Michael Dylan Foster

The Question of the Slit-Mouthed Woman: Contemporary Legend, the Beauty Industry, and Womens Weekly Magazines in Japan

Am I beautiful? The Slit-Mouthed Woman (1979)

the streets of Japan were haunted by a dangerous woman. She was attractive, in her late twenties or early thirties, with long black hair and a white surgical-style mask over her mouthin Japan a custom not at all uncommon for somebody suffering from a cold. Lurking on a street corner, or beside a telephone pole, she would waylay a child walking home from school. Am I beautiful? she would inquire. And then she would remove the maskrevealing a mouth slit ear-to-ear in a gruesome smile. Even like this? she would ask the startled child. The woman was known as kuchi-sake-onna, literally mouth (kuchi) slit/ split (sake) woman (onna), or more coherently, Slit-Mouthed Woman. Having rst appeared in December 1978, her story traveled rapidly throughout the Japanese archipelago, terrorizing elementary and middle-school students and stimulating heated discussion among older children and adults in every prefecture.1 By the summer of 1979, a national newspaper had identied kuchi-sake-onna as one of the buzzwords of the moment (Asahi shinbun 1979, 7); according to one source, 99 percent of Japanese children
n 1979, This article has beneted from the support of a great number of colleagues and friends. In particular, I would like to thank Susan Antebi, Ariga Takashi, Thomas Hare, Ichiyanagi Hirotaka, Komatsu Kazuhiko, Komma Toru, Susan Matisoff, Jim Reichert, Carole-Anne Tyler, and especially Michiko Suzuki. I am also grateful for the perceptive feedback of the Shingetsukai at Kanagawa University, the members of the spring 2005 Cloning Difference residency fellowship at the University of California, Riverside Center for Ideas and Society, and the editors and anonymous readers for Signs. 1 The rst documented appearance was in Gifu Prefecture in December 1978; by June 1979, there were reports in every prefecture (Asakura 1989, 13840). Asakura (1989, 139) and Hiraizumi (1979, 19) both chart the legends progress through Japan.
[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2007, vol. 32, no. 3] 2007 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2007/3203-0005$10.00

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were familiar with her story (Kinoshita 1999, 14). The rumor of the SlitMouthed Woman is an urban or contemporary legend, an item of hearsay, a fragment of gossip embedded in conversationthe type of discursive artifact so often overlooked, or underestimated, within cultural interpretation.2 Yet there is no doubting the rumors lasting impact: although excitement about the Slit-Mouthed Woman peaked in 1979, even today she remains a lively, if multivalent, cultural icon. In recent popular culture, for example, she is mentioned in the blockbuster horror movie Ringu (Ring; 1998), in Studio Ghiblis animated feature Heisei tanuki gassen Pompoko (Tanuki [Racoon-dog] battles of the Heisei era: Pompoko; 1994), and explicitly thematized in a short lm entitled simply Kuchi-sake-onna (SlitMouthed Woman; 1996). The powerful effect that the Slit-Mouthed Woman has had on Japans cultural landscape results from a critical combination of factors, including the psychosexual imagery associated with her gure as well as the poignancy of this imagery within the specic historical moment of its emergence. In the pages that follow, I explore a number of interpretations of the SlitMouthed Woman as an abject and monstrous female; I then focus particularly on her appearance in popular womens weekly magazines, venues in which she raises signicant questions about normative femininity, the fashion industry, and female agency. Academic discussion of the Slit-Mouthed Woman in Japan has primarily considered only oral versions of the legend, but by reading closely her textual appearance within the context of these particular magazines and by examining her legend with regard to contemporary gender issues, we discover a gure of resistance who speaks meaningfully of female subjectivity against the backdrop of the Japanese womens movement. On a broader level, by exploring various readings of this polyvalent text, I also hope to offer interpretive strategies through which we can better understand the ways oft-ignored cultural products such as contemporary legends can encode sometimes contradictory ideologies, providing insight into the dynamics of complicity and resistance as well as into the complex sociohistorical concerns of a given moment.

Many voices

It is impossible to identify an originary form of the Slit-Mouthed Woman story; like all contemporary legends, it is characterized by variation over
2 Although I use the terms contemporary legend, legend, or rumor to refer to the narratives in question, folklorists might also label them urban legend, memorate, or simply anecdote (see Fine 1992, 14; Turner 1993, 15). For Japanese terminology, see Miyamoto (1998, 510).

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time and space. A version recounted in one place is sure to differ from a version collected elsewhere. Reinvented with each telling, the text is never stable; it is both palimpsest and pastiche, continuously recreated by performers who are also the audience. Indeed, it is fair to say that there are as many versions as there are people who have recounted the tale; a legend such as this one is truly polyvocal. Nevertheless, wherever and however her story was told, the Slit-Mouthed Woman seems to have had a powerful effect: I have very scary memories of the Slit-Mouthed-Woman story from third and fourth grade of primary school . . . this woman with a white mask and long hair would come from behind and tap you on the shoulder. When you turned to look, she would ask, Am I beautiful? [Watashi kirei?] If you said, Yes, youre beautiful, she would say Even like this? [Kore demo?] and remove the mask and threaten you. Or if you said, Youre not beautiful, she would come chasing after you. When I parted with my friends on the way home from school, and it was getting dark, I would be frightened when I thought about it. (Saito 1992, 90)3 As the legend made its discursive sojourn through the country, it accrued different elements (often etiological in nature) that eshed out the narrative. Not only did the woman have a slit mouth, but she also carried a knife or a scythe. She was particularly fond of a hard candy known as bekko ame. She could run 100 meters in several seconds, her tremendous speed often attributed to her having been an Olympic athlete. If she pursued you, however, there were several ways to escape: running into a record shop, for example, or in one of the most memorable methods, intoning the word pomade. Not surprisingly, many versions of the legend also developed explanations for the slit mouth, perhaps the most common one attributing it to a horrible mistake incurred during cosmetic surgery. Here is one example from Tochigi Prefecture: The Slit-Mouthed Woman came into being because there was this very beautiful woman, but she was concerned that her mouth was too small so she went to a certain cosmetic surgery clinic and had an operation. But there was a mistake with the operation to make her mouth larger, and the instant she saw her face after the operation, she went insane and became the Slit-Mouthed Woman. Usually she wears a large mask and asks people, Am I beautiful? If they say
3

All translations of Japanese sources are my own.

