Tomie



Tomie is a horror manga by Junji Ito that predates the well-known Uzumaki and The Enigma of Amigara Fault.

Tomie is an unusually beautiful girl with wavy hair and a distinctive mole below her right eye. Structured as an anthology, the manga revolves around Tomie as she starts a new life in one city after another, influencing new people, making new friends... and new enemies...

It becomes evident that she's up to something, but there's no way to stop her. Not even death can bring her down. And it's been tried. Several times.


 * Adult Fear: How the story starts: the police and school admin tell Tomie's classmate that she was found dead and dismembered. The teachers advise the students to take care and use the buddy system.
 * Alpha Bitch: Tomie is most certainly this. She taunts and belittles her enraptured victims which usually end in them snapping and killing her. Ditto to girls immune to her charms, calling them nothing, nobody, stupid, etc.
 * Anthropomorphic Personification: Tomie is apparently the living embodiment of lust and all the negative emotions that go along with it.
 * Art Evolution: The Tomie series starts out looking a bit rough around the edges, but smooths out into Junji Ito's familiar style as it progresses.
 * Asteroids Monster: Trying to cut up Tomie will only end up with more Tomies.
 * Beauty Mark: Tomie's distinctive mole.
 * Berserk Button: It's not a good idea to call Tomie a monster.
 * Due to her superiority complex, even the most accurate picture of her is enough to set her off due to her impulsive need to destroy her "imposter" clones. When Mori first painted her, she flipped out and mocked his picture. When he made a portrait inspired by the photo his friend sent of her monstrous appearance, she goes ballistic. Mocking, insulting and accusing him of making a sick joke about her.  All of it causing him to snap and chop her up.
 * Bi the Way: Only in the movies. The original version from the manga is extremely contemptuous of other females, but Movie!Tomie has a few Schoolgirl Lesbian romances under her belt as well. Interestingly, she's a lot more gentle with her female lovers and less outwardly bitchy and demanding, at least at first, than with the boys.
 * Black Widow: An incredibly strange example, where the title character does, indeed, go after the money like a typical Black Widow... Except she gives men an odd feeling of wanting to kill her.
 * Body Horror
 * Break the Cutie: Is there no male (and occasional female) Tomie HASN'T broken?
 * Reiko from the first chapter, maybe? Tsukiko also seems to have handled herself admirably.
 * Charm Person: Oh boy, Tomie is the prime example of this Trope. She can make anybody fall in love with her.
 * Cloning Blues: There is no hive mentality binding one Tomie to another - they will even manipulate some poor schmucks into offing each other on their behalf.
 * Corrupt the Cutie:
 * Tomie herself didn't seem to be that bad when she was alive. Sure, she was trying to seduce her high school teacher while she had a boyfriend, but her catty remarks were limited to teasing Reiko, her Only Friend, for still being childish. She also had the right to call out Yamamoto for smacking her in the face. Being sawed to pieces while still alive is not a nice way to go, and she still remembered Reiko.
 * In one story Tomie corrupts a young boy to do her bidding, eventually turning him into a killer.
 * Cruel and Unusual Death: Let's just say that if Tomie doesn't die this way then something is wrong. Her first death was arguably the worst because she was still an ordinary girl then, being semiconscious after falling off a cliff and then witnessing her classmates saw her to pieces while her only friend watches in horror.
 * Demonic Possession: All it takes is Tomie's HAIR to take over another person's body and turn it into another Tomie.
 * Disproportionate Retribution: Most of the time Tomie does what she does for kicks. However to truly earn her ire, you'd either have to slight her or she merely perceives you slighting her. For example in "Photograph", Tsukiko was on Tomie's Radar for taking pictures of Yamazaki and Tomie was well aware of her crush on him.  Yet her response rather than merely steal him away, was to get Tsukiko suspended and have Yamazaki himself try to kill Tsukiko when she retaliates with her photos of Tomie. Tomie doesn't like the idea of men thinking or talking or interacting with women and girls that aren't her and even then it has to be her and not one of her "Clones".
 * Eyes Do Not Belong There:
 * Fate Worse Than Death: Surprisingly, Tomie could probably be this. Consider that no matter how often she's killed she will always regenerate from her wounds or whatever is left of her, often in horrible gory fashions. Also the fact that proximity to another Tomie causes both to want to kill each other by any means necessary. Whether she acts the way she does in hopes someone will kill her for real, or is a complete bitch because it's her only way of coping with the realization is up to debate.
 * Fingore: Tomie's fingers once regenerated into five of her and ganged up on "Pinky".
