came there, whose face was covered by a veil. Kenjiro was her first, and for a time only, customer. She told him how she had been a virgin in San Francisco, and had made her way by the French method, as it was known; willing to scuk the semen out of every cow-puncher, machinist, tinker, farmer, and ranch-hand that would have her. Her undoing came when someone heard she had sucked off two soldiers from a fort at the same time; a trio of Buffalo hunters had wished to see her exceed the feet. When she failed...a glass bottle had torn her mouth wide enough for the grimy, unwashed cocks to thrust themselves in and out of her mouth. Semen had sprayed into her wounds, and the old woman who had tried to sew them shut used fishing line. The infection had nearly killed her, and the wounds had never completely closed.

After all, she still had to work, and she had not yet given her maidenhead to anyone. Or so she told him. What the truth of the matter was, none knows. Perhaps she had angered a pimp on the road. Or had told Kenjiro a tale designed to make him hard for her; such was his dark imagination, he might even have taught her the story to tell him, in the way men do who become fixated on one thing.

By the end of the year, she became his wife, and their descendants still number among the families here.

When he died, and was laid to rest next to his wife, their sons saw a tall, pale woman at the corner of the cemetery. With long dark hair, and a fan that hid her face. Nor were they the last to see the slit-mouthed woman, or her scars, or feel the cold kiss of her blades.

From her kimono, Miu produced a pair of old, heavy iron scissors. With a snip, the wick fell off the candle, and the flame died beneath the toe of her sandal.