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Yes, she will remove the mask, say Even like this? and show her mouth. If you see that and try to escape, she will come after you, and kill you with a scythe. She is exceedingly fast and can soon catch anybody, but she has the weakness of not liking the odor of pomade, so if you say pomade, it is said that you can escape her. (Saito 1992, 91) Much scholarly discussion of the legend in Japan has focused on structurally isolating various narrative elements, such as reasons for the slit mouth, clothing and what she carries, and time of appearance and behavior (Tsunemitsu 1993, 40).4 Concomitant with this formal analysis is the attempt to situate the Slit-Mouthed Woman in a lineage of monstrous women within Japanese folklore. Fueled in part by a nostalgic drive to discover a persistence of folkloric tradition in urban and suburban settings, motifs are combed for historical connections to earlier legends and other monstrous women. The scythe, for example, as a tool emblematic of pastoral tradition, metonymically imbues its possessor with traditional rural connections (Nomura 1995, 53; 2005, 12934). Similarly, the ritualistic invocation of pomade links this mens hairstyling gel with the apotropaic powers of certain plants traditionally used to ward off evil spirits and other pests. Such connections with previous folklore were duly promoted in the popular press: in one weekly magazine, for example, Matsutani Miyoko, a prominent folktale scholar, is quoted as suggesting that the Slit-Mouthed Womans desire for candy might be the inuence of the Candy-buying ghost legend, a much older legend in which a woman who has died during childbirth returns night after night to purchase candy for her unborn baby (Toguri 1979, 27).

A female monster

Through this search for traditionality and latent memory (Nomura 2005, 130), the Slit-Mouthed Woman is congured as a modern avatar of earlier demonic women of folklore.5 Within this context, her monstrousness becomes contingent on particular powers of femalenessgiving birth and motherhood. Such interpretations promote a sense that woman is always already monster, or as Rosi Braidotti puts it, she is forever associated to unholy, disorderly, subhuman, and unsightly phenomena. It
For analyses of narrative structure, see also Asakura (1989, 13537) and Nomura (1995, 6465). 5 See Miyata 1985, 2033; Komatsu 1986, 23638; Nakamura 1994, 18188; Nomura 1995, 3840.
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is as if she carried within herself something that makes her prone to being an enemy of mankind, an outsider in her civilization, an other (1997, 64). The trope of the monstrous female in Japan is not limited to premodern folklore; it also nds expression in modern Japanese literaturefrom the so-called poison women of the late eighteenth century (Marran 1998, 2007) to the dangerous women recurring in literary works by canonical twentieth-century authors (Cornyetz 1999). Whether or not there are direct historical links between these other female demons and the Slit-Mouthed Woman, there is a long lineagefolkloric and literarythrough which similar images of women are (re)produced within the cultural imaginary. From a Western theoretical perspective, the Slit-Mouthed Womans cavernous and terrifying mouth signies the unclean (Douglas 1966) and the abject (Kristeva 1982), that which is rejected in the constitution of normative subjectivity. She is paradigmatic of the dyadic mother, a maternal gure of the pre-Oedipal period who threatens symbolically to engulf the infant, or similarly the oral sadistic mother, a cannibalistic female demon feared by both female and male infants who imagine that, just as they derive pleasure from feeding/eating at the mothers breast, the mother might in turn desire to feed on them (Creed 1993, 109). Although such interpretations powerfully underscore the mouths capacity to ingest and incorporate, the symbolism of the mouth is also of course associated with female sexuality. In June of 1979, at the height of the legends circulation, psychologist Akiyama Satoko (1979, 15) observed that the Slit-Mouthed Womans image had particular meaning for girls approaching sexual maturity who experience vague anxieties about sex, pregnancy, and why that part must always be covered up. In a later article, Akiyama emphasizes the strange atmosphere of the erotic associated with the gure of the mother: The slit located in the lower part of the mothers body, the big mouth that gives birth to the childprobably it can also suddenly open up and swallow the child. . . . A place that is usually covered up and cannot be seen, it twitches like an entirely independent living thing, and can at certain times become wide enough to give birth to a baby (1989, 30). Encountered on the street, the SlitMouthed Woman is a pervert, a female asher revealing sexuality to innocent children. Although I translate the line kore demo? as even like this? it might also be accurately rendered even this?; the Slit-Mouthed Woman performs a cynical bait-and-switch tactic whereby the desire for the beautiful is replaced with this, a representation of the desired in its most sexualized, extremeunbeautifulform. To the young boy, she embodies the threat of female sexuality and anxieties of emasculation/

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castration; to the young girl, she is an eerie gure of warning, unveiling adult sexuality in its starkest, most visceral reality. The easy correlation here between the mouth, concealed behind the clean white gauze of the mask, and female genitalia is reected explicitly in the comments of a male college student at the time: The mouth of the Slit-Mouthed Woman is genital-like. And whats more, it is ridiculously huge and gaudy and unclean, so I dont want to be touched by it! (Fukasaku 1979, 31). Folklorist Komatsu Kazuhiko states bluntly, The Slit-Mouthed Woman is a monster of the female genitalia (1986, 23738), intimating that the problem is not one of female genitalia per se but that the genitals in question are monstrousa provocatively ambiguous designation. While demonstrating her abjection, showing herself as a mutilated body hideous to look at, the Slit-Mouthed Woman simultaneously threatens to mutilate, to make abject, and to render similarly hideous those who gaze upon her. If male castration anxiety derives from the recognition of a womans lack of a phallus and the horror derived from viewing genitals that appear castrated, then the Slit-Mouthed Womans hollow yawning mouth is a vivid and horrifying expression of this lack. She has been painfully mutilated by the patriarchal symbolic order; her torn orice is not only the abject sore of her subjection but also a terrifying reminder to all who look upon it. As Barbara Creed argues, however, womans genitals are frightening not only passively because they appear castrated but also because they appear castrating (1993, 110). Creed elucidates the role in horror lms of what she calls the monstrous-feminine, and particularly the motif of the vagina with teeth, or vagina dentata; the relevance of this motif to the Slit-Mouthed Woman does not take a great stretch of the imagination.6 With her gaping, red-lipped mouth (sometimes portrayed with sharp teeth), the Slit-Mouthed Woman articulates a visceral image of the castrating mother or femme fatale. She is an insatiable sexual predator who invokes the intimate connection between desire (Am I beautiful?) and disgust (Even like this?), between the pleasure principle and the death drive. Not only does the mouth itself threaten to dismember and devour, but the accompanying knife/scythe similarly conveys a symbolic power to mutilate (castrate). Some versions of the legend, in fact, explicitly state that the Slit-Mouthed Woman will do unto her victim what has been done to her. She is akin to the vampire of legend (and literature and lm) not only because of the oral and sexualized nature of her threat but also
6 For discussion of the vagina dentata motif, see Raitt (1980) and Grosz (1995, 187205).

