Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Futakuchi-onna

I have been sketching ideas for a Futakuchi-onna. It is for an art contest that the Anime Boston website is holding for Halloween. The requirement is to make an art piece of a "yōkai" which is a phantom, ghost, or strange apparition that appears often in Japanese folklore. There are many different types of yōkai like the Hebi, Okami, Baru-baru, and Tofu-Kozo. The grand prize gets to have a free Artists' Alley Table at the convention. I am very eager to win this competition!

 
A Futakuchi-onna is a type of yōkai that is characterized as a woman with a large mouth on the back of her head, with thick lips and a long tongue. There are different stories as to the origin of this creature, but mostly they involve women who eat very little and grow the extra mouth on the back of their heads due to starvation. Usually a Futakuchi-onna hides the extra mouth by rolling up the hair, but when the Futakuchi-onna is alone, it lets the hair loose and it feeds. The hair on the head can move around like tentacles, and feed the extra mouth.


The idea I had for my piece was to have the Futakuchi-onna as a scary, menacing monster. It would not seem unlikely that if a Futakuchi-onna ever existed that people would try to have it killed, like burning witches at the stake, so in this drawing a ninja attempts to kill the Futakuchi-onna. Unfortunately the ninja fails miserably and is now the Futakuchi-onna's next meal. My version of the Futakuchi-onna tends to catch weapons aimed for her and can morph parts of the hair-tentacles into blades. How devastatingly horrifying would it be if a woman were to ever become a Futakuchi-onna that feeds on human flesh? Maybe I should have it in my web comic...

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