A Fountain of Blood in the Shape of a Girl: The Kaleidoscopic Themes of Junji Ito’s Tomie
The Ito-verse melded with Barbie World this summer, and the pink blockbuster’s commentary on gender has similarities to Tomie’s
July 2023 was a big month for Ito-heads. (And yes, I did just make up that term.)
Adult Swim provided a (small but appreciated) update on their long-awaited Uzumaki mini-series, which had begun to feel doomed. Then, at the San Diego Comic-Con, Junji Ito was compelled (like so many of us) to pose inside one of those life-sized doll boxes promoting the Barbie movie.
The photo went viral, leading to some fan art blending Barbie’s aesthetic with Ito’s. (This is the summer of merging opposites!)
Once I spotted this particular image of Barbie as Tomie, I had what I needed to justify writing and submitting thousands of words about the character. She kickstarted Ito’s illustrious career as a mangaka in 1987, and with the Barbie connection, she’s relevant again. My excuse to talk about her at length is officially acceptable — no matter how thin it is!
Tomie is probably not Ito’s best work (if you were to do a poll, that badge of honour would likely go to Uzumaki or the short The Enigma of Amigara Fault), but it is my favourite. You could say what happens in it is repetitive, but you could also call that repetition emblematic. You could argue the ending is inconclusive, that there is no end to the girl who goes by the name of Tomie, but this too might be emblematic There’s no main cast sticks around for the duration; a few additional characters get seen a handful of times, but many show up only once.
Tomie is the only constant, and perhaps that’s meaningful.
Pinning down the point of Tomie and answering questions such as “Who is this for?”, “What’s this really about?” and “How am I supposed to feel about Tomie?” is like trying to catch fish with your bare hands. The themes are multitudinous, conflicting, and possibly imaginary.
The following is a breakdown of the different angles from which one may look at Tomie. There are three major ones, in my opinion, and the contents of the manga bolster each perspective.
Interpretation # 1: The Plight of Women
In this initial interpretation, what befalls Tomie in the inaugural chapter is an inciting incident. It makes Tomie an allegory about sexism. The primary themes become ones of gender-based violence, the entitlement men can have to women’s bodies, and men’s anger toward the women they can’t have or who don’t want them.
It makes Tomie a saga about justified female rage.
Chapter one opens with Tomie’s funeral. Her best friend Reiko tells us she was brutally murdered, shortly after going on a field trip with her high school class. One day, inexplicably, she returns to school. Her peers and teacher, Mr. Takagi, shit bricks. Not only for the reasons you’d imagine, though.
Seemingly oblivious, Tomie tries to carry on with her interpersonal relationships including the one she had with Takagi (He was having an “affair” with her.) Everyone seems beset by guilt and grows jittery. After Mr. Takagi fails to shake out the truth of the doppelgänger’s identity and goes insane, Reiko and Tomie’s boyfriend Yamamoto confess something to one another: They can’t take it anymore. They must turn themselves in to the police.
In a flashback, we realize Tomie’s class and teacher were responsible for her death.
On the field trip, she went to sit next to Mr.Takagi at the edge of a cliff; he was on a smoke break. The other students were roughhousing below. Tomie wanted her teacher to leave his wife and marry her. She told him she may be just a teensy bit pregnant, and she may have been making this last part up to scare him into commitment. (Shocker: She’s got the maturity of a high schooler!)
She not-so-subtly threatened to let the statutory rape cat out of the bag if he won’t claim her soon, and this was exactly when Yamamoto discovered them together. He trailed Tomie up the cliff because he had suspicions and yanked her to her feet when they got confirmed.
The couple’s shouting match drew the attention of the rest of the class, who looked up to take in the drama. Yamamoto slapped Tomie, and she called him a monster (a word that has significance throughout the manga.) She turned her back on him in disgust, but they were very near the cliff’s edge. She misstepped, wobbled, and fell. It was a mighty fall, and as her peers milled around her crumpled body, they determined that she absolutely must’ve been dead.
Yamamoto wailed with instant regret, but Takagi interrupted the hysteria. He asked the boy if he planned on giving himself up to the authorities, which immediately shut Yamamoto up. Other kids suddenly chimed in: It’s not your fault, Yamamoto! You didn’t push her. She tripped! You shouldn’t have to throw your life away because of this! Not for a girl like her, anyway. We’ll all help you!
A freaked-out Yamamoto was convinced. Takagi jumped into action, instructing all the girls to keep a lookout. Reiko complied meekly. Boys got told to remove their clothes and grab the toolboxes they brought for the geology lesson they were to have on this journey out in nature. They began to carve into Tomie’s dead body to dismember her.
Oh, but wait!
Tomie was still alive!
Being cut into roused her. She was hurt, and they were hurting her more.
The boys pulled back, shocked. What now?
Hurry! Mr. Takagi replied, and he ferociously stabbed Tomie. Someone else instinctively covered her mouth as her abdomen got slit open. Her hands and feet were sawn off frantically, her head removed. A gang of young men in their underwear turned something whole into bloody pieces before going to rinse off in the river.
In the aftermath, Tomie’s classmates took pieces of her body to get rid of. Reiko was given Tomie’s heart, wrapped up like something from the butcher’s. She tearfully threw it over a bridge and into a ravine.
This is essentially I Know What You Did Last Summer on steroids.
When, in the present, members of the class get wind of Reiko and Yamamoto wanting to break rank, they give chase. The duo runs until Reiko is too exhausted and falls to her knees, dragging Tamamoto down. Their pursuers catch up and corner them in an alley. You’re sure they’re goners, but Tomie steps into the frame.
She asks what everybody’s doing. Everybody stops, stares, and bolts in terror. Everybody except Tomie’s boyfriend and best friend, that is.
Yamamoto crouches at her feet and begs for forgiveness. Tomie remarks that he and Reiko seem like they’ve gotten awfully close, and the boy is caught off guard. He insists she’s gotten the wrong impression. As he’s stumbling over his words, Reiko sucks it up, books it and never looks back.
The chapter concludes with Reiko informing us that Yamamoto never left the spot she fled from. When found, his mind was gone. She and her family have moved to another area, by the ocean, and many of her old classmates have allegedly died by suicide. She considers the field trip a mass delusion. Tomie must’ve been alive all along; she can’t see how she and her peers could’ve done the things she remembers them doing, and she knows the Tomie she last saw was no ghost.
During a stroll on the beach, Reiko finds a wrapper that looks every bit like the one containing Tomie’s heart. But it’s empty. With dread in her belly, she peeks into a nearby sea cave and inside — inside, God, that’s Tomie, isn’t it?? Or something
resembling Tomie, at least. Something becoming Tomie, with fleshy roots and stumps for arms. It’s draped in seaweed, and it has her face.