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because of her ambiguous conguration as both victim and victimizer, castrated and castrator, attacking others because of an earlier violation of the self; like the vampire, she represents a sexual power whose threat lies in its difference from a phallic norm (Williams 1984, 89).

Education Mama

The psychosexual interpretations suggested by the monstrous feminine and the vagina dentata provide critical symbolic grounding on which to base a contextualized analysis attentive to the sociocultural moment haunted by this dangerous woman. Even more than a literary or lmic text, a word-of-mouth legend will soon disappear if it fails to resonate within contemporary social, cultural, economic, and political circumstances; that we even have a Slit-Mouthed Woman text (or texts) speaks to its relevance within the cultural imaginary. If legends can be characterized as products of social tension and strain (Best and Horiuchi 1996, 119), then certainly the Slit-Mouthed Woman reects a sense of alienation within an expanding urban environment. It is no coincidence that the same article that cites Slit-Mouthed Woman as a buzzword for the rst half of 1979 also notes the currency of the term rabbit hutches to describe homes in the faceless concrete apartment buildings that had risen up throughout Japan. The late 1970s and early 1980s witnessed intense social and cultural change after the end of Japans high economic growth period, and surely the strains of these circumstances nourished the legend. Tempting as it is to characterize a legend as a manifestation of a vague set of sociocultural tensions, however, I would concur with historical sociologist Sato Kenjis assertion that anxiety or discontent can probably be found at any time or during any historical period (1995, 18283). It is more protable, then, to focus on how a legend reects particular anxieties and discontents. One such interpretation posits that the image of the Slit-Mouthed Woman is related to the so-called Education Mama (kyoiku mama). As anthropologist Anne Allison explains, the term Edu cation Mama refers to a mother so committed to furthering the education of her child that she does everything from sharpening pencils, making midnight oya shoku (snacks), and pouring tea for a studying child to consulting with teachers; investigating the range of subjects, tutors, and juku (cram schools) available; and boning up on subjects where her child is decient. [It] . . . is a term both of respect and reprobation: respect for those mothers who are successful in seeing children

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through the competitions of the Japanese school system and reprobation for the pressure they consequently must exert on children whose days, nights, and energies are consumed by study. (Allison 1996, 106) A number of Japanese scholars have suggested that the Slit-Mouthed Woman represents a sort of Education Mama turned monster: the image of her confronting children on their way home from school or on the twilit streets between school and cram school (supplementary evening schools attended by students from elementary through precollege) was born of anxieties felt by children regarding pressures exerted by their own mothers (Miyata 1985, 20).7 The Slit-Mouthed Woman is a projection of these apprehensions: the absolute control exerted by the mother inside the household is internalized by the child and carried forth into the outside world, creating a fantasy of constant surveillance and discipline. She is the mother-as-demon: panoptic, inescapable, and driving the child beyond her or his natural capacities. Not only did the Education Mama phenomenon develop in the highly competitive environment of the postwar period, but pressures on young children to perform academically also became increasingly intense during the 1970s, with rates of cram-school attendance steadily rising. In many versions of the legend, it is en route to cram school that children are confronted, and the Slit-Mouthed Woman herself is usually portrayed as being in her twenties or thirties, an appropriate age for the mother of a young child. Within this context, the Education Mama dovetails neatly with the monstrous feminine: when long work hours typically require that the father is absent from the everyday household, the mother becomes the castrating threat in a dyadic family, enforcing the Law and driving the childs passage into the symbolic order. The would-be attractive and nurturing mother (Am I beautiful?) is demonized, transformed into the castrating mother (Even like this?). But the very neatness with which the Education Mama can be conated with the Slit-Mouthed Woman reects the difculties implicit in interpreting a cultural product as varied as this one: the association of the two female gures, while undeniably resonant, is to a certain extent a function of the polyvocality and mutability of the narrative. Any pervasive legend or rumor necessarily articulates anxieties across a number of social strata and concerning a range of salient contemporary issues. Although the Education Mama may be one inuence on the Slit-Mouthed-Woman image,

7 For debate about the Education Mama hypothesis, see Komatsu (1986, 23132), Miyamoto (1998, 2425), and Kinoshita (1999, 1819, 2223).

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it is certainly not the only one (Komatsu 1986, 231); indeed, the connections between the two women are meaningful only when particular motifs (i.e., the Slit-Mouthed Womans appearance as a young mother, her accosting of children) are emphasized.

Masking/unmasking

One element within the Slit-Mouthed-Woman legend that contributes to this interpretive open-endedness is the mask, a denitive motif found in almost every documented version of the tale. The removal of this mask transforms an attractive woman into a terrifying threat. It is a literal unveiling, the pivotal point of the narrative, like a Proppian function propelling the plot forward. Any mask, of course, presents an overdetermined symbolic problem, signifying itself even as it draws attention to the very thing it conceals. In the particular case of Japan, masks have long been used in no and kyogen theater and also in countless local ritual/religious performances, where they represent specic character types or emotions or serve to transform humans into deities, demons, or animals. These are usually full facial masks, worn in the context of performance, in the ritualized space of the stage or the shrine. Though sharing certain semiotic associations with these other masks, the Slit-Mouthed Womans mask (masuku) is distinct. It covers only half her face, and rather than replacing the mouth with a different one, the white gauze erases it completely. Available at any pharmacy or convenience store, this type of mask is usually worn when the subject is ill and does not want to transmit germs to others or, inversely, to protect herself when others are ill. The public use of such masks in Japan can be traced back to 1918 when they were proposed as a prophylactic against the Spanish inuenza (Shimokawa and Katei sogo kenkyukai 2000, 429). Even today, the use of masks to prevent the spread of germs is common in Japan; additionally, they are marketed as lters against common allergens and most notably were internationally visible during the SARS outbreak of 2002. As a method for preventing the spread of germs, the mask permits the wearer to participate in the trafc of everyday life, to go about business in the secular public space of the community. But even with regard to health, the mask is an ambiguous sign. On the one hand, it serves as a form of stigmatization, signifying that the individual wearer is ill (unclean) and must be separatedif only by thin gauzefrom the rest of society. On the other hand, it can also suggest that the wearer is healthy but that those around her or the environment itself are unclean and dangerous. In either case, the mask indicates disease, either of individual or society/