 * French Cuisine Is Haughty: Once Tomie is well enough to have a say about what she's eating she'll start demanding foie gras and other fancy food.
 * Full-Frontal Assault: Considering that Tomie always regenerates without clothes, unavoidable really.
 * From a Single Cell
 * Glamour Failure: Photographs reveal that Tomie isn't a normal human. She strongly dislikes having her picture taken.
 * Hoist by His Own Petard: Subverted with Tomie. Prolonged exposure causes the victims to go crazy, and Tomie's repeated taunting is the berserk button that leads to her ending up a gory mess, yet her constant regenerative abilities means that such circumstances are only a minor setback.
 * Humanoid Abomination
 * I'm a Humanitarian: Possibly subverted as Tomie, who's only borderline human, sometimes resorts to this to speed up regeneration.
 * Kill It with Fire: In the manga (Canon version), Tomie herself confirmed in chapter 10 that fire is her weakness and can permanently make her stop regenerating.
 * Lack of Empathy: The root of pretty much all of Tomie's Alpha Bitch-ness and assorted villainous acts. As explained in "Mansion", she doesn't see other people as people. This also explains why she has plenty of thralls but never an actual boyfriend: she enjoys the affection, but after a while she gets bored and it's time to find a new toy.
 * Having no empathy for the other characters does make a bit of sense, considering she's not actually human. From her perspective they're just another type of animal. However, the fact that the various different Tomies rarely get along could be due to this, though it may just be that her species is inherently territorial.
 * Live Action Adaptation: Several. It's worth noting that Tomie's repeated 'returns' allow for the casting of a different actress each time.
 * Manipulative Bitch
 * Mugging the Monster
 * Nigh Invulnerable: Tomie is the regeneration type taken to its logical extreme. Even when submerged in acid, it only partially stops the regeneration process and prevents her decapitated head from dissolving.
 * Burning her remains does seem to destroy them, though. However, if you miss even a single piece of tissue...
 * Not Quite Dead
 * Off with His Head: During a freak out a second face sprouts out of Tomie's head. She orders her two thralls to cut the tumor off, but they cut off her head instead.
 * Pet the Dog: The only person that Tomie does not seek to harm is her Only Friend Reiko, in the first chapter. Reiko witnessed Tomie falling to her death after her boyfriend Yamamoto hit her, and wanted to run for help. She froze when the class realized Tomie was still alive when preparing to cut up her body, and on autopilot mode tossed her best friend's heart in the river. Reiko and Yamamoto decide, after Tomie returns to class with no memory of what happened, is to turn themselves into the police. This act leads to their classmates chasing them down, and Tomie performs a Villainous Rescue, letting Reiko go while confronting Yamamoto and the others who chopped her to pieces alive.
 * Shapeshifter Baggage: They do give an explanation of sorts for this. During the hospital arc, the doctors attempt to kill her with a radiotherapy machine, but it only accelerates her growth. This implies that Tomie is an extreme radiotroph, capable of converting radiation into mass, and presumably under normal circumstances she simply uses background radiation from the air to fuel her regeneration.
 * The Sociopath: If such a description can apply to something that merely looks human.
 * Spooky Photographs: Introduced in the Photograph chapter, and becomes a recurring plot device. One chapter even has an oil painting variant.
 * Technology Marches On: In "Photograph" it takes one accidental photo from the only girl in school who owns a camera to make Tomie lose her cool. How on earth would Tomie cope with everyone owning a camera that can instantly send film and video to everyone else?
 * Then again, it might only work with actual film.
 * The Tell: Every Tomie (in the manga) has the same mole that allows you to tell if someone is a Tomie. This mole is absent in the movie, however.
 * There Can Be Only One: If multiple Tomies turn up, they often start trying to kill each other.
 * Wounded Gazelle Gambit: Whenever someone seduced by her spell tries to kill her, some poor schmuck comes along and saves her, unaware of the endless cycle she has wrought upon her countless victims.
 * Villain Protagonist: Well, technically she's the title character.
 * The Virus: One story involves a girl who gets a kidney transplant from a recently killed Tomie. The kidney starts regenerating into a new Tomie and is removed, but Tomie cells are still floating around, and multiplying inside, the kidney recipient's body. No points for guessing what happens next.
 * The Virus: One story involves a girl who gets a kidney transplant from a recently killed Tomie. The kidney starts regenerating into a new Tomie and is removed, but Tomie cells are still floating around, and multiplying inside, the kidney recipient's body. No points for guessing what happens next.