And thus, Tomie’s loop is established:
A) People meet an individual Tomie, a stunning girl
B) Men are overwhelmed by her mere presence in a way that seems preternatural, and they morph into her willing slaves
C) …But the infatuation inevitably spirals out of control, and they snap — killing and often mutilating her
D) The mutilated Tomie regenerates, regardless of the number of pieces she’s diced into and regardless of how small these pieces are. In fact —
E) …The more her remains multiply, the more new “hers” will exist: perfect clones of the dead girl spring up from tiny morsels of meat, even from stains made by her blood.
Presumably, all the parts of Tomie’s body dumped in various places by her classmates had the same fate as her heart, and the attempted eradication of one girl hatches a swarm. All subsequent chapters after the first are inhabited by copies of her (and copies of those copies, each of whom believes they are the One True Tomie. )
How or why these respawns happen remains as much of a mystery to us, the readers, as it does to the Tomies. They’ll shrug or roll their eyes when asked about their origins or how they can look precisely like some girl recently found dead. Duplication is an involuntary act, and it doesn’t exclusively happen after they’ve been murdered and chopped up. In extreme emotional distress, a Tomie may have another self start swelling from her cranium like a tumour. It’ll try to claw its way out of her skin — a very literal attempt to run from her problems.
Though all Tomies are identical twins, they certainly are a dysfunctional family. One can discern when another has materialized, and she’ll go the extra mile to sabotage her. Tomies who sprout from the pieces of an old, dead one are “born” as teenagers and could stay that way forever. If a regular baby gets injected with a sample of Tomie DNA, it grows into a Tomie child who can go through a natural lifespan and get old. Anyone else exposed to her DNA will develop all her traits and have their personality swallowed up by hers.
Since the clones occasionally seem like a hivemind, sharing a giant database of memories and experiences that extends back to the OG Tomie, Interpretation # 1 deems Tomie’s loop to symbolize the reverberation of trauma. Through such a lens, we can see how every dalliance Tomie has is a (probably unconscious) attempt to correct the “mistakes” made with Mr. Takagi. Tomie wants to understand what she did to deserve her rejection, public humiliation and vivisection. The all-consuming ambition of the clones is to be the sole focus of the men they’re with as if trying to prove something — and if a man’s every need cannot be fulfilled by Tomie and Tomie alone, then it’s not love.
Tomie’s definition of love is juvenile due to her psychological wounds persisting (unlike her physical ones.) Her replicas are “stuck” with an adolescent grasp of things. Like any of us, a Tomie can only ever apply what she knows — and what she “knows,” as a victimized teenager with PTSD, is pretty unhealthy. Her expectations are unrealistic, so she is always disappointed. This leads to mounting frustration, which worsens her defensiveness and impatience. A defensive and impatient person has a very short fuse.
As a strategy to fortify her fragile ego and avoid ever being as powerless as she was on the day of the field trip, post-chapter one Tomie adopts a crueller demeanour. It’s as if the clones voted to flip a switch. They may fight like cats and dogs amongst each other, doing their little Highlander LARP, but on this matter, they’re in unanimous agreement: It’s far better to come across as a cold bitch than as some dewy-eyed thing that gets stomped on and taken advantage of.
OG Tomie wasn’t much of a showboat nor was she noticeably mean-spirited. She was beautiful but didn’t seem to rub it in people’s faces. Her worst crime was that she was cheating on her boyfriend, I guess? When she “rises from the dead” she’s mainly just confused as to why everyone is trying to avoid her. This confusion could be pretend, and she could be playing head games with her classmates as part of her vengeance plot, but even the act — if it is an act — is pretty muted.
The crossover from this to the Tomie of chapter 2, who waltzes into a random girl’s hospital room to casually tell her to stop arranging visits with her male friend Tadashi (adding, with a hair flip, that the sick girl looks “mousy” and that Tadashi will be relieved when she dies), is so abrupt and radical that it can only be calculated.
Chapter two Tomie calling herself “Reiko,” the name of the ex-bestie, also has to be calculated.
The new ‘tude is a protective measure to distract from the insecurity at the core. The distraction is necessary for any Tomie victory, seeing as her insecurity is her prime weakness — the exposure of which terrifies her. It gets hidden under layers of cartoonish arrogance and a viciousness deriving from a profound bitterness.
Though rare, there are intervals when a secondary character bypasses the veneer and clocks the artifice. They don’t always realize this is what they’re doing. They often aren’t even clued into the fact that Tomie is special. It’s merely due to some spark within them that Tomie’s presence can’t extinguish. They thwart her inadvertently, flagging her embellishments or acknowledging her as the validation-starved kid she fundamentally is. This is illustrated prominently in chapter four when a Tomie clone tries to win over a leery classmate, Tsukiko. This girl, however, is having none of it. She tells Tomie I can hear the fork in your tongue. She calls Tomie a monster in a skirt, triggering a splitting episode.
When Tomie’s male lackeys pile in to help upon hearing her scream, she yells Don’t look! She’s mortified by the other her budding off from her skull, by how disgusting she is.
Here we have Tomie’s Achilles heel, her deepest secret: Ultimately, she hates herself.
Chapter nine’s Mr. Mori is a young, up-and-coming artist who becomes a fanatic about capturing Tomie perfectly with his paints. After much fretting, he reveals Tomie’s “perfect likeness” to her, and it’s a grotesque portrait with a second face stretching out of her own. She believes Mr. Mori must be mocking her. Are you calling me a monster? (There’s that word again.) Mr. Mori beseeches that she looks more closely, but she knocks the canvas from his hands.
Chapter nineteen’s Ryo is a famous male model who confesses his love to Tomie. He’s promptly laughed at and told he could never be her equal. He explodes, declaring that if she thinks she’s the most beautiful woman in the world, she’s nuts: I hang out with all kinds of women, most of them models, and compared to them you don’t even rank. If we’re talking scales, you aren’t even fit to weigh in. And more than that, I bet you know it yourself. That’s why you’re so scared to be a model. You know there isn’t a photogenic cell in your body.
Such a scorching tirade gets Tomie to urge another man to jump Ryo on the street one night and slash his face with a pocket knife. This way, he’ll have a large scar and his modelling jobs will evaporate.
Tomie falls apart, figuratively, when told a truth about herself that poses a genuine threat to her self-delusion. What pisses her off so badly about Ryo’s accusations or Tsukiko’s assessment is their accuracy. The portrait of her is accurate. A key detail of the manga is that Tomie can’t allow herself to be photographed, painted, drawn, etc. Her “true colours” the pain, the fury, the sorrow — seep through. She discovers she always has some obvious deformity in a photo or any artistic depiction.
Interestingly, her next biggest weakness might be real love. It’s implied in Gathering, chapter seventeen, where we meet Umehara. He’s a unicorn of a man who doesn’t succumb to Tomie’s charms in any way, shape or form and never feels even a little hankering to kill her. He actually attempts to rescue her from a mob of lusty men who do want to harm her. By the end of his chapter, he hasn’t been killed, is not a murderer and is still mostly( if not entirely sane) — lucky him! What steadies him is his lasting devotion to his deceased wife, Naoko. In a room packed with dozens of slobbering men, it’s Umehara’s absolute immunity that intrigues Tomie. Because she can’t have him, she must have him.