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environment, and establishes an opposition between these two. It functions as a thin and pliable boundary signifying only that someone or something is unhealthy or polluted but not specifying the location or form of pollution. During the 1960s and 1970s, as the media began covering the negative aspects of rapid economic growth, this ambiguous association of the mask with disease and pollution became part of the cultural imaginary. Environmentally caused health problems (pollution illnesses, as one mayor called them) such as Minamata disease (mercury poisoning) and Itai Itai disease (cadmium poisoning) garnered more and more media and public attention, leading to an increase in citizen protests and to the governments establishment in 1971 of an environmental agency to respond ofcially to pollution and health-related concerns (Broadbent 1998; see also George 2001). During this period, children in some areas might be seen wearing pollution masks on their way to school (Esashi 1996, 155). The simple white mask, profoundly linked with disease and pollution, came to be emblematic of the human side of environmental destruction. Within this context, the Slit-Mouthed Woman legend becomes a symbolically overdetermined allegory of the suffering incurred in Japans postwar drive toward economic success. With a bitter smile hacked out by sacrice, hers is the face of the populace, a face disgured through overwork and environmentally wrought disease; or, as the countenance of the land, she is cut and made ugly through an overharvesting of natural resources and overconstruction of roadways and factories; or, as the visage of Japan shown to other nations, she is a brave face put on to cover the disgurement etched by sacrices made for economic growth. In all of these allegories, of course, the mask signies that something is wrong; its sudden removal shockingly reveals the hideous truth, poignantly questioning the hope embodied by the gure of the young woman (Even like this? suggests another question: Was it worth it?). The target of the SlitMouthed-Womans attack is almost always a child, as if the monstrous victim/victimizer is warning about the future or perhaps pointing out that it was for the sake of the children that the sacrices of her own generation were made.

Media and antimedia: The ideology of transformation

There is always an instrumental aspect to the transmission of rumors. Whether it is for more news, status, power, entertainment, money, social control (Rosnow and Fine 1976, 130), the exchange of hearsay is almost never simply a matter of passing on information for informations sake. If you dont take part in the talk of the Slit-Mouthed Woman in the

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classroom, one elementary school child explained, theres a sense that you are not part of the group (Hiraizumi 1979, 18). As a commodity constantly produced and reproduced by its own consumers, the value and meaning of the Slit-Mouthed-Woman legend is contingent on the particular producers/consumers and the particular space in which the producing and consuming happens. While psychoanalytic and allegorical readings provide important tools for grappling with this slippery text, it is also critical to explore the legends value and meaning within a single dened marketplace, that is, to adopt an interpretive strategy that limits the parameters of the inquiry by grounding analysis in a particular discursive context and historical moment. Although scholars in Japan have considered the Slit-Mouthed Woman from a variety of perspectivesincluding the formal, historical, sociological, and comparative approaches touched on abovesuch analyses have focused primarily on oral versions of the legend, often collected as memories. In contrast, incarnations of the legend in the media have generally been regarded somewhat pejoratively as tangential to these oral forms. Yet the media not only affords insight into the legends real-time transmission at the height of its popularity but also provides textual artifacts concerning the legend and the urry surrounding it that are of interest in their own right. To be sure, it is difcult to assess mass medias role in the initial spread of the legendcertainly, the Slit-Mouthed Woman did not appear frequently in the major print media before June 1979 and indeed seems to have traveled around the country primarily by word of mouth.8 By summer, however, the very rapidity of the legends diffusion had attracted media attention; it was duly noted in serious newspapers and magazines and became the subject of excited commentary on television, on radio, in weekly entertainment magazines, and in the popular tabloids known as sports newspapers (supotsu shinbun). One media outlet in which the legend appeared consistently in the summer of 1979 was womens weekly magazines (josei shukanshi). For the remainder of this essay I focus only on this single dened market, a space in which the presence of the Slit-Mouthed Woman speaks with special poignancy about Japanese women at the end of the 1970s. I concentrate on womens weeklies because the Slit-Mouthed Woman not only

Electronic media including television and late-night radio broadcasts probably also contributed to the legends diffusion, as did so-called mini-komi, smaller and local mass media venues (Akiyama 1989, 29; Asakura 1989, 140; Miyamoto 1998, 17, 20). For the most part, reports of the legend did not occur in national print media, such as Asahi shinbun, until the summer of 1979, after the legend had already been diffused throughout the country.

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showed up with comparative frequency in these magazines but also because, as a dangerous woman, her appearance in a forum specically targeting a female readership raises critical questions about what she had to say as a gendered subject. By attending to her representation in this textual space, we nd an image of the Slit-Mouthed Woman as she appeared to adult females, and we also get a glimpse of her at the very height of the excitement surrounding her. The interpretations I offer in the following pages are not meant to be all-inclusive or monolithic; rather, they offer a critical reading of the legend within a specic context and suggest a fresh way of considering what this mysterious woman had to say about female subjectivity in late-1970s Japan. Womens weekly magazines are a discrete genre: distinct from other types of womens magazines, such as glossy lifestyle and fashion magazines, they are inexpensive and tabloidlike, printed mostly on low-quality newsprint and published weekly rather than monthly. The tone of these magazines was (and still is) gossipy and light, containing news of television and movie stars, the latest trends, horoscopes, and easy-to-read general interest stories. In 1979, three major magazines were representative examples of womens weeklies, and it is in these particular venues that the Slit-Mouthed Woman most frequently appeared: Josei jishin (Woman herself ), Josei sebun (Woman seven), and Shukan josei (Weekly woman).9 All three of these weeklies were distributed nationwide and widely read combined they sold upward of a million and a half copies in the second half of 1979 alone. We can assume that exact readership numbersor at least perusal numberswere even higher because such magazines were frequently read casually in bookstores and waiting rooms. That the ubiquitous (though now considered pejorative) expression OL (oeru), or ofce lady, referring to a female clerical worker, originated in Josei jishin testies to the mediums broad inuence.10

The yearbook of the Japanese publishing industry cites these three magazines as examples of weekly publications within the broader category of womens magazines (joseishi). In 1979, weeklies accounted for 42 percent of total sales in this category, with monthlies making up 58 percent (Shuppan nenkan henshu bu 1980, 64). For other womens magazines, see Clammer (1995), Moeran (1995), Rosenberger (1995), and Skov (1995). 10 Statistics for the second half of 1979 are as follows: Josei jishin, 705,399 copies; Josei sebun, 576,855 copies; and Shukan josei, 439,897 copies (Shuppan nenkan henshu bu 1981, 1719). Recent (2001) data from the Josei jishin editorial department suggest that readers are generally female and range from their teens to their sixties, although 60 percent are married women in their late twenties through thirties (personal communication, 2001). For more on the readership of womens magazines in general, see Inoue (1984, 43). The term OL rst appeared in the May 17, 1965, issue of Josei jishin (Ochiai 1995, 108).

