TOMIE: NO USE ESCAPING - JUNJI ITO

Don’t have too much to say about this one, Ito is the fucking king. Of the three longer works I’ve read from him, Uzumaki, Gyo, and this one, I’d say I rank them in that order, best to worst. It might be more than a coincidence that my ranking lines up with the order in which I read them, but irregardless, they are all very strong and very strange and very good. Tomie is structured as a series of somewhat short stories that I assume were individual issues originally. I know very little about Manga, Anime and the cultures and fandoms that surround them, so I honestly don’t know how this would have been published originally and whether or not this is unusual. Likewise, the stories could be read in basically any order it seems, especially once you’re generally familiar with Tomie the character, only a few of them connect directly, and I don’t know how common this is either (Uzumaki and Gyo, on the other hand, were quite sequential and built on one another directly). Tomie is a beautiful teenage girl, with a small beauty mark. Men are constantly falling under her spell, bringing her the things she asks for (she’s got expensive taste) and killing on her command. However, they always end up killing and mutilating Tomie herself. So far, so Lacanian. It twists further and gets really Ito-y when you realize each shread or piece of Tomie grows back the body in an extremely gross process. I was a bit worried about how “normal” the idea of a femme fatale, especially a teenage girl, was but Ito manages to dip the story in so much body-horror and disgusting terror it could only be him. I think I’ve read all the long Ito now (except maybe one about Frankenstein?) so Manga people, let me know: what else is like this? 4 beauty marks