He’s a normal guy suddenly thrust into a madhouse, and his WTF reaction to the whole thing is pretty priceless. His amusing retort, when Tomie kneels before him and asks if he loves her, is: Love you? We just met. How on earth should I know that?
Aren’t you still a teenager? Where are your parents?? When Tomie changes tack later on and appeals to his sense of chivalry, asserting that the horny men he saw earlier had kidnapped and imprisoned her, he fires back with If you’re the victim, why is it you act like their queen? Why are you trying so hard to seduce me?
There are other husbands and widowers in Tomie who become spellbound despite their statuses, so why is Umehara exceptional? Did these other men not love their wives enough, or had they faked it? Does Gathering mean that Tomie is the litmus test for real love, or does everyone in a Tomie’s orbit have the competence to exert willpower and usually they just…don’t?
“She made me do it” is a common refrain throughout the manga. It was some supernatural sway!, say the men of Tomie, to each other and themselves. As they survey the ghastly mess they’ve made of a girl, they wonder Why did I do that? It was her fault, whatever the reason — that much seems clear. Tomie was simply too beautiful; she shouldn’t have flaunted what she had if she didn’t want men to fixate on her! She should’ve been nicer when a guy approached her if she didn’t want him to flip out!
She shouldn’t have made fun of him when he was vulnerable with her!! (It brings to mind the Margaret Atwood quote.)
She had too many demands! She was so full of herself! She gave him no choice!
Umehara’s conduct suggests that a good deal of Tomie’s murderers probably did have a choice, but the excuses were more comfortable: It was her, not me. I was provoked. She kinda killed herself, when you think about it.
It brings to mind victim blaming. How many of Tomie’s deaths were due to her irresistible influence, and how many were merely attributed to that influence by men who wanted to shirk accountability?
In a feminist interpretation, Tomie is a testament to the mixture of desire and hatred that women can ignite in men. Women can ignite this just by existing. Not even a single conversation between them and these men is required — and that’s what’s so alarming. A woman’s pleasantness or aloofness doesn’t have to be a factor in the equation; being pleasant isn’t the shield you think it is. Nice women get targeted, bitchy women get targeted: It’s the womanness that is targeted.
Possessing womanness tends to make life more hazardous and more uniquely complicated. Like a lot of young women, Tomie is as resented as she is coveted. Her beauty makes her important to men, but if that beauty becomes inaccessible or won’t behave as it ought to, she turns into an enemy. And aggression is typically what people’s enemies get treated to.
The final note I’ll be making on this initial interpretation is conceivably the most fascinating, as it’s an element that hardly ever takes precedence in 99% of Tomie-related discussions. I’m continuing the trend, I suppose, by saving it for last in this section of the analysis, but here it is: What impact does Tomie have on other women? They also pine for her but think “I want to BE her!” rather than “I WANT her!” This, too, can be intuited as an examination of the ramifications of sexism. The temptation isn’t erotic like it is for men,but it’s a temptation nonetheless (Logically, yes, there should be some women falling into mad, distinctly romantic love with Tomie because queer women aren’t mythical. Juni Ito, however, decided to act like they were. For the sake of this retrospect on the manga, I will as well.)
In chapter eleven, Hair, we witness how very young girls, tweens younger than Tomie, are already damaged by an environment that holds women to high, often unattainable beauty standards. The women who can’t (or who refuse to) meet the standards set for them by society are ostracized by it.
Chapter twelve, Adopted Daughter, conveys how the set standards penalize old women, those far older than Tomie. The female contract stipulates that you must never look old and lose your sexual viability. Your youth is your only currency. Should you run out of it, you’ll be kicked out of the game. You must also absolutely have children if you want to “count” as a woman. A childless old woman is a most pathetic specimen!
In each of these tales, Tomie embodies the sexist pressures women are subjected to during all phases of their lives. In Hair, to friends Chie and Miki, Tomie is the idealized version of themselves as a grown woman. She’s the older sister they wish would hang out with and mentor them. Of course, the girls view themselves as awkward and plain and believe their looks define them. Of course, they compare themselves to every other girl — which girl doesn’t?
When a stand of the Tomie hair that Chie finds stashed in her dad’s work desk fastens itself to Miki’s scalp and transforms all of Miki’s hair into shiny, swishing Tomie hair, Chie is envious. She also tries to plant individual Tomie hairs in her head, but in the end, neither of them is very fortunate: Miki dies as Tomie hair erupts from every pore and orifice she has, choking her as it spews forth from her mouth like a projectile vomit. Chie is rushed to the ER with a long hair follicle burrowing into her brain tissue, and it doesn’t look promising.
As the adage goes, “Beauty is pain.”
That Chie’s father cheated on her mother with a Tomie and kept a box of her hair clippings in his private study seems weighty. (He took the hair after killing her, but Miki only learns this toward the end of the chapter. Chie never learns at all.) When Chie shows the hair to Miki for the first time, they can tell it doesn’t belong to Chie’s mom. While it might have come from Chie’s grandmother or one of her dad’s former flames before marriage, a currently active mistress sounds much more probable. Through this speculation, the young girls become tuned in to a few harsh realities about life as a woman:
A) Husbands cheat
B) They’ll cheat, and you’ll never know a thing
C) Your husband’s mistress is very likely better-looking than you and,
D) Pretty girls always win
The old woman in Adopted Daughter, Mrs. Hinadas, takes in an orphaned teenager discovered passed out on her and her husband’s property. Mrs. Hinadas was infertile and couldn’t have kids, but yearned for a daughter. She and Mr. Hinadas, being wealthy, adopted numerous times over the years, but each girl tragically died. This has led to gossip about the Hinadas offing all these adoptees themselves. Seeing how the local orphanage has banned any further children from being rehomed with them, the Hinadas see the unconscious girl on their lawn as a miracle. Unsurprisingly, this girl is Tomie.
The exact nature of the rumours about the elderly couple is pertinent. It’s said they hold their daughters captive, latch onto them like leeches and suck out their youthful essence. Also pertinent: Tomie instigated these rumours before “passing out” on the couples’ lawn, as a ploy to eventually inherit their house and all the fancy stuff in it should they ever get investigated by the police (This is for sure one of the more villainous arcs for Tomie. The two worst ones get covered in the breakdown of the second major interpretation.)
The real culprit behind all the deaths is Satoko, the Hinadas’ seasoned maid. It turns out Satoko also wants to inherit everything the couple owns once they’re gone and has been poisoning the meals of the adoptees. The Hinadas really are innocent in all this, being double-crossed on all sides.
Tomie puts on an Oscar-worthy performance for her “father,” trying to coax him into believing that his wife of four decades has been slurping on her arms to extract all the Beautiful Youth juice. He doesn’t buy it right away, but the next time Mrs. Hinadas is fixing Tomie’s hair, she falls into a trance-like state and does attack the girl’s arms with her mouth. Does Tomie prod the woman into doing this, with her influence, to get Mr. Hinadas on her side? Yes, ostensibly, but it’s never been previously inferred that she can pick the distinct method in which she’s attacked. Something about her makes it happen, but she can’t dictate how. However, it’s too coincidental that Mrs. Hinadas would attack her exactly as her rumours said she would.