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With their deluge of advertisements and articles on making over the body and the face, womens magazines in general can be considered disciplinary sites through which standards of physical appearance are molded. With regard to beauty and attractiveness for the modern woman, feminist scholar Inoue Teruko has noted, standardized criteria are applied, and ratings and rankings are carried out. It is in womens magazines that the criteria for these judgments are presented as fundamental truths with no room for questioning (1984, 6566). Disciplinary power, Michel Foucault tells us, produces docile bodies, in part through a modality that implies an uninterrupted, constant coercion (1977, 137), a notion that correlates with consistently bombarding readers with images of beauty and techniques for beauty making. A quick glance through any issue of the three womens weeklies in question reveals a plethora of advertisements and articles focusing on physical appearance and beauty and also promoting, with little subtlety, a normative aesthetic. Even excluding the broad category of makeup products, over 35 percent of the advertisements in womens weeklies concern ways to improve appearance (dieting products, aesthetic treatments, corsets, and cosmetic surgery), a rate surpassing that found in other womens magazines during the same time period (Inoue 1984, 58).11 Foucaults suggestion that a docile body is one that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved (1977, 136) appropriately highlights the importance in disciplinary discourses of corporeal transformation. In a sense, the articles and advertisements in womens weeklies are not about beauty per se but about the fantasy of becoming beautiful: all womens magazines (not just weeklies) are, in Inoues words, catalogs for the purpose of transformation (1984, 6268). Susan Bordo notes that Science and technology have generated an industry and an ideology fueled by fantasies of rearranging, transforming, and correcting, an ideology of limitless improvement and change, defying the historicity, the mortality, and indeed, the very materiality of the body (1993, 245). Dedicated to this ideology of transformation, these magazines intimate a radical destabilization of the esh, a suggestion at once frightening and empowering corporeality is a mutable substance that can be made to conform to the desires of the subject. Or rather, it is through the (re)fashioning of the body that one can create, as Leslie Rabine phrases it, a self-produced coherent subject (1994, 64). A woman does not have to accept the individual body and face given her but can undertake any number of procedures to make it conform to normative standards of beauty. Fur11

These statistics are from magazines published in July 1980.

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thermore, within the context of these magazines, normative beauty is equated with feminine power: by transforming herself physically to comply with socially constructed values, a woman achieves greater status within the dominant society to whose standards she is conforming. In the words of Higuchi Keiko, a feminist intellectual writing in 1978, Its not a bad thing to be popular among men because of your beauty . . . I certainly do not look down on anybody . . . who attains her goals by using her beauty as a weapon (1978, 156). At the same time, however, the normative aesthetic of the beautiful sold in the pages of these magazines informs the parameters of desire and delimits the possibilities of transformation. There is, as Joanne Finkelstein puts it, an inherent contradiction in all of this; at the very moment when women are depicted as self-producing, what they are often constructing is the constrained and subjugated image of the heterosexually desirable female (1997, 156). Both Rabine and Finkelstein are concerned with the contemporary Western fashion industry, but their comments are also appropriate for Japanese womens weeklies of the 1970s, a space in which female subjectivity is constructed as a product of normative discourses on corporeal beauty, and in which (female) corporeal beauty is equated with power in patriarchal society. In Japan as elsewhere, the body itself may be considered part of the fashion system (Miller 2003, 272). Within this discursive environment, what can the image of the Slit-Mouthed Woman mean? Why does she appear frequently in these magazines, and what does she have to say? To be sure, one of the many issues she articulates is this very problematic of female beauty as a value for women in a hegemonic male social structure: at the heart of the legend, after all, is the question Am I beautiful? Komatsu points out that if a man with a mask were to walk up to people on a street at night, stop them and say, Am I handsome? [Ore bidanshika?], it just would not cause the same vivid sense of fear as the Slit-Mouthed Woman; rather, it would even have a sense of the comic about it (1986, 232). The very linchpin of the legend, the premise around which it revolves, is the radically different set of values accruing to men and women. Within a male-dominated world (outside the household) female agency and power can be achieved only through honing ones appearance as a weapon. The Slit-Mouthed Woman, Komatsu continues, arouses peoples terror because she works powerfully on their tacit understanding with regard to how much effort women must expend on their own beauty, how much they are controlled by it, as well as how difcult it is for a woman who is not considered beautiful to live in this world (1986, 232).

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Extreme makeover

Komatsu underscores the legends potential as a transgressive counternarrative to the normative trajectory of female development and transformation that is in compliance with hegemonic aesthetics. When viewed specically in the context of womens weekly magazines, this counternarrative becomes all the more poignant: attractive at rst glance (with the mask on) but ultimately disgured and repulsive, the Slit-Mouthed Womans question, Am I beautiful? assumes a mocking, parodic tone. To be sure, like many of the articles in these magazines, news of the SlitMouthed Woman is presented tongue-in-cheek, with a register that is playfully ambiguous with regard to the reality of her existence. But as with any discursive product, a critical interpretive and multilayered reading of these lighthearted texts can yield serious insight into the broader cultural imaginary. If, for example, we read the legend as a warning against the dangers of striving to transform oneself to societys standards, it is not surprising that her conguration as the victim of cosmetic surgery gone terribly wrong is especially prominent within these magazines. An article in Shukan josei, for example, reports: There were three sisters and they all had cosmetic surgery. However, for each one of them it was a big mistake, and their mouths were slit from ear to ear (Shukan josei 1979a, 32). Situated in the corner of the very same page, surrounded by the article text, is an advertisement for cosmetic surgery. While the practical demands of layout are undoubtedly a factor here, such advertisements are so common in these magazines that this sort of ironic juxtaposition is inevitable, causing the cosmetic-surgery-gone-awry motif to assume a fresh immediacy. The legends implicit warning against such extreme (but not uncommon) measures almost comically subverts the unassuming advertisement encouraging readers to undergo just such extreme measures. At the same time, however, the advertisements willful disregard for the articles contents speaks to the blinding bombardment of normative beauty discourse, against which all resistance is ultimately nothing more than ironic commentary. The spatial coincidence of these two antithetical moments, conicting voices within a broader discourse on female agency and the beauty industry, highlights eloquently (if inconclusively) a problematic of resistance and conformity, of transgression and normativity.12

