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*This post discusses major plot details*
*Also, this post does not have pictures because the titular slit-mouthed woman is disturbing to me and I don�t want pictures of her on my blog*
First off, what is the slit-mouthed woman? The slit-mouthed woman (kuchisake-onna) is a real live Japanese urban legend which emerged in the late 1970�s. In the legend, a child walking home on a dark night is confronted by a woman wearing a surgical mask. The woman will ask the child, �Am I beautiful?� If the child answers no, the woman will take out an industrial-sized pair of scissors and stab the child to death. If the child answers yes, the woman will remove her mask to reveal that her cheeks have been sliced open like Tadanobu Asano�s character in Ichi the Killer. The woman will say, �Am I beautiful now?� If the child says no, the woman will stab the child to death, and if the child says yes, the woman will slice its cheeks open as well. Or at least, that�s how the story is told by that time-tested resource on Japanese folklore, Wikipedia.
It�s a pretty grizzly story, made all the more horrifying because the victims are children, and it�s this aspect of the story that seems to be the focus for Koji Shiraishi in his 2007 film, Carved: The Slit-Mouthed Woman.
(The original Japanese title doesn�t have �carved� in it, as far as I can tell. The title is Kuchisake-onna, or Slit-Mouthed Woman. I suspect the American distributors added the �carved� to distinguish it from 2005�s The Slit-Mouthed Woman (just plain Kuchisake in Japanese), which is a Japanese pink film�a softcore pornographic film but not exactly pornography, or rather, not exclusivelypornography, because it has an emphasis on non-sexual plot, character, and cinematographic elements that go beyond the padding of your typical porn film�that deals with the same subject matter. It�s basically a series of couplings, each of which concludes with the fornicating couple getting attacked by the slit-mouthed woman).
I have seen one other Shiraishi film, and that was 2005�s excellent �found footage� horror movie, Noroi: The Curse. His other films include Occult (which appears to be in the found footage tradition as well, and which has Kiyoshi Kurosawa appearing in a supporting role as himself, and which I would very much like to see, but, what with the philistinism of so many DVD distributors in the United States, who knows when I�ll get the opportunity to do so?) and Grotesque, a piece of �torture porn� allegedly so repellent that the British Film Board compared it unfavorably to the Saw and Hostel films and refused to certify it. (Britain has a government-backed film censorship board that �certifies� movies for distribution in the U.K. Australia has a similar system, notorious for its reactionary censoriousness. Maybe it�s a Commonwealth thing? The MPAA maybe pernicious, but at least it�s not government mandated).
Now, back to Shiraishi and Carved. Anyone taking on the myth of the slit-mouthed woman has to come up with a good reason for her slit-mouth�dness. Deferring once again to Wikipedia, our digital Lafcadio Hearn, the myth can be traced back to a Heian period story of a jealous samurai who mutilated an unfaithful wife or concubine by slicing her mouth with his sword. The main problem with this account is that the presence of samurai in the Heian period is something of an anachronism; as I understand it, the samurai did not emerge as a class until the very end of the Heian period, when their ascendancy brought about the clash of the Genji and the Heike and the eventual establishment of the Kamakura shogunate. Now, I suppose it�s not impossible that this myth refers to the nascent samurai of rural Japan in the Heian period, but it seems unlikely. Sei Shonagon mentions the samurai a grand total of once in The Pillow Book, and in that context they appear to be more like servants than warriors (both of which could be retainers, however, so we see how the sense of the word could evolve from the one to the other). So for most of the Heian period, samurai just wouldn�t be a much of a factor. Sigh, Wikipedia.