Anywho, Mr. Hinadas cuts the attack short. His wife is rattled. She doesn’t know what came over her. She weeps in bed as Satoko tries to get her to rally. The maid goes to bring her a drink, and when she gets back she finds the old woman has hanged herself.
Satako spends the following months putting her poison into Tomie’s food, but all Tomie does is complain about the taste. The scheming maid opts to expedite things and enters the scheming girl’s room to strangle her with a rope. It’s too late, though — Mr. Hinadas is already on his 700th stab of Tomie’s corpse. He halts upon seeing the maid and supplies her with the usual spiel: I was out of my mind! I looked at her one day and felt overwhelmingly homicidal!
Satoko stumbles into the hall, and the old man follows while ominously stating that he can’t let her go to the cops. The concluding image is of a gore-drenched Tomie serenely propping herself up on an elbow as the screams of the maid echo in the distance.
In this chapter, Mrs. Hinadas has been in a long-lasting, stable marriage. She’s altruistic and maternalistic. If one is to judge her feminine virtues, you’d think she’d be above reproach. Women get taught that if they do everything “right”— aren’t sluts, aren’t divorced, are good wives who have a nurturing heart and don’t quarrel — they’ll be spared the rod so many others are struck with for stepping out of line. Mrs. Hinadas followed “the rules” but still fell out of favour with the world and felt like she had to atone because she dared to get old. Virtues don’t hold as much water when you can’t be considered attractive anymore (or if — Heaven forbid — you were never considered attractive.) Many of the classical feminine traits get lauded only when a woman is young or if she’s beautiful. A woman who manages to get (and look) old is stripped of her womanhood, and all old people get stripped of their personhood.
The first time we see Mrs. Hinadas (excluding the opening imaginary scene), she’s crying over another dead child. Whenever I pass my reflection, I feel sad, she says. If only I had a daughter by my side. I could dress her up, do her hair, make her pretty as I once was. She mourns for herself as well as her latest girl because the girl was not only a child she could love but a reminder that she wasn’t always the crone she is now. She revisits what she misses so much via a daughter, giving them clothing and hairstyles she can’t pull off. Their beauty soothes her. If life won’t let her be beautiful anymore, can it at least let her dote over someone who is?
Is there a kind of vanity to her way of thinking? Sure, but women are indoctrinated from such an early stage (as seen in Hair) to be preoccupied with their looks and to put physical beauty on a pedestal. Natural aging processes get treated as an affliction. Mrs. Hinadas’ rapture for a daughter to raise is still coming from a sincere place, and I don’t think it’s all about her pride. Being denied motherhood, she seems to feel flat-out cursed by God.
Perhaps it’s Karma, says Mr. Hinadas of their infertility and bad adoption streak. And while it’s not portrayed as something meant to hurt his wife’s feelings, that comment smarts.
There’s a callousness to the disgrace Mrs. Hinadas has to endure when induced to suck on Tomie’s flesh like a gross, old weirdo. Her quiet, interior anxiety about being disposable and her grief about age and lost looks get externalized in such a degrading way. She’s made into the undignified caricature she fears becoming: a creepy, crazy, spiteful hag in a fairytale who throws herself upon the radiant, rosy-cheeked princess.
It’s callous that her only real friend, Satoko, has been diligently ruining her happiness behind the scenes. It’s callous that Tomie, whom she put so much faith in, never cared for “mother” but only for decorating her fingers with rings.
The tagline for Tomie that Viz Media put on the front cover of its deluxe edition is apropos: No Use Escaping. Tomie says this to a guy, but it’s as true for her as it is for him. It’s an assertion that’s as much about her loop as it is his impending expiration. She can’t escape the unfairness of her predicament. She can’t escape being a punching bag for selfish, petty, overly emotional men. Throughout history, neither could millions of women. In the present day, millions still can’t.
With her brutalized, often nude body abandoned on mountainsides, buried in shallow graves, or crammed into fridges, Tomie is an amalgamation of all women’s suffering.
With her unfaltering reanimations despite this suffering, she’s an amalgamation of all women’s tenacity.
Interpretation # 2: The Plight Of Men
What you just read was a load of Tomie Kawakami apologia.
There’s abundant evidence that we aren’t supposed to root for Tomie and that she’s no underdog. The supposition of Interpretation #2 is that the manga is a rather commiserative map of the male psyche. It isn’t a condemnation of how women are the receptacles of men’s baggage and angst; instead, it sympathizes with men’s romantic woes.
Tomie is about men being self-conscious and scared of it showing. It’s about ways men are often straining to properly inhabit the costume of “masculinity” in a similar fashion to women with “femininity.” Our society does have standards for men, and while the options may vary a bit more, they remain narrow. Lines men are fed are about wealth, professional rank, physical strength and sexual authority.
The aggression of men cited in the first interpretation is usually a retaliation toward anyone contesting their manliness. Customarily, it’s the sole retaliation available since “manliness” gets regularly boiled down to “toughness”. The only out boys and men get when contested in such a way is to respond with violence because violence is manly. If you bow out of violence and choose to de-escalate, the taunt of “Are you a man?” is answered with a resounding no. It’s also a no if you’re somehow okay without the things society deems necessary for a man to have.
And to be a man who isn’t considered a man is the death knell.
Women are often the arbiters of manliness ( the pretty ones, in particular.) They hand out blue man ribbons to men by dating them, responding positively to their advances, falling in love with them and sometimes just recognizing their existence. While being an arbiter is prestigious, it’s also dicey as you incur the wrath of the ribbonless. Many women don’t even know they are arbiters but plenty do — and plenty weaponize it. Or at least, there is a paranoia among men that they do. Tomie certainly does, and that’s why she’s the epitome of the fantasy turned nightmare.
Tomie’s hypnotic influence, her goading, her materialism, her clinginess, her casual malice, her inability to be satisfied and her “immortality” seem like a patchwork of male anxieties regarding women: Your anguish is her kink.
She’ll hurt your feelings just because she’s bored. She’s everything the manosphere podcasts warn you about; hot and mentally fucked. She’ll make you feel like you’re in Heaven for five minutes and then relegate you to Hell for a thousand years. She’ll drain your balls and your wallet.
Imagine it! A woman who’s bad for you that you can never be rid of.
Much of Tomie indicates that it’s about the perils of lust, what a corruptive force it can be for men and how it’s unpreventable but integral to govern. It’s about hedonism, sexual obsession and their ugliness. It’s a tale about the thanklessness of simping, reckless White Knighting, and the calamity of trying to “save” a toxic woman. You get reminded that men can be abused and gaslit by women. Some chapters are a vindication for young, blackpilled men since Tomie isn’t just hitting back at degenerates and sociopathic Chads — she’ll mistreat and deplete a child who had no way of ever dominating her or a homely dude who earnestly came to her aid and was separate from those who conducted her most recent throttling.