Real disguring accidents caused by cosmetic surgery are not uncommon (Davis 1995, 28). While exact statistics regarding cosmetic/aesthetic surgery in Japan during the 1970s are difcult to nd, in 1978, the year of the Slit-Mouthed Womans emergence, the term cosmetic surgery (biyo geka) was recognized for the rst time by the Japanese government as a designated medical treatment (for a brief chronology of cosmetic surgery in Japan, see

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Kathy Davis suggests that such procedures as cosmetic surgery must be viewed as a complex dilemma: problem and solution, symptom of oppression and act of empowerment, all in one (1997, 169). Davis, who has written extensively on the subject, says that most women she interviewed rejected the notion that . . . they had allowed themselves to be coerced, normalized or ideologically manipulated. On the contrary, cosmetic surgery was a way for them to take control over circumstances over which they previously had no control (1997, 175). Although it might be argued that refusal to recognize coercion is evidence of the extent to which ideology has been internalized, Davis makes clear that the decision to have surgery is a proactive choiceoften against great resistanceand an internal determination of ones own appearance even while accepting the inevitable external inuences on its form. Choosing surgery, she points out, involves going along with the dictates of the beauty system, but also refusalrefusal to suffer beyond a certain point (Davis 1997, 179). Surgery becomes an intervention, but one that is part of living in a gendered social order (Davis 1997, 179). Or, as Anne Balsamo puts it, Whether as a form of oppression or a resource of empowerment . . . cosmetic surgery is a practice whereby women consciously act to make their bodies mean something to themselves and to others (1996, 78). While this notion of what might be called conformist intervention characterizes cosmetic surgery as a realpolitik tactic for weaponizing ones appearance and assuming power in a male-dominated heterosexual matrix, cosmetic surgery also provides a potent mode for critiquing these same dominant social structures. Most notably, since 1990 French performance artist Orlan has publicly undergone a series of surgeries to reshape her face in the image of women from famous works of art, painfully highlighting the social construction of the body, the vicissitudes of fashion, and the sociocultural pressures that sculpt female esh. Orlans work is not a critique of the technology of transformation itself but of physical standardization as the premise of cosmetic surgery (Auslander 1997, 129); her performances parody the disciplinary notions that inform the cosmetic surgery project. I draw attention here to cosmetic surgery because, as a form of cultural signication (Balsamo 1996, 58) through which technological intervention naturalizes womens bodies, it is paradigmatic of the transformative procedures advocated in the pages of Japanese womens weeklies. If, as Philip Auslander reminds us, a body that
the Japan Society of Aesthetic Surgery at http://www.jsas.or.jp/history.html). Furthermore, surveys show that womens awareness of these practices was high (see Ichida et al. 1981). For details on cosmetic surgery and aesthetic salons in 1990s Japan, see Miller (2003).

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is understood to be discursively produced and ideologically encoded can also be seen as a site of resistance where hegemonic discourses and codings can be exposed, deconstructed, and, perhaps, rewritten (1997, 140), then the appearance of the Slit-Mouthed Woman within the context of womens weeklies can, like Orlans surgeries, operate parodically from within by borrowing the very tools of the discourse it critiques. This strategy is evident in a June 1979 Woman Seven article that notes that the Slit-Mouthed Woman is about thirty years old, has long hair, wears a mask, and goes after children (Josei sebun 1979, 6263). Three photographs accompany the article: two portray the Slit-Mouthed Woman looking appropriately demonic (if not slightly camp), and one shows a young woman smiling innocently. This smiling young woman, the caption explains, is in fact the model who transformed (henshin shita; 63) into the Slit-Mouthed Woman of the other photographs. The article inverts the standard before and after head shots of the cosmetic surgery or makeover advertisement: here the before is a smiling, attractive young woman, while the after is a disgured, monstrous attacker of young children. While womens weeklies implicitly convey the message that any woman has the potential to transform into a beautiful woman, the before and after shots here provide a parodic commentary that toys with this ideological message. If beauty is power within the phallocentric order, then a different kind of power can be achieved through an extreme makeover that radically dees the dominant beauty construct. Through the transformative capacity of makeup, a woman can change herself from a passive object of other peoples aesthetic judgments into an active, self-dened subject who inspires fear (or revulsion) in others. By the use of makeup to create a frightening rather than a pretty face, aesthetic consciousness is inverted: the young womans intervention is nonconformist and parodic, a seductively erotic self-uglication through which the technology and ideology of transformation is appropriated to poke fun at normative beauty standards. In a critical discussion of utopian responses to cosmetic surgery, Kathryn Pauly Morgan suggests a response of appropriation (1991, 44) that might include the use of surgery and other makeover technologies to produce what the culture constitutes as ugly so as to destabilize the beautiful and expose its technologically and culturally constitutive origin and its political consequences (1991, 46). Within the pages of womens weeklies, the Slit-Mouthed Woman does just thisshe provides a carnivalesque rouse that momentarily brings into relief hegemonic structures. By assuming a form parodic of the advertisements and articles in the surrounding pages, she makes explicit and destabilizes, if just for a page or two, the ideologies they promote.

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Signs of resistance

The appearance of the Slit-Mouthed Woman in the womens weeklies offers a dissident, if playful, commentary on the subjugation of women through a patriarchal beauty industry, but the transgressive potential of her image is also bound to a specic historical context. Here we can add one otherusually overlookedsymbolic association for the mask: it is a mark of protest. While indicating illness or pollution, it also signies that which is forbidden or must be kept out or sight, concealing (masking) the identity of a wearer engaged in behavior that deviates from sociocultural standards. The mask as sign of deviance obtains not only semiotically but also historically. For example, in postwar public demonstrations in Japan, such as the student movement of the 1960s, protests against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty (in 1960 and again in 1970), the womens liberation movement of the 1970s, and the decades-long protests against the expansion of Narita International Airport near Tokyo, participants often covered their mouths with masks or white towels.13 These images would have been unavoidable in the 1970s; Narita Airport protests, for example, made headlines in May 1977 when demonstrators clashed with riot police (resulting in some four hundred injuries and the death of one protestor) and again in March 1978 when protesters broke into a control tower (Shimokawa and Katei sogo kenkyukai 2001, 445, 451). In the cultural imaginary of 1979, then, in addition to its associations with disease and pollution, a mask would signify protest and recalcitranceidentifying the Slit-Mouthed Woman as a gure of resistance. In particular, the Slit-Mouthed Woman can be associated with the womens liberation movement that reached its heyday in Japan during the 1970s. This was a time of increasing female involvement in the work force and increasing organization for womens rights, spurred on by the declaration in 1975 of the UN International Womens Year (Molony 1995, 28182). With the very public protests of such groups as the so-called Chupiren, an organization for the legalization of the birth control pill, the womens movement received more and more media attention, and images of women, masked and holding placards, appeared in the popular press.14 Not surprisingly, women who organized against male hegemony
13 A great deal has been written on citizen protests during this period. In English, see, e.g., Havens (1987) and Sasaki-Uemura (2001). See also Apter and Sawa (1984), which includes several photographs of masked protesters. 14 Chupiren, short for Chuzetsu kinshiho ni hantai shi piru kaikin o yokyu suru josei kaiho rengo, was founded on June 14, 1972. Although not the most important organization in the liberation movement, its skillful use of media made it highly visible (Ehara 1990, 7). The lowdosage birth control pill was not legalized for general use in Japan until September 1999.

