Christopher, a
Victorian-era American journalist, is traveling through
Japan looking for Komomo, a lost girlfriend he had promised to rescue from prostitution and bring to the
United States. Landing on an island populated solely by prostitutes and their masters, he is solicited by a
syphilitic tout. Christopher has to spend the night, requesting the company of a girl. Disfigured and disturbed, the girl claims a closer connection with the dead than the living. She tells him that Komomo was here, but hanged herself after her lover never came for her. Distraught, Christopher seeks solace in
sake. Falling asleep, he requests a
bedtime story. The girl recounts her past — her mother, a midwife, was forced to sell her to a brothel after her father died. Komomo was the most popular girl there, making the others jealous. When the Madam's jade ring was stolen, Komomo was tortured to confess. After suffering hideously — underarms burned, needles driven under fingernails and into gums — she hanged herself in torment, tired of waiting for her lover. Christopher refuses to believe the story, and pleads for the whole truth. The girl starts again; in the second telling, her family is no longer happy nor loving; her father was an alcoholic, her mother an abortionist. She was taken in by a Buddhist priest, who molested her and inspired an obsession with hell. She beat her father to death for raping her. She gives a new version of Komomo's fate. The disfigured girl stole the jade ring and planted Komomo's hairpin to frame her — and after Komomo was
tortured, killed her. She explains that she intended to save Komomo from
hell: as Komomo would be doomed for having such an evil friend, only through betrayal could she sever the friendship and ensure Komomo a beautiful afterlife. Christopher is desperately convinced something has been left out. The woman then reveals a horrifying secret: a tiny second head in the center of a hand hidden beneath her hair — her "Little Sis", a
parasitic twin, the woman's identity now partly revealed as that of a
Futakuchi-onna, a type of
supernatural being. Her mother and father had been brother and sister; "Little Sis" was the fruit of their
incest. It was "Little Sis" who commanded her to kill her father, and steal the ring. As the hand begins to talk like Komomo, Christopher is overcome by madness and threatens to shoot her. She informs him that wherever he goes, he will be in hell — a flashback implies that he murdered his own sister as a child. He shoots the girl in the heart and head. Before dying, the girl's body turns into Komomo. The epilogue finds Christopher in a Japanese prison serving time for the murder of the girl. When he is given a water ration, he hallucinates that the bucket contains an aborted fetus, and cradles the bucket while singing a lullaby, kept company by the ghosts of Komomo and his dead sister. ==Production==