She’ll use an elderly couple with genuine affection for her as pawns because she wants their shiny, expensive baubles.
Although there are several junctures in the manga wherein you may say, “I get it; what she’s doing isn’t good, but I get it. She’s in pain and lashing out. She’s only quasi-aware of what’s spurring her on, screaming into a void, groping blindly and messily toward a reprieve from what ails her,” there are glaring deviations. Interpretation # 2 posits that these deviations signify Tomie is not imitating a merciless bitch to conserve herself — she simply is one. To humanize her is to be tricked by her. She was never anything human.
If Chapter One is not the inciting incident, we’re left with something more sinister. No longer is this a horror suffused with melancholy because the whole narrative is contingent upon an incredible injustice done to an impressionable girl. If there is no OG Tomie (not one we ever get to know, anyway),then nothing marks the shift from girl to beast. There’s no sad origin story; the “girl” who falls off a cliff and gets chopped up by geology tools is already a duplicate. Of what? A highly evolved planaria, as suggested by Dr. Tamura in chapter three? That’s as near as we ever get to a conclusive answer in the manga, and it sure does deromanticize the trials and tribulations of our flawed heroine/ pardonable anti-heroine. It cements her as the antagonist right out of the gate if anything.
There are no layers to this version of Tomie. She’s just a Venus flytrap that picked up human speech. The second interpretation is somehow bleaker than the story of an abused teen who becomes a monster that relives her trauma since there can be no allowances for her actions. There’s no poignancy to her loop, no message about misogyny. We’re looking at what is very likely some kind of…glorified flatworm. Trauma is still a motif, but it is the trauma of men.
In what ways do men feel preyed on by women? What are the types of female predation? What really frightens guys about women?
We often equate predation with something sexual — this is the sort of predation girls and women tend to experience at the hands of men. Female sexual predators are not to be downplayed, but when men feel “preyed on” by women, they mean something else. In a sweeping generalization of the hetero dynamic, women fear getting used for their bodies. On the other hand, men fear getting used financially, or as a stepping stone, a pit-stop, a gofer, a full-time ego-stroker for a narcissist who can only love herself. Men worry that the minute they stop curbing the fullness of their emotions for a woman, she will immediately mock them. The more devious women, those well-aware of their roles as arbiters, may even fake reciprocity of attraction and pull the rug out from under you. They’ll do this just for their amusement because the dumb look on your face will be entertaining.
A woman’s evil is historically sneakier than a man’s. With this understanding, it’s ultimately easier for women to get away with being bad. The inferior station of women in society becomes quite useful. Benevolent sexism that infantilizes women, pretty much globally, coaches us to view women as beings incapable of deliberately doing wrong. Women’s weakness becomes their strength, and through this, they’ll opportunistically usurp any man she doesn’t like (however petty the reason). A woman may use her sensuality to get a man into a compromising position just to blackmail him. A pretty woman will use a man’s libido against him without missing a beat because women aren’t even really into sex and have a pragmatic attitude toward it: it’s a deed through which they can obtain compliments and designer bags.
These are superstitions about women which terrorize men, many of whom are usually sincerely hoping to find a love match. When you’ll probably get clobbered by false accusations or drawn into economic ruin, diving into the dating pool is a little iffy.
Through the Tomie entity, Yamamoto is shown how duplicitous women are and how trivially they regard your love for them. Male attention is generic for them, while men fight over crumbs of female attention.
Mr. Takagi is shown how cunning women are, even before they’re old enough to exit high school. He’s shown how deftly they turn men’s secrets into guns that get pointed at men’s heads. He’s the most recurring character in the manga, a worker bee spreading pollen for his Queen across multiple chapters. He’s clammy, with the telltale dark rings under his eyes of any Tomie serf, and he breaks into maniacal laughing jags. How badly he gets pommelled for his forbidden attraction!
Kimata, a lackey of Tomie’s in the chapters that feature Tsukiko, is shown that even if you sacrifice everything for a woman — scale buildings, maim people in her name — she’ll still find things to complain about. She’ll still dismiss you as if you’d been nothing but lazy all along.
A kid named Yamazaki nearly loses an eye for Tomie, fallaciously becomes the main suspect in an investigation into a suspicious death and straight-up vanishes.
Ryo gets disfigured just because he told Tomie she wasn’t the greatest thing since sliced bread. After his face gets scarred, he gets third-degree burns in a fire. He started this fire to kill off a mutated Tomie, whose many unripened selves were jeering at him.
Cascades of unnamed men and boys die throughout the manga after Tomie galvanizes them to be assassins for her. She sends them after other clones of herself and after each other. Boys end their lives for failing her, and grown men get murdered during their attempts to appease her. None of their howling passion matters to her; her beauty sleep is unperturbed.
The most damning segments of Tomie are Little Finger and Boy. It isn’t hyperbole to say these chapters are notorious. The answer to the question I posed in the preamble to this piece (how am I supposed to feel about Tomie?) becomes unambivalent, and here’s why:
The Tomie in Little Finger marries a much older man with four grown sons, the youngest of which is 20-year-old Hiroya. He’s been tormented by his brothers his whole life and is, by his own account, ugly and short. He’s become cynical and mistrustful living this way. The elder sons tussle over who gets first dibs on “step-mom” in the wake of their father’s death, but much to their chagrin, she concentrates on Hiroya. He’s stayed firmly on the outskirts of the competition, minding his own business. Just leave me alone, he tells Tomie. No, I can’t do that, says Tomie, whose allergic to snubs.
Hiroya knows a gorgeous woman interested in him must have a second agenda. He doesn’t budge, impervious to her flirting. His brothers lock him in the basement out of jealousy. They only let him out again when they’ve massacred Tomie and need him to drive her remains far away and hide them. He gets distracted while driving and crashes. While sitting in the wreck, he is grabbed suddenly by Tomie. She has slithered out of garbage bags in the back seat. In a blind panic, he uses the spade he has with him to break her stiff fingers from around his arm. He winds up taking shelter in a cave when he sees a bulletin on the news in a diner announcing he is wanted for Tomie’s murder–his brothers have of course set him up as the fall guy.
When he gets cold one night and puts his hands in his coat pockets, he realizes the four Tomie fingers have tumbled there. Revolted, he tosses them into a fire he builds. He’s on the lam for a while and doesn’t mind isolation from the general public. He steals food and shovels the ashes from his extinguished fires into a pile at the back of his cave. Unfortunately, he slices himself on broken window glass while fleeing from an upset farmer he’s stolen from, and the wound becomes infected. Struggling to sleep, he hears what sounds like shifting sand coming from the shadows where his ash pile is. He goes to find the source of the sound and, lo and behold, four figures of Tomie made of ash have risen — one for each finger that got cremated. They all look the worse for wear, but the pinky finger is extra crispy.