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were often defeminized, disgured, demonized, and caricatured as the Ugly Feminist (Wolf 1991, 18). In mens weeklies, for example, womens liberation activities were reported under such headlines as, Ugly Women Are Causing a Commotion or Coven of Witches (Ariga 2000). Some female activists put a positive spin on these designations, appropriating, for example, witch as just the right term for women who choose to nd their own way of living (Mizoguchi, Saeki, and Miki 1995, 325). The period in which the Slit-Mouthed Woman thrived (1979) has been noted as a time of particular transition within Japanese feminism from the media-visible, activist manifestation of the womens liberation movement to the more academic and theoretical womens studies (Ehara 1990, 89).15 The image of the Slit-Mouthed Woman in womens weekly magazines might be thought of as a remnant of the activist, transgressive spirit of the early-to-mid-1970s. One episode described in the July 5, 1979, issue of Josei jishin, for example, vividly portrays the Slit-Mouthed Woman as a gure of resistance, raising critical questions regarding gender, sexuality, and beauty. After explaining that the legend has appeared in the Tokyo region, and then introducing the cosmetic surgery motif, the article quotes a male farmer from near Narita Airport: They say she comes out by a lonely road near the airport. You see there was this man from one of the neighborhood farms, and hes walking along the road at about 9:00 at night, and theres this pretty good-looking woman standing there. Nice big eyes. So he calls out to her. After all, shes wearing a neckerchief and all, so he thinks shes a prostitute. . . . what? No! It wasnt me . . . I said I heard this from somebody! So anyway, he goes closer and this woman, from behind her mask, she says, give me candy. So the guy who had approached her thinks, ah ha, this ones a little funny in the head . . . he thinks he can do her for cheap, and he says, If I buy you some candy, will you go to a hotel with me? (Josei jishin 1979, 48) The article goes on to report that for a moment the beautiful woman said nothing, stared intently at the man, and then suddenly removed her mask! Not only did the man lose any desire to fool around with her, but he left his farm implements where they were, and escaped to his house (Josei jishin 1979, 48). Steeped as it is in a tawdry eroticism, there is a titillating undertone
15 For more on the development of feminism in Japan and feminisms use of the mass media, see Shigematsu (2005).

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to the article. At the same time, however, it can also be read as a critique of dominant male attitudes. Assuming what Rabine calls the male/subjectfemale/object structuring of the symbolic order (1994, 65), the man immediately concludes that an unknown woman walking alone must be a prostitute; he bargains for her as a commodity, hoping to purchase her for the price of some candy. Upon removal of her mask, however, the episode becomes a narrative of empowerment: the vectors of power are instantly reversed, and the woman transforms into a threatening agent of social change, confronting the objectifying male gaze and registering a powerful protest against the status quo. It is no coincidence that the narrative is set near Narita Airport, notorious as the site of violent protest; the informant concludes, It is also said that this is the curse of the airport riots (Josei jishin 1979, 48). The episode represents a coalescence of several critical aspects of the Slit-Mouthed Womans role: she speaks of a moment of protest, mobilizing a perceived vulnerability into a freshly asserted empowerment, staring back at the male gaze, and articulating a critical female subjectivity.

The performance of legend

For several decades, folklorists have been intrigued with the notion that a legend can be dangerous, that the real-life enactment of its text, a process known as ostension, can inspire real-life acts of violence (Fine 1992, 2058). In a sense, of course, the fashion industry itself is driven by the everyday ostensive (consumerist) performance of what appears in the pages of magazines, as the fantasies it produces are actually acted out by readers on their own bodies (Rabine 1994, 63). But if the appearance of the Slit-Mouthed Woman within womans weeklies is a symbolic political performance of resistancecomplete with mask and costumethen what does it mean when the same medium reports on a woman who transcends this discursive space to perform the legend in a real social context? While in no way a resolution to the eternal popular-culture paradox of complicity and resistance, such a performance demonstrates how textual discourse can bleed into cultural practice, as the rumor plays itself out within a real-world context and then loops back into the discursive mass media forum. In blaring headlines, the August 7 issue of Shukan josei asks: Has the frightening Slit-Mouthed Woman nally been arrested!? (Shukan josei 1979b, 3031). The accompanying article recounts an incident that occurred earlier in the summer, when a charming former OL of a cosmetics company (1979b, 31) was experimenting at home one evening with

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makeup. With the assistance of her friend, a designer, she was able to slit her mouth up to her ears with late night make-up. Admiring the results, her friend exclaims, Its the real thing . . . just like the real thing! What a waste to remove the make-up now! Its no fun if we dont go scare somebody! (1979b, 31). Duly taking up a knife (to add force to the performance; 31), they proceed through the drizzly night to frighten the friendly manager of a local restaurant. It turns out, however, that the restaurant is closed, and it is while waiting for her friend to run and get a coat for her that the made-up Slit-Mouthed Woman is noticed by a passing taxi driver, the police are notied, and she is taken into custody. The article highlights the transformative power of makeup: the woman worked for a cosmetics company, her friend is a designer, and they make up a womans face that is frightening rather than beautiful. The narrative also plays on the normative patriarchal structure in which the outside world is the domain of menthe restaurant manager, the taxi driver, the police ofcerswhile the domain of women is restricted to the household. But for the women locked within the connes of this domestic space, transformation is ultimately meaningless (a waste, no fun). Only in the outside world can such transformations have meaning and effect. But in this patriarchal space, women are always already other: even before he notices the made-up face and the knife, the taxi driver is suspicious: In this rain, in the middle of the night, this is not the time for a woman alone (Shukan josei 1979b, 30). Even more strikingly, the article is riddled with references to the womans appearance (slim body, oval face, large eyes [Shukan josei 1979b, 32]), the subheadline exclaiming: Usually it is the Slit-Mouthed Woman who is supposed to ask, Am I beautiful? but when it comes to the Slit-Mouthed Woman captured by the Himeji Police, witnesses, media, and even the intimidating detective all say with an eroticrather than a frightenedsense of excitement, Yes, she is beautiful! (30). There is an insistence here that makeup is only artice, that the transformation of woman into something powerful, something that challenges male hegemony, can be nothing more than a game. It is an ironic, phallocentric twist on the legend: there are two masks herethe mask that covers her mutilated face and the mutilated face itself covering a normal female face. Just as the white mask comes to signify the transgressive face it conceals, so the transgressive facecreated by makeupsignies the beautiful female face hidden beneath it. Indeed, the concealing of this true face makes it all the more tantalizing, all the more desirable: the vagina dentata has been defanged. In the end, the appropriation of the technology of beauty to perform the Slit-Mouthed Womans ugliness, with