Well, there are no samurai in Shiraishi�s film. No, for his purposes, this slit-mouthed woman, who is first and foremost an abuser and mutilator of children, was herself mutilated while perpetrating violence against a child. During a flashback sequence, Shiraishi presents the unmutilated woman as a mother of three children whom she beats and brutalizes constantly. Why does she do this? It�s never really explained. She beats her children in a state of exhausted frenzy, if such a thing doesn�t sound too paradoxical. We see her as a woman with a great but invisible psychic burden weighing down on her, and she lashes out at her children to vent her inexplicable fury. Perhaps her madness isn�t specific; she�s just mad. Anyway, we see her beating her children and then, as the one surviving child narrates the event years later, she eventually murdered two of the children, leaving just her and her one child. (Oh, is there a father? He�s never mentioned. More on this later). So one day, as she�s raging at the boy, she has a brief moment of lucidity in which she looks with horror on what she�s done to her children. And she takes up a large knife and hands it to the child and says, hey, I killed your siblings, and I know I�ll kill you too, so, for the love of God, kill me now, aim for the neck, cut my head off, or I�ll kill you. Well, you don�t ask a child to do this for you, so of course he�s initially reluctant to do it. But then madness takes her again, and she grabs a large pair of scissors (the scissors) and tries to stab the boy, and he flails at her with the knife and swipes it across her face, and that�s how she becomes the slit-mouthed woman. He then proceeds to stab her to death but, wouldn�t you know it, she�s now a monstrous demon-thing, capable of possessing other mothers with issues, and the only way to truly finish her off is to slice off her head, as per her original recommendation.
Most of the movie takes place in the present day, when an earthquake frees the slit-mouthed woman from her subterranean lair and she begins to kidnap children. We meet a lot of people in this movie; we meet the children and we meet their mothers. There are few fathers in this movie. We first meet one of the children, Mika, as she�s being berated and beaten by her mother, and what strikes us about this scene (and perhaps what makes it even more disturbing than it already is, because maybe I�m going out on a limb here, but child abuse is upsetting) is how completely inexplicable the abuse is. This woman appears to be hitting her child for no reason� just like the original slit-mouth woman! (And if that point doesn�t seem clear enough to you, don�t worry, Shiraishi has a whole movie to hammer it home). At least in this case, we find out what happened to the father (car accident) (I was tempted to write �picnic, lightning,� but I restrained myself) and the mother explains that her relationship with her daughter was �changed� since then, but we don�t get any more details.
We also meet a teacher�who�s kind of the hero and who teams up with the slit-mouthed woman�s surviving son, who just happens to a teacher too, to try to rescue the kidnapped children�who tries to intervene in Mika�s relationship with her abusive mother. Now, granted, that intervention lasts for about a minute before the slit-mouthed woman shows up and kidnaps Mika while the teacher�Yamashita-sensei�looks on in horror, but it conveys to us that Yamashita is strongly sensitive to the issue of child abuse. We soon find out that this is because she used to beat her own small daughter before she and her husband separated and the daughter went to live with him. Why did she beat her daughter? We have a flashback sequence in which Yamashita confronts the girl and says, �So, you love Daddy more than me?� And the girl responds, �I love Daddy. I hate you because you hit me.� Yamashita responds by slapping the girl across the face, thusly proving her point exactly. And that�s all the explanation we get for why Yamashita�who throughout the rest of the movie seems like a very kind and caring individual�used to beat her daughter.
And I get nervous about this because if the fundamental horror of the movie isn�t the woman with the freaky face (although she�s plenty unsettling to look at) but rather the horror of child abuse, it would seem that Shiraishi is placing the blame for said abuse solely on women, and he�s not really providing any explanation for why they do it. They just do it as an end in itself. Now, nothing justifies child abuse, mind you, but mental illness or something�anything, really�could at least place it in context. The only thing the three abusive women in this movie have in common is that they couldn�t hang on to their children�s fathers. It would seem that Shiraishi is implying that that�s the cause for the women�s abusiveness, and that�s a pretty appalling conclusion to reach.
Or maybe it isn�t. Maybe we shouldn�t look at it this way. Maybe these women are just three individual women, acting within the context of this particular story, and as such we shouldn�t see them as being representative of all women, and we shouldn�t assume that Shiraishi is making grand pronouncements about his opinion on all women. In fact, I�m almost positive we shouldn�t see it that way. That is the way of the English Department, of the Critical Theorists, of the people who can never let a character just be an individual; a character who is a woman is taken to represent all women, a character who is black is taken to represent all black people. It�s downright dehumanizing. Let individuals be individuals unless you have some compelling reason to see them otherwise.
Yes, these are the lessons we can take away from Carved: The Slit-Mouthed Woman: child abuse is horrifying and the American English department is in desperate need of reform.