Hiroya sees that they all resemble and sound like his dad’s new wife and supposes he must be losing his marbles from a fever. He’s not, though. The ash girls stick around, tee-heeing as he shivers under his blanket. Pinky lags behind the other three. She’s lipless and eyeless, a mopey husk gaining. Hiroya watches as the three superior sisters bully the ugly one, and the parallel between them and his brothers is unmistakable. After days of this, he puts his foot down and demands that the harassment of Pinky stop; he pulls her gallantly to his chest. The bullies scoff and exit the cave as their recuperation completes.
Hiroya is now almost delirious from infection, but manages to tell Pinky he’s been in her place before. Ironically, it wasn’t pretty. Pinky then says her first words: Hiroya, I love you. His breathing shallow, Hiroya admits he’s never felt so strongly for a woman till now. He thinks he’s in love, too. He wants her to stay with him as he’s dying.
But Pinky begins to cackle, her ghoulish jaws clacking. Oh, dear. So, this is the type you go for? She declares that it’s been fun to string Hiroya along, to have this thing to tease him about. Her healing then ramps up, and she’s finally decent enough to go. She ditches Hiroya, and he dies alone.
The boy of Boy is Satoru. He’s about nine or ten, and during a solo adventure, he finds a Tomie in a tide pool. He thinks he’s found a dead body, but then it grabs his ankle. She tells him not to be afraid; she is hurt, but he can make it better by visiting her with things like food and clothes. Oh, and he also shouldn’t tell anyone about her. They can be private playmates.
Satoru is coaxed into keeping Tomie company and comforting her. When he turns up the next day, she wants to reward him with a kiss; it doesn’t sound like it’ll be a peck on the cheek, either. Today, I’ll show you how the good boys get kissed, she tells him in a skin-crawling fashion. She oscillates between engaging with him as a mother and lover, which ranks at about 150% on the ick-factor scale. She does kiss him. On the mouth. Twice.
Back at home, his actual mom and dad concur that he is acting strangely; he’s distant from them and has night terrors. His mom tracks him to the beach one day and catches him and Tomie having a genuinely deranged game of tag. The panel where we see Tomie charging after Satoru from his POV is really unsettling. Her hand is outstretched to snatch him, seeming faster than she should be. She’s barefoot in a sundress, and her face looks like it’s been struck with a hatchet several times. She’s wearing a rictus smile and has dead fish eyes.
Satoru’s mom tells Tomie off and orders her to step back. When asked who she is, Tomie says I am his mother. His real and really creeped-out mom shepherds him back to their house, but his antics get wilder. When he takes a kitchen knife and says he has to see his “mommy,” his mother can only lock him inside and wait for her husband to return from work. When he does, and they unlock the front door, what greets them is the sight of their child cutting their carpet to shreds with scissors.
He’s already hacked at the couches, the curtains and the walls. He pushes past them and hightails it to the beach, where he finds Tomie in the arms of another man.
The man gets stabbed in the back with the scissors, and Satoru insists that now he and his mommy play.
Tomie does a bit of this at the sight of the bloody scissors but ultimately commands him to stop calling her “mom” — she never cared that much for the little brat anyway! He starts to wail, and she laughs at his retreating figure.
His parents get forced to tie him to a wooden beam in their house because he’s become borderline rabid; he does nothing but shriek for his “mommy.” When a sing-songy voice drifts through the open window, they look out into the street and see Tomie standing there. She sweetly beckons the boy, and his mother determines it’s time for the police. The father stalls her; if the police are involved, they’ll take Satoru in as a young offender for killing that guy.
What should I do? his mother asks.
Leave it to me, says the father.
He goes outside to give Tomie a stern talking-to, but is riveted to the spot once only a few feet away from the bloom of her beauty, which has become pristine again.
He instantly deserts his family for her and is never seen again. Satoru becomes a felon who gets put to death by lethal injection.
The takeaway from these infamous chapters is black-and-white. You’ll never hate Tomie so consummately as you do here, and her sadism is never more razor-edged. Her treatment of Hiroya is so wanton, and all it amounts to is kicking someone when they’re down. Rack your brains for the answer to why Tomie was so uncharitable to him, and it really is just because. She did it just because she could. It gives you a pit in your stomach. She’ll go to any length and any low to be able to say: There. I win.
Though Umehara was insusceptible,he was treated with kid gloves in comparison. I can only think this is because while the “offence” was similar, the man was not. Umehara was someone sought after by women, and Hiroya wasn’t. It’s one thing to be rebuffed by a man who may prefer another woman and another thing entirely to be rebuffed by a man who has no chance with any woman. How dare a beggar be a chooser, right? Tomie believes Hiroya should be thanking her, and his gratitude should runneth over. That he should not instantly jump at the chance to be with her when she was being so philanthropic is an affront.
Tomie plays the long game in Little Finger. Presumably, she impedes her healing. She administers a final blow that no one will ever know about except for her to a barely cognizant man. Because he’s at death’s door, her treachery won’t make him suffer for long — which you’d think would be the crowning achievement for any quester of vengeance. Takagi’s suffering, after all, is protracted. He’s Tomie’s most enduring toady, and as he was a bonafide sleaze it seems kosher. The suffering manufactured by Tomie will, however, be the last thing Hiroya remembers. Her betrayal is the last thing done to him in his life, and that gets her rocks off.
She puts so much more into this betrayal than she gets out; at least from the Hinandas, she got a mansion. As Pinky, after being pinched and pulled by her “sisters,” living for days on end in a dingy cave and voluntarily staying charred, the triumph is sour and minuscule. But how gleeful it makes her!
What’s done to Satoru is a sucker punch. 500+ pages in, you don’t think you can be shocked anymore, but Boy makes you squirm more than any decapitation or rotting corpse. When you arrive at the panel of Tomie kissing Satoru, weirdly amorously as he sits in her lap, it suddenly feels illegal to own the book. You feel polluted by the image, and you’ll wish you were back in the good, old chapters of simple gore.
Satoru is groomed. There’s no other word for it, and it’s like a turd in your mouth you can’t spit out. A more nuanced angle could be had if we were back in Interpretation #1, since groomers have often been groomed themselves. That version of Tomie would once again just be applying what she knows. Even given that, it would still be odious — once a victim of sexual abuse spreads that abuse to someone else, they forfeit any claim they had to the label of “victim.” You’re a perpetrator now, baby.
We’re never shown Mr. Takagi and Tomie kissing. Maybe that’s why I was more viscerally grossed out by the grooming of Satoru. As unacceptable as it is for a 30ish-year-old teacher to be sexual with a 16ish-year-old student, something about the sheer difference in size between a 16-year-old and a 10-year-old is so acutely disconcerting.
Maybe it bothered me more because Mr. Takagi never spoke to Tomie like a father.
Or maybe, admittedly, it was due to the peculiarity of a female sex offender abusing a male child. We don’t contemplate female sexual predators much, but we should work on that. Biases will have us expect it from men but feel blindsided when women do it. They tell us that children are safe with women, are supposed to be with women, and that women can’t be wired like that.