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all its rebellious potential, fails because women are doomed to be beautiful. More than her scariness, the article tells us, it was her eroticism that packed a punch (Shukan josei 1979b, 32). There is an expression in Japanese that is invoked when somebody promises to keep a secret: Even if [my] mouth were slit, [I] would not speak/tell.16 Implicit in this construction is the premise that a slit mouth, a mouth that has been forcibly opened, inevitably must speakand the voice that ows forth will betray dangerous truths. As a female subject dened by her open mouth, the Slit-Mouthed Woman is the very incarnation of a gure who just will not, cannot, keep quiet: her gaping maw is frightening not only because of its monstrous potential to devour and destroy but also because of its monstrous potential to speak. Violently torn by the disciplining gaze of the beauty industry, the very sign of her oppression becomes a vehicle of expression: victim is transformed into assailant, mouth wide open, with no choice but to speak. At rst, then, it seems somewhat ironic that at the end of the Shukan josei article noted above the arrested woman refuses an interview. Even though her mouth is slit, the author concludes sardonically, she has nothing to say (Shu kan josei 1979b, 32). But, of course, she has already spoken loudly and clearlythrough a public performance of the legend. The problem here is one of language, of the interpretation of signs. Within the private female sphere in which the makeup is applied, the woman encodes herself with a confrontational subjectivity, armed and dangerous, ready to cause violence to the symbolic order. But within this phallocentric system, a network of power relations that still subordinate women economically, politically, sexually, physically (Rabine 1994, 66), her rebellious body is decoded only as an object of desire. The very different ways in which this body is readas if it were two different bodies (Rabine 1994)underscores not only the dangerous ambiguity of the semiotic system that encodes women but, more devastatingly, the intransigent interpretive positions of the gendered reading subjects.

Coda

In this episode, then, as in the pages of womens weeklies, the appearance of the Slit-Mouthed Woman provides a short-lived moment of carnivalesque parody, an intimation of resistance ultimately overshadowed by the predominance and persistence of the ideological forms it would critique.
16 The phrase is kuchi ga saketemo iwanai. I am grateful to Komma Toru of Kanagawa University for bringing this expression and its relevance to my attention.

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As with the carnival, transgression is temporary and ultimately perhaps only reafrms the dominance of the existing structure: with the turn of the page, the reader encounters yet another advertisement for aesthetic treatment. The report of her arrest was one of the last stories about the Slit-Mouthed Woman to appear in womans weeklies; by the end of the summer, the excitement surrounding her was over. Womens weeklies would continue to promulgate normative standards of beauty and the techniques for achieving it. Although styles and tastes would change in the ensuing decades, and certainly womens roles have shifted in many ways, when it comes to sculpting the female body, the popular ideal of a woman who poses little emotional, intellectual, or sexual threat to the patriarchal status quo (Spielvogel 2003, 7) would persist. In contemporary Japan, the Slit-Mouthed Woman may no longer be newsworthy, but her voice has never entirely disappeared. She does not, of course, carry the same cultural weight and meaning as she did in 1979, but the urry of excitement that surrounded her almost three decades ago has made her an indelible part of the Japanese cultural landscape. Not only has she become a stock character for horror lms and anime, a monster listed in compendiums of supernatural creatures, but for scholars her story also provides the quintessential example of a contemporary legend or rumor.17 And if we return to the womens weeklies, we can see that the paradigmatic question Am I beautiful? has become part of the cultural landscape. In the year 2000, for example, a four-page spread in Shukan josei displayed pictures of people who had radically altered their appearance: a woman with multiple facial piercings, a weight-lifting grandmother, a seven-year-old bodybuilder, and a male nalist in a womans beauty contest. The title of the spread reads, Am I beautiful?! (Shukan josei 2000, 69).18 The humor signied by this headline/question is ironic because the gures presented are so clearly not considered beautiful; it is a joke promoted by the beauty industry, a wink of complicity suggesting that all of us looking at these pictures knowwhile the subjects of the pictures do notthat of course they are not beautiful at all. At rst glance, then, it seems the subversive potential of the SlitIf Internet presence is any sign of contemporary cultural signicance, then the 128,000 references called up by a Yahoo! Japan search (conducted December 17, 2005) for kuchisake-onna (in Japanese) speak of a lingering resonance. 18 This spread (one of a series) focuses on foreign oddities/surprises (Shukan josei 2000, 69); the pictures are culled from non-Japanese tabloids and similar sources. The use of foreign images does not lessen the irony of the Am I beautiful? question but serves rather to reinforce its transcultural potency, lending it an added critical relevance reecting the fact that fashion/beauty trends in Japan are part of a global marketplace.
17

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Mouthed Woman and her provocative question have become complicit in the disciplining practices of the beauty industry; to be sure, as Judith Butler warns, there is always the possibility that certain parodic repetitions might become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony (1990, 139). At the risk of sounding too optimistic, however, I suggest that the joke is (also) on the beauty industry. The SlitMouthed Womans question subverts itself; it is steeped in the bitter, quiet power of irony. Perhaps this is the residual force of any resistant moment: long after it is over, it persists as a memory, and nothing is exactly the same again. Even today, a faint echo of the Slit-Mouthed Woman can still be heard: she has inltrated everyday discourse in Japan, making it difcult to ask sincerely, uncritically, unreexively, that essential question of female subjectivity within patriarchy: Am I beautiful? Department of Comparative Literature and Foreign Languages University of California, Riverside

References

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