Few non-Westerners make such an impact on (western) horror than manga writer and illustrator Junji Ito. Stories of Lovecraftian creatures and tantalizing terrors we encounter everyday are set to the background of horrifically disturbing images. They are uniquely Japanese, but still bewitch our minds with his utter madness. One such work, his most well-known, is the story of a girl who actually isn’t: Tomie.
First gracing the pages of a girl’s manga magazine, Monthly Halloween, Tomie (the main character) is a seemingly normal highschooler. She has a family, goes on class trips, wears a uniform. We immediately notice her striking beauty. Her long black hair flows elegantly down her back, while a charming beauty mark, a defining feature, rests just below one of her eyes. Tomie is gorgeous… and she knows it. Slowly we come to learn her affinity for men; one by one (or even many at the same time), men and boys alike fall for her, each pining for her attention. She eats it up and the men beg for more. The beg and beg and beg, each time growing more in love with her — until that love turns into deadly obsession. You see, Tomie has a unique power over men. That power comes at a cost though; Tomie’s life is the price. The series follows 20 stories involving Tomie and her many deaths… and many rebirths.
Junji Ito is the Japanese version of many different horror icons: Stephen King, Stephen Gammell, you name it. He’s pretty much horror personified. Before I read any Ito works, I knew his illustrations. Eerily beautiful and terrible at the same time, Tomie’s illustrations — all of Ito’s, actually — perfectly exemplify the stories they’re telling. Tomie is able to lure you in, peering directly into your eyes. By the time we realize there’s any danger, characters transform into withered, decaying monsters. The situation goes from cute to bat-shit insane!
Storywise, we learn of Tomie’s powers of seduction and ultimate demise(s) through a series of vignettes. In one story, a student takes her picture, only to end up capturing the evil protruding from her skull. Tomie is kidnapped and held in a basement in another story, before displaying her inhuman regenerative powers. Her hair is able to possess others who try to claim it in another. Every story demonstrates that Tomie, although seemingly mortal, is in fact not. Like a parasite, she cannot be stopped, only existing to cause harm and spread like sickness.
Tomie is an incredibly fast read. Written in manga style (like a comic book), stories read quickly and are accompanied by frames upon frames of bizarre and monstrous images. I finished the book after 2 days of non-stop reading. Tomie is indeed as enthralling as its namesake; I couldn’t get enough of her outrageous circumstances, which is great for fans like me — after the book, there is a novel, TV series, and live-action film to keep the story going.
I absolutely love this series, so much so that I now have a Tomie tattoo in her “split-face” form. Tomie is fast-paced, but still manages to trap you in its (or her) clutches. And as the writing style almost guarantees you won’t want to put it down, it’s almost as if she herself was beckoning to you from within the pages of her book. If you’re looking for horror that’s outside of the box, look towards the East, and you’ll find a world where everything just feels wrong. Tomie is a piece I see myself reading over and over, finding new gore to gawk at or read infamous quotes from a master horror author. The best part is, there’s always more where that came from.