This, though, is how women’s evil can slip through the cracks. Bad women are enabled when the default status of all women is “weak and ineffectual.”
When a patriarchal culture insists The Two Sexes innately excel at different things, and are prone to certain things because of immutable natures, men aren’t spared from the whittling down of their human potential. Gender essentialism prevents everybody from accessing all the tiers of their humanity.
If women are all sweetness, light and child-like unsophistication, it not only divests them of their capacity to be intellectual, serious and tactical but also of their capacity to be violent and vulgar. If men are defined mainly by their disparateness from women and the realm of female-coded things, then they are robbed of all expressions of shyness, gentleness, sadness and, yes, fearfulness.
Sexism makes it so that nobody is permitted to be fully human.
When we register the story of Tomie not through Tomie’s eyes but through those of her prey, we can glean that its mission is to underscore the minefields of masculinity. Being a man is fraught with danger, especially if you’re a young man still forming his sense of self. To be a young man is to live in fear of the parts of yourself you’re repressing. These are parts you’ve repressed before even completely understanding them; parts that spook you because of how tender they are and because of how hungry and raging they are. Women’s duality is freaky; you get told they’re physically, socially and politically inferior, but they’re simultaneously responsible for awarding you your credentials as a man. You can only be seen as an “Alpha” to other men through women, somehow — through the accumulation and domestication of them.
Women frequently seem like a whole other species. In Tomie’s case, she is. As this other species that tantalizes you more than any human babe, she’s the supreme test and tease. A lust for the wrong kind of woman, a shallow, avaricious, hostile and unfaithful woman, will ruin your life if you let it.
Don’t be so dazzled by beauty that you can’t think. You should learn to appreciate inner beauty.
Don’t assume a woman is a damsel in distress simply because she’s a woman; she could just as easily be a snake waiting to strike. Perceived weakness can be a trap in the same way beauty can be.
In closing: Save yourselves, men!
Interpretation # 3: Just for Yuks
Tomie is, lowkey, a comedy. Some of the time, it’s even highkey a comedy.
A dark comedy? Sure. An absurdist comedy? Yep. A self-referential comedy? You betcha.
And Tomie isn’t the exception.
Lots of Junji Ito’s most celebrated works are funny. On purpose. The humour isn’t accidental or a quirk of translation. If you’re laughing a little under your breath or feel your eyes crinkle from an appreciative smile, don’t worry: it’s what’s supposed to be happening. You’re not malfunctioning.
Ito’s impish flair is surprising for the uninitiated to learn about. If you’ve only gotten exposed to some of his most impressively repugnant art floating around on the internet (the decay, the guts, the creepy-crawlies, etc.), it wouldn’t be out of bounds to imagine him as someone unwholesome; someone who could watch a snuff film while enjoying a fruit rollup. In actuality, Ito is openly afraid of so many things! He’s more of a mild-mannered dweeb than some goth zaddy, and I love him more for it.
In interviews, he’s spoken of being afraid of sharks, ghosts, dying and plenty more. I found this quote from him that I want to slap onto a t-shirt: “I am a horror maniac who prefers to stay at home.” Goddammit, me too! Horror is my favourite genre of anything, but seeing one drop of blood irl does Gilderoy Lockhart’s version of Brackium Emendo to my legs. Junji Ito being a neurotic who’s drawn nightmare fuel since before I was born makes me feel seen.
To veteran fans of Ito, getting a side of off-kilter goofiness with your order of horror is what makes the man the Michelin Star restaurant he is. Those who know, know. His stuff gets meticulously deconstructed, but it wouldn’t be incredibly far-fetched if it turned out that most of the deeper meanings attributed to his catalogue were an invention of his fanbase. His books mean these things to these people, but it could’ve all been less fussy to him. We, readers, have been getting philosophical about a mildly eccentric guy with a bit of an imagination who liked drawing bodily fluids and beasties. We’ve got our heads up our asses as we imagine convolutions where there are none.
I have my head up my ass with my bounteous mentions of metaphors and symbols, with all my semantic bullshit!
While the zaniness of Tomie isn’t as forthright as it is in Gyo, an irrefutable flippancy is woven throughout. During the most egregiously ridiculous moments, tentacles of doubt wriggle into your brain folds: “Could this possibly not be an allegory for misogyny? What if it’s not saying anything about men’s hurdles either? What if it doesn’t have anything to say at all??? And it’s just??? Some nasty, offbeat entertainment?”
One sentence from an online review I read for research has stuck itself in my craw, a sentence calling Ito “the manga equivalent of Ed Wood.” It feels….apt???
For every entry like Boy or Little Finger, there are scenes like the ones in Passing Demon that will cause you to snort spontaneously. Picture this: Yukio, the latest boy mesmerized into trying to kill a Tomie copy, gets cornered and commits seppuku in front of the crowd. The Tomie who did the mesmerizing is in the crowd, and she’s a little third-grader named Ayaka. As other onlookers swoon and yelp, she mutters Oh, poop! He screwed it up!
That she would have the wherewithal to convince a boy to kill someone for her but still refrain from swearing is hilarious, and so is her pouty irritation as if she’d misplaced a crayon instead of witnessing someone commit a gnarly suicide in public.
Passing Demon is packed with rib-ticklers; Ito had been publishing Tomie chapters for years and years at this point, he was on the cusp of wrapping everything up, and it seems he was poking fun at himself and his creation. He’s permitting himself to get a little more blatantly loosey-goosey here, and the silliness that does blow in now-and-again throughout the manga gets heightened. Before Yukio’s untimely death, Ayaka tells her decently older sister You poor thing. It’s a pity you weren’t born with my natural charms.
Yasuko, the sister, verbalizes the preposterousness of this as someone reading the manga would: What the heck? You’re just a third-grader. I don’t know about you, but it felt like she was speaking to Tomie/Ayaka on my behalf.
Perhaps the single funniest panel in all of Tomie comes courtesy of Passing Demon when Yasuko’s friend Yocchin reveals to her that several little girls in town look just like “Ayaka”: Like, two or three more… and they all look the same. It’s mind-blowing. They’re all seven or eight years old. And they’re all little bitches. I was taken off guard by that last bit of exposition, and I remember laughing out loud. I liked it so much I took a picture of the page with my phone. It’s not like it was the first time a Tomie was ever called a bitch (far from it), but I think it’s the best time. It’s due to many elements coming together. Mainly, it’s because it gets said about seven and eight-year-old girls; it’s so out of pocket that the laughing happens automatically.
Teen girls branding some little girls as “bitches” is funny in the same way telling your beloved cat in a faux-serious tone that he stinks and you hate him is funny — this is the most consonant correlation I can make.
The trio of child-aged Tomies meeting each other for the first time is also great. The face-off, as a gale wind tosses the treetops to and fro, is stupidly dramatic. Imagining a townsperson, who’s not at all clued into what’s going on, simply stumbling across the tense staring competition is endlessly amusing. It would be like seeing the finale of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, but Clint Eastwood had his hair in pigtails.
