Tomie

Tomie Kawakami is a schoolgirl of extraordinary beauty who provokes obsession in everyone she meets. The obsession curdles into violence; she is murdered and dismembered; every fragment regenerates into a new complete Tomie.

The series comprises independent stories across different times and places, each following a new set of people through the same cycle.

She is killed in almost every story. That has never once been the end of one.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

There is no continuity and no progression. Each story restarts the pattern with new characters, and Tomie herself has no arc, no development and no history that is ever established.

The repetition is the design. The series is a set of variations on a fixed situation, and the accumulation across twenty stories is the effect.

The series never explains her. She is not a demon, a ghost or an experiment, and Ito consistently refuses to supply an origin.

She is better understood as a phenomenon that the stories observe from different angles. Several attempt an explanation and all of them are partial.

The premise inverts a convention: the monster is not hideous but perfect, and what she does to people is achieved entirely through their response to looking at her.

The series is genuinely unsettling about desire, possessiveness and the speed with which admiration becomes a claim.

A beautiful woman who deserves what happens to her is an ugly pattern, and the series can be read that way.

It can also be read as an account of what men do to women who are looked at, in which Tomie's indestructibility is the point rather than her culpability. Both readings are available and the ambiguity is not resolved.

The body-horror sequences — fragments growing into new bodies, partial Tomies, a head developing a torso — are among Ito's most inventive.

The regeneration is drawn as biological rather than supernatural, with a clinical attention to the process that makes it considerably worse. Ito is also careful to vary the mechanism between stories, so a reader who thinks they know how she returns is repeatedly wrong.

These are Ito's first published stories and the drawing improves visibly across the series, from relatively plain early pages to the dense hatching of his mature style.

The progression is interesting in itself, and the later stories are noticeably more assured in both composition and pacing.

Twenty stories on one premise is a great deal, and the middle of the collection is repetitive by any measure.

Readers frequently recommend sampling rather than reading straight through, since the effect depends on recognition rather than on accumulation of detail. The stories were written across more than a decade for different magazines, and reading them consecutively produces an effect the original publication never intended.

The people around her are consistently weak, possessive and quick to violence, and the series has no interest in making any of them sympathetic.

The uniformity is a limitation and is also arguably the argument: the response she provokes is presented as general rather than as a property of any individual.

The character is among the most recognisable in horror manga, and the series has been adapted into a long sequence of Japanese films.

It also established Ito's reputation and the template of his method: a fixed strange premise, examined repeatedly, never explained. Her name has also become shorthand in Japanese popular culture for a particular kind of beautiful, destructive and indestructible figure.

A single deluxe hardcover collects the complete series, which is the most practical way to read it.

The earlier paperback releases were incomplete and are best avoided, since several of the stronger later stories were missing from them. The hardcover also restores the original story order, which matters because the drawing's development across the series is part of what makes it interesting.

Readers who want Ito's horror at its most conceptual, and who are interested in a work that refuses explanation as a matter of principle.

It is the least narratively satisfying of his major works and the most formally interesting. Readers who want a story should start with Uzumaki instead.