By Patricia Zhang
Edited by Elim Chan and Alloe Mak

CW: Body horror, gore

“I just wanted to kill her…that’s why I stabbed her. But you stopped me before I could cut her up. For some reason, I felt this urge to dismantle her.”

I collect Junji Ito’s works. I have a friend who gifts me one each birthday and Christmas because he knows how obsessed I am (thanks Dustin!). I saw an analysis of The Enigma of Amigara Fault on YouTube when I was in grade 5, and since then, have fallen head over heels with his work. I have read all (or at least the most I could get my hands on) of Junji Ito but the piece that has affected me the most—the one I keep going back to—is his anthology series, Tomie.

Femme fatales, as of late, have been increasingly popular in pop culture movements. Think Jennifer from Jennifer’s Body or The Love Witch, but one of the most iconic in the world of horror manga is Tomie from Junji Ito’s Tomie. 

Tomie follows the main character—or at some points, characters—Tomie. Tomie is the embodiment of beauty. She’s irresistible, impossible to deny, despite being rude and egotistical. Though there are some variations in how the story is presented, it typically follows a person or a group of people as they have the misfortune of meeting Tomie in some way or another. They meet her, become infatuated with her, fall in love or do her bidding, but ultimately end up either killing themselves or Tomie herself. Tomie appears to have a certain power to attract these people and cause them to have an unexplainable urge to kill her. Not by simple gunshot either, more like brutal axe limp-to-limp slaughter. The men who fall in love with Tomie dismantle her. 

This is perhaps best demonstrated in Painter, one of the chapters of Tomie. In this chapter, artist Mitsuo Mori meets the mysterious Tomie at his third gallery opening. At first sight, he says she is bewitching, and after Tomie manages to get Mori to drop his current model, he begins using Tomie as the subject of his paintings. Tomie is blatantly narcissistic and egotistical in Painter, she says: 

“Do you really think you’ll stumble on another girl as beautiful as I? Search till you drop or sit here and wait for her—either way, you’ll be wasting your time.”

After the portrait of Tomie is finished, she says:

“Just look at it! You think this silly thing captures even a tenth of my beauty? … I don’t frequent talentless hacks. I’m off to find a real artist.”

Once Tomie leaves, Mori falls into a pit of obsession with her. The once hot-and-upcoming artist sinks out of the spotlight. He attempts to paint Tomie again, after literally taking her from a sculptor whom Tomie was working for as a model. She claims he has tried to kill her—she lets him know that multiple men before have tried to kill her and cut her up into pieces. When he finishes the painting again, it’s a ghastly image of Tomie—a deformed and gorey rendition. After she expresses her disgust at the painting, Mori kills her with a cleaver and cuts her up into parts. The chapter ends with him staring at Tomie’s body parts until he presumably dies. 

All interactions with men for Tomie follow this sort of pattern. She is shamelessly arrogant and her mocking and ridiculing of these men are framed to be the reason she is killed. 

Yet the horror doesn’t stop at men-falling-in-love-then-killing. Since she dies each chapter and people can’t die more than once, there’s a supernatural aspect. Tomie is she’s virtually immortal. Not in the traditional sense that she cannot be harmed, Tomie can literally die—as mentioned,we see her getting chopped up into pieces over and over again. But she comes back. From every piece she is cut into, she grows. Past the cool imagery, Tomie can  regenerate from any body part. This means if you cut a Tomie up into 42 pieces, such as in the opening chapter, she will grow into a new Tomie from each of the pieces,  42 new Tomies. In Painter, Mori watches as her body parts each grow into different Tomies.

At first glance, Tomie is about how the greed, narcissism, and irresistible beauty of Tomie leads her to her deserving demise. She meets someone new, demands foie gras or expensive earrings, calls them unworthy or stupid, and pushes them to eventually kill her brutally. People have an seemingly unexplainable urge to kill her. That’s the common theme. But I would argue that the central theme of Tomie is how this warped sense of love acts in two ways; for Tomie, to chase love; for the men, subjecting Tomie to their will in the name of it.

In the first chapter of Tomie, also called Tomie, her backstory—how she came to be the “monster” today—is revealed. On a school field trip, Tomie reveals that she is pregnant with her teacher’s baby as she has a relationship with him. The teacher gets scared, and a fight ensues that ends with Tomie falling down a cliff. What follows is a lot of gaslighting and manipulation from the teacher, where he convinces an entire class to cut Tomie up into pieces and throw her body parts away. 

Tomie is a story about how love becomes warped in possession and greed. Tomie is a victim of love, rather, the senseless and overwhelming love-turned-obssession from the men she is victims of. Men in Tomie only “fall prey” to Tomie because it’s love at first sight for them. Tomie is about an exercise of power disguised as a gross perversion of love. 

The only times we see Tomie interested or loving men are either when she wants to manipulate them or when they are not interested in her in the first place. When the men in Tomie don’t automatically fall in love with her, she becomes obsessed with making them love her. 

In the name of love, Tomie has no consent over how she is desired. The men around her view her as an object. In the chapter Hair, (where her hair was discovered in a box and then woshipped) her hair is adored, but not to her consent! Tomie is consistenlty labelled as a person who had it coming (she was bratty so she had to die). But, ultimately, she remains a victim of the “love” of men. Not to mention that in the first and titular chapter, she is 15 years old and in an obviously problematic relationship with her teacher. The men of Tomie know this, and yet, they have no trouble making her a stepmother, or even making a sort of sake from her body and drinking it.

Love is inherently destructive in Tomie. She is murdered over and over again, but the cycle of destructive love continues with every man she seduces. The skin she was born in, and the identity that was shaped for her because of that, is who she is. Ironically, she herself is a victim of her own beauty, as well as her own search for love.