Sleek black hair frames her pale face, thin smile, and the iconic beauty mark under her right eye. Her name is Tomie, and she is the most beautiful woman in the world. Men and women alike grow obsessed with her, though the former is most often awash with jealousy, desire, and eventually a violent urge to violently murder and dismember the very woman they claimed to love. Only Tomie always returns. Like an unrelenting earthworm, she is able to regenerate countless times through her severed body parts, forcing herself out of a kidney, limbs, and even a carpet soaked with her blood.

Published first as a serial in 1987, Tomie was Junji Ito’s debut as a horror manga artist, and remains to this day one of his most well-known stories. So popular was the original that it would go on to be adapted many times: into nine live-action remakes, an anthology TV series, and a brief but memorable episode in Netflix’s 2023 animated series, Junji Ito Maniac: Japanese Tales of the Macabre. None of the remakes, however, would receive the same acclaim and popularity as the original.

“My friend Tomie is dead,” so starts the first of the collection’s twenty chapters. Only it’s not before long that Tomie, looking very much alive, waltzes back into the classroom. In their surprise of this impossible return, her classmates are wracked with guilt and fear, through which we learn the details of her murder: Outdoors on their break, Tomie leaves her classmates to talk with Mr. Takagi, the classroom teacher, threatening to tell the school they’ve slept together if he doesn’t leave her wife. A classmate Yamamoto overhears the conversation, and, in provoking Tomie, causes her to fall off the high edge. Just as Yamamoto is about to call the ambulance, Mr. Takagi stops him, convincing him that his own life shouldn’t be ruined over Tomie. The teacher then concocts the cover-up: they were to cut Tomie’s body into forty-two pieces, one for each member of the class to hide across the city. 

Source: Junji Ito

With no supernatural event, the plot behind Tomie’s murder is grounded in a familiar and violent reality. Mr. Takagi, with all his talk of protecting Yamamoto, is really trying to protect himself. If Tomie survives, their affair would become public; if she died, an autopsy would reveal the fetus in her womb. To escape unscathed then, Mr. Takagi had one choice. Tomie’s body, the evidence for his crime, must be destroyed.

So starts the cycle of Tomie’s regeneration, where each time she suffers a variation of the same violent end as the first time she was murdered. Only now, the narrative positions her as no longer a child but a supernatural monster. With her otherworldly beauty and the grotesque method she crawls back to life, Tomie’s murderers excuse their actions with some supernatural handwaving, that “an urge” drove them, that they felt “compelled” to cut her up, that “it was an expression of love,” as if the responsibility of killing and dismembering a woman can be delegated to anything but themselves. The few men who offer explicit rationale behind their murderous impulses are equally, if not more appalling: cutting Tomie up so they can “share” her among themselves, slashing her face so no other man can possess her beauty. 

While there is nothing inherently wrong with imagining a woman with supernatural beauty, the rhetoric behind Tomie’s “abilities” is reminiscent of justifications used to excuse sexual harassment and violence against women: high schoolers in short skirts are blamed for distracting male teachers, rape victims are asked what they were wearing, and, in this case, one woman’s beauty is somehow used to rationalized her never-ending murder and mutilation. Ito describes Tomie as “having the ability to make men desire to kill her,” a premise that places the burden of male violence on its victim. Even after Tomie reappears after being murdered, her classmates continue to objectify her: “Zombie or not, I wouldn’t mind a piece of that!” 

Other narrative and artistic choices contribute to Tomie’s character as a misogynistic cliché. Photography, a medium associated with depicting the “truth”, is used to reveal a monstrous figure emerging from Tomie’s otherwise beautiful face. Likewise, characters are used to invoke Tomie’s “essence” in connection with her mutilated body, reiterating the tired warning of men against beautiful women: that behind her beautiful mask, she is really a monster! Similarly, body horror is only utilized to depict the grotesqueness of Tomie’s regeneration, visual proof of Tomie’s obvious monstrosity. 

Only one scene breaks free from this singular depiction. Early in the series, a photograph, unlike the others of Tomie’s disfigured head, shows a “sad young woman fading into the shadow.” Though the narrator explicitly states the girl isn’t Tomie, an alternative interpretation is that she represents the original Tomie: the high school girl who was brutally murdered and remains trapped in this cycle of regeneration and violence. In a later chapter, Tomie says she “willed herself back to life” to “take vengeance” on the man who abandoned her, aligning her with the tradition of the onryō, vengeful spirits in Japanese folklore. Yet even vengeance offers Tomie no escape. Her spirit can never rest as she is murdered and mutilated again and again, returning each time seemingly less human, but somehow more beautiful than before. 

Source: Junji Ito

When asked about his inspiration for Tomie, Junji Ito talks about how he was once afraid to talk to girls and created the character to overcome this fear. These interviews suggest that Ito was less interested in critiquing the violence against women than exploring his own anxieties around women, positioning Tomie, who he describes to be “arrogant, a liar, and a monster”, as the true source of horror. This unsympathetic characterization leaves Tomie with a distressingly singular psychology: she is occupied only with her beauty and her ego, and her relationship with men seem driven less by desire for them than her need to be desired by them. 

Yet, despite all this, female readers continue to be drawn towards her. Today, Tomie’s image resurfaces across TikTok makeup tutorials, Halloween costumes, and the shadowy corners of YouTube subliminals. Some creators go a step further, replicating the monstrous face as it tears away from the beautiful one. In claiming both sides of her, fans engage with a character whose appeal extends beyond Ito’s vision of her as a man-killing monster.