An introspective analysis on Tomie

When people mention the manga Tomie, a few iconic images come to mind: the girl with a face
growing out of her head, the mashed faces and limbs attached to a wormy body, a girl eating the flesh of
a dead, frozen hiker. Tomie’s monstrous transformations, while scary in their own right, are the result of
violence towards her – a reaction to her supernatural beauty.

For the unfamiliar, Tomie is a manga by horror master Junji Ito. The collection of stories focus on
Tomie, a beautiful Japanese girl with a strange magnetic charisma that drives most people she meets
insane. As a result, these strangers usually end up murdering or disfiguring Tomie in various ways. Yet
Tomie can’t be killed, as her flesh regenerates and clones itself.

Many readers associate Tomie with body horror due to the grotesque contortions and wounds
inflicted on her and her victims. But the truly terrifying element of the manga is the violence of human
nature that Ito depicts – how desperation and desire will cause someone to go to the extreme. Tomie’s
beauty and power comes at a price, a message that is all too familiar to women.

Aside from her immortality, Tomie’s main source of power is her beauty. She uses it as a tool,
wielding it on men (and women) to get them to do her bidding – whether it’s to be her bodyguards, to
carry her up an icy mountain, or to murder her clones. Yet Tomie’s beauty usually ends up being her
downfall.

Her first death, for example, is accidental, but many of her subsequent demises come from
either bloodlust or a possessive desire. The stories “Gathering”, “Revenge”, and “Morita Hospital”
showcase this the best, as the men she chooses or encounters eventually turn on her and attack her. As
one Tomie worshipper states in the story “Revenge”, “It was…an expression of his love.”

It’s that twisted statement that really highlights how these often-brutal murders and attacks on
Tomie are much more horrifying than the “monstrous growths” that spring from her body. Only a few of
Tomie’s deaths are pre-meditated, meaning that whoever does attack her does so from a primal,
emotional state. These attacks also resonate with the issue of sexual harassment and violence that
occurs in a world where 38% of the homicides of women are related to partner violence.With that in
mind, beauty can be considered a double-edged sword. Anyone familiar with Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty
Myth knows that beauty is considered a form of social currency, and to be beautiful opens up
opportunity or favor. But on the flipside, the quest and maintenance for beauty can backfire, and lead to
death. Ito exaggerates this with the unusual actions his characters take to achieve beauty.

In the story Hair, for example, a young girl named Chie finds a box of hair in her dad’s study. It
turns out to be Tomie’s hair; when her friend Miki places the strands of hair on her head it essentially
turns her beautiful and into an almost-Tomie lookalike. When Chie’s dad sees Miki-Tomie he confronts
her, confessing to murdering her because he loved her and hated being rejected. The Tomie hairs that
have embedded into Miki’s scalp explode out of her body in reaction, killing her.
 Whether direct or tangential, everyone who comes into contact with Tomie or pieces of Tomie, is
affected by her. She is, of course, an evil being and not meant to be sympathized with, as she
manipulates people to achieve status or just for fun. But in her form of a young woman, she is still seen
as an object or a thing to be owned or used – whether it’s her beauty, her blood, or her cells – and that is
highly relatable to many of society’s young women today. Tomie is essentially a paradox of existence, and
she highlights the sub-conscious danger of attention while female.

Her strange aura and supernatural beauty draws people in like a siren calling sailors to their
death – but Tomie is the one who suffers the consequences of her song.To put an interesting twist to her
misadventures, Ito says he had written her as an unlikable character. But she is more than that, too.
Haughty and perpetually unimpressed, Tomie is a divisive figure: The people around her are either in
love with her or despise her; they are eager to kill her or kill for her—there’s not much middle ground.
This love-hate relationship that men often have with Tomie is also expressed in how they’ll keep body
parts as souvenirs after brutally killing her, as in The Basin of the Waterfall.

That she can inspire such fascination, fanaticism, jealousy, and fits of fury makes her more a
force of nature than a conventional villain in Ito’s repertoire. He hasn’t done much to evolve her
personality over the years to keep her from becoming a cliché, nor does he really need to: As seen in the
manga Hair and Top Model, Tomie serves as a kind of mirror on which people like to project their
insecurity or vanity. Even when confronted with Tomie’s true face, as captured only in portraits or
photographs, they remain blind to it.

A creature of instinct, Tomie is often malevolent in a petty, non-committal kind of way. There’s
no overarching plan to spell the destruction of mankind. She just acts according to her own nature, with
no real control over the extent of her sinister influence. In Painter, even she admits that she has no idea
why all those who love her inevitably try to kill her. Still, seducing men ranks higher to Tomie than a
sense of self-preservation, perhaps because she knows she can never truly die. Their obsession with her
is no different than her own obsession with being the object of their adoration. The few times she shifts
from the pursued to the pursuer is when she comes across a man immune to her charms. Tomie loves
only to be loved.

As shown in Gathering and Orphan Girl, she reciprocates people’s feelings—if at all—strictly as
far as they can entertain, flatter, or cater to her expensive tastes. Inherent selfishness and egotism is so
baked into her that multiple regenerated Tomies act independently of each other: the ones in Old and
Ugly and Murder consider one another rivals, tasking their admirers with assassinating the others like
warring tribal lords. The film Tomie Vs. Tomie also plays with this fact by essentially pitting Tomie against
herself.

Ito has said that his art strives to make the beautiful every bit as detailed as the grotesque. This
explains why there is such a delineation between the two extremes, especially in his later work. Besides
Tomie, the closest Ito has come to inverting this self-made trope is probably with Narumi of the Bizarre
Hikizuri Siblings—a beautiful, albeit strange girl—but even Narumi isn’t overtly destructive. Tomie
remains an outlier: She is as much a beauty as she is a monster. Like something right out of Arthur
Machen’s Great God Pan. Acts of violence are carried out in her name, but never by her own hand.
Among Ito’s slug girls and blood bubbles, Tomie’s brand of horror hits closer to home: a familiar, flesh-
and-blood evil that can bring out the worst lurking in humanity.