Before I entered the corrugated iron construction in the sinister bric-a-brac section of an old shopping mall in Odaiba, I didn’t know about the legend of Kuchisake Onna (Slit-Mouth Woman). The legend is of a woman a long time ago, who was the wife or lover of a Samurai. She was very beautiful, but also very vain. Her Samurai husband suspected her of cheating, so slit the corners of her mouth from ear to ear, screaming “Who will think you are beautiful now?!”

Urban legend has it that a woman roams around at night, especially on foggy evenings (Odaiba was fogged-out today), with her face covered by a surgical mask, her weapon of choice: a pair of blunt scissors. If she comes across somebody, she will ask them “Am I beautiful?”, before stabbing them to death.

So the man handed me a torch with a red gel over the lens and an amber coloured children’s lollipop, and I opened the sliding door into a pitch black corridor. Mutilated bodies and human hair hung from ropes and children’s toys could be found slumped in the corners of the passageways through which I was cautiously moving. I had already been warned “If you see the woman with the scissors – run”, and yet the sign on the outside had clearly said “Don’t run”! I had also been told to place the candy on a table where a pair of scissors could be found.

So I was trying to stay smug as I walked further into the maze of the building, having previously seen schoolgirls coming out of the exit of the structure screaming in terror, some crawling, some crying. I turned a corner and pointed my torch. There were sheets of black rubber hanging from the ceiling, partially blocking the way ahead. I could see there were more further down, staggered so that the gap between the wall and the sheet was on a different side of the corridor each time, creating large blind spots my feeble torchlight couldn’t penetrate. I prepared myself for something and nonchalantly swept aside the first sheet so I could pass, but recoiled involuntarily. I can’t properly remember what I saw but I think it was a large doll’s head, detached from the body, dirtied and with a missing eye, at my eye level. I was back a little from the sheet which was rippling from my initial attempt to pass, and had not controlled the aim of my torch, so bought it back down to point towards the corridor, and the sheet.

I was laughing to myself. I was trying my hardest not to get shaken at any point, reminding myself that it was like a fairground attraction. So I moved the black sheet again, but there was nothing this time, so I knew that there was at least one person who was inside with me, waiting for me up ahead. I pressed on through the ‘house’, sometimes entering small rooms, often getting hit in the face by objects that had been strung up but got missed by the torchlight as they were too high. Many more tricks were carried out, and noises were activated, whereby turning in the direction of the source would result in pointing your torch into the bloodstained faces of past ‘victims’, scissors protruding from eye sockets. I was looking for a table. A surface where there was a pair of scissors maybe. So I’d slowed down even more when the corridor opened out again. I’d seen what I thought to be a table, the only one so far that looked like it might be the right place to put the lollipop. I headed over and was almost at the table when I heard a movement to my right. I already knew what to expect, but still managed to forget to properly inspect the table before I turned my torch in the direction of the noise. I didn’t hit anything with the beam of my torch and was about to pan when a girl, tall by Japanese standards, wearing a surgical mask and brandishing a long pair of scissors lurched into the red light of the torch. I knew I was supposed to run, so I did! I slammed the lolly down on the table and pegged it!

I went around some piled up wood and course canvas material and tried to look where I was going assisted by the torch. For the first time there was another light source apart from mine in this room, on a table. Next to the naked bulb there was a pair of scissors plunged into the felting on top of the table with congealed blood heaped around the base. I stopped and thought about my lollipop, misplaced further back. I didn’t know what you got if you put it in the right place, and was feeling slightly embarrassed that I’d put it down on the wrong table, so I turned back to see if there was a way for me to go back without bumping into Kuchisake Onna again. I hadn’t even taken more than two steps when I found myself running towards a light at the end of a corridor pursued by two guys in leather masks and Kuchisake Onna dragging one foot behind her and pointing forward with the shears. One final eardrum-bursting hiss of air hit me in the face as I came out of the doorway and back into a shopping centre in Odaiba. I stopped as soon as I got outside and tried to appear more composed. And then thought that if I hadn’t watched Japanese horror films like ‘The Grudge’ and ‘ The Ring’ before, I might have got the lolly correctly placed and won a prize.

As I was leaving a guy handed me a flyer for the new movie coming out soon: Kuchisake Onna 2. Cool marketting ploy, I thought.