Other memorable (and definitely deliberate) segments of comedy in Tomie that slayed me include:
A) The scene in Old and Ugly, the very last chapter, when Yasuko yells at Ayaka to hide in the attic because someone has just smashed through the window and is after her. No replies the little girl at risk of being murdered. It’s dirty.
B) The scene in Mansion, when Tsukiko retrieves her camera after being into a giant, spooky house by Tomie. She has been chased through a labyrinth by a guy in a suit of armour, found an old man being held prisoner in a dungeon, been threatened to be experimented on by Tomie and Mr.Takagi (who’s been living in disguise as the old man), and seen the old man’s grossly deformed daughter (who was previously experimented on and is now a giant Tomie head with dangling Tomie arms and legs that drags itself around with a phallic-looking worm tail.)
To finally escape the house, Tsukiko takes photo after photo of Tomie with the flash on. Stop it! whines Tomie. You’re the worst photographer ever! It’s delightfully Valley girl-esque, and anything reminiscent of a Valley girl against such a backdrop is such a trip.
C) The scene in Revenge, when a seemingly half-dead Tomie is rescued by mountaineers. A blizzard picks up, and a man named Guchi gives up his snow pants and jacket for Tomie to wear. During the onerous walk through the snow to get to a cabin, she drops and claims she can’t walk any further. Guchi, who has toughed it out only in his boxer shorts for her sake, honourably invites her to climb on his back so he may carry her. Tomie slowly blinks at the other guy there, Tanimura. What about him? she asks. A rookie like him? Guchi crows. I won’t allow it. He doesn’t have the experience.
But he’s a lot more attractive, Tomie composedly remarks.
D) The scene in Babysitter, when a poor woman gets tricked into looking after a couple’s baby. The “baby” turns out to be what I can only describe as a Tomie whose like a sentient heart. The woman’s mind unravels as she’s locked in with this baby-thing; she must keep it from continuously caterwauling. She submits to a game of “Horsey,” where she will play the horse. Giddyup! urges Tomie, and with one of her disgusting subclavian arteries, she whips the woman’s ass. It’s patently loony. The woman loudly and despairingly neighs in response, and Tomie makes an incredible expression you have to see for yourself before announcing: This is stupid.
When the woman huffs that “baby” is getting heavy, Tomie shrills Are you calling me fat? The idea that Tomie has it in her to be indignant about someone insulting her looks, even when she’s a face poking appallingly out of a pulsating, veiny heart, is wonderful.
E) Much of the dialogue from Assassins. This chapter contains an exchange that gives the “little bitches” scene in Passing Demon a run for its money. It’s about a guy named Tetsuo who is stuck catering to the whims of a bodiless Tomie head. She’s just more of a face, really — one that won’t shut up for a second. So many of the Tomie-head’s paroxysms make it seem like Ito is doing a self-parody; it’s probably more keenly felt here than anywhere else. Tomie goes overboard with her Tomie-ness, and it verges on camp. It is camp.
The golden exchange comes as Tetsuo is trying to discreetly take the Tomie-head for a walk through bustling city streets; he’s carrying her in a loosely wrapped cloth. There’s a peephole in the material to look through, and she tells her newest subordinate to take her to a jewelry store. I’m dying for a necklace, she says.
You don’t even have a neck, Tetsuo mutters to the sack he’s holding. What would you do with it?
Tomie still wants to go to a jeweller–until she rapidly changes her mind: Forget the jewellers. Actually, take me to an antique store. And then to a French restaurant. A good one! No, wait. Spanish! I want Spanish!
Pedestrians’ gazes start to linger on the man with a shouting sack, and it’s so obviously a farce.
Every cry for caviar and foie gras from the Tomie-head is a farce because she has neither neck nor stomach.
When an intruder breaks into Tetsuo’s place to kill the Tomie-head (after being recruited by a different Tomie, naturally), it takes cover in a wastebasket. Once the intruder is incapacitated by Tetsuo, it emerges from its shelter. What are you doing here? the intruder wonders aloud, baffled since this girl has the same face as his girl. And in such a small wastebasket…
These are jokes! These are jokes and more jokes!
There’s a joke, truth be told, in Boy. Yes, *the* Boy. No, I can’t really believe it either. But I’m almost certain it’s meant to be funny, and I’m almost certain it works. It’s there in the back-and-forth between a completely inveigled Satoru and his mom. He’s attempting to leave the house with a knife, and when his mom wants to know where he’s going he tells her he’s off to be with his “real” mommy. He then parrots something Tomie said, a compliment she gave him.
When I grow up, I’m gonna be the pillar of my community, says Satoru, with a glassy stare and massive under-eye bags.
The dichotomy between his words and his appearance, the buoyant statement said in a monotone, and the compliment’s odd ungainliness operate like a perverse Jack-in-the-box.
You’ve been sunk waist-deep in ooze; you’ve seen the chilling game of tag and the mouth kisses *shudder*. Frown lines become more pronounced with every page you turn until — bam! Something tongue-in-cheek launches at you from the cesspit, like a Pomeranian leaping from The Lament Configuration.
Interpretation # 3, the least pretentious of the pack, states that Tomie is a purveyor of yucky yuks. Not only is it not doing social commentary on what you think it is, it’s not doing any social commentary at all. It isn’t a Russian nesting doll with a creed at its center. Academics, Redditors, Medium writers and weebs worldwide have embarked on a project that Junji Ito never asked any of them to do.
The character of Tomie is neither feminist nor anti-feminist. She’s not a catalyst to evaluate the troubles of women or men. She wasn’t made with sexual politics in mind.
You’re looking too hard, and you’re thinking too much. Interpretation # 3 endorses kicking back, relaxing and savouring the sanguinary show!
There’s a song called How Beautiful It Is by the music collective Must Save Jane that gets linked to Tomie, but her anthem is something else to me.
It’s Björk’s Bachelorette. Everything I’ve given myself carpal tunnel syndrome trying to say in writing is redundant when pitted against those lyrics. Any would’ve made for an opportune title to this composition because Tomie is a “tree that grows hearts” (one for each a man takes), and all the men are “birds on the brim” who are “hypnotized by the whirl.”
Who’d argue that if a man forgets Tomie’s name, they wouldn’t “go astray like a killer whale trapped in a bay?” Certainly not me.
It’s the description in the very first verse of the track, however, that most divinely condenses whatever anyone has ever ascribed to Tomie or conjectured about her since her inception at the tip of Junji Ito’s G nib:
“I’m a fountain of blood in the shape of a girl.”
In every vignette of the manga, it rings true. Whether Tomie is only the shape of a girl because being chronically objectified has led to her depersonalization, or because she’s a planarian flatworm from outer space masquerading as a human, she still bleeds like a geyser.
Whether deserved or not, she bleeds.
Whether you’re reading a horror-comedy, a horror with comedic sprinkles, or a comedy with horrific components, she bleeds.
No matter the angle you look at her, Tomie Kawakami will hemorrhage.
