She will appear on streets at dusk, usually near schools, usually when the crowd has thinned enough that you are almost but not quite alone. She is tall. She is well dressed. She wears a surgical mask over the lower half of her face, which was not unusual in Japan even before masks became common worldwide. She has long dark hair and large eyes.
She will approach you and ask, in a voice that is perfectly pleasant: "Am I beautiful?"
If you say no, she will produce the scissors she carries beneath her coat. She is fast. You will not be able to run in time.
If you say yes, she will pull down the mask, revealing her mouth — slit from ear to ear, a wound so wide the skin has never healed, the grin permanent and biological and wrong. She will ask again: "Am I beautiful now?"
If you say no at this point, she will kill you where you stand.
If you say yes at this point, she will slit your mouth to match hers.
There is no scenario that ends well. There is no correct answer. She is not really asking about beauty. She is asking about something older than beauty — something that has no word in modern Japanese or in any other language. She is asking if you will witness her. If you will see what was done to her and call it something other than monstrous.
She was human once. The oldest versions of the legend say she was a woman whose husband disfigured her in a fit of jealousy. The newer versions say she was a patient of a cosmetic surgeon who went wrong. Both versions agree that she died before she was found. Both versions agree that dying did not stop her.
In 1979, the legend became a full-scale panic in Japan. Schools were letting children out in groups. Police were patrolling on foot after dark. Reports of the woman flooded in from Nagasaki to Hokkaido — always the same description, always the same question. The panic lasted approximately three months and then subsided, as panics do.
But the reports never fully stopped.
Folklore researchers have catalogued over forty regional variations. In some, she is slow. In others, she runs. In a few, she can be distracted by throwing hard candies on the ground — she will stop to count them. This detail strikes many as absurd, which may be why it has persisted. Absurdity is its own kind of armor.
The safest response, according to some accounts, is to tell her she is average. Not beautiful, not ugly. Average. The question confuses her. She will stand in the street with her scissors at her side, thinking. It buys you enough time to run.
I have heard this advice repeated. I have wondered, in idle moments, what she thinks about when she stands there — whether she is running through all the faces she has asked the question and tallying the answers, or whether she is remembering what her face felt like before, when it was only a face and not a question.
I have never been brave enough to find out for certain. I take a different street.