Spooky unkillable witch girl who makes men fall in love with her only to then go crazy and dismember her, then regenerate and begin the cycle anew. I know, THAT old chestnut again - it’s Junji Ito’s Tomie Boy!
Tomie is one of Ito’s oldest characters. The first story in this collection is back from when he was working as a dental technician in the ‘80s and drew manga in his spare time, with the most recent taking place years later when he’d become a bestselling and award-winning author whose work was regularly being adapted into film and TV shows.
I don’t know why he kept telling stories about this character though. Obviously something about Tomie kept pulling him back but it’s not clear what. And, considering this edition collects the three Tomie books in one, that’s not great. Worse, he barely develops the character over 730+ pages and years of storytelling.
What exactly is Tomie? Where did she come from (where did she go, where did she come from Junji Ito)? What does she want? Why does she do what she does? What is her goal? These are all basic questions you’d expect a competent author to answer for their main character, especially given the sheer abundance of stories she appears in, and Ito completely fails at answering any of the above.
What we do know about Tomie is that she’s fatally beautiful, meaning she transfixes men until they kill each other, others around them, and, ultimately, her. She’s incredibly mean-spirited and she can’t die. She also regenerates from mere pieces of her flesh. So if she’s cut in half, both halves regrow into one full Tomie - so she can effectively clone herself numerous times this way.
Because Ito doesn’t do anything with the character beyond establishing her powers, the stories become repetitively inane in their structure. Tomie shows up, men fall for her, she ruins their lives, they kill her, she regenerates, blood blood blood, etc. The stories rarely differ from this template and it gets quite dull after a spell. Ito becomes more proficient at this story over the years but he frustratingly refuses (or is unable to?) grow the character beyond this basic style of horror story.
The book also highlights a couple of Ito’s weaknesses as a writer: he has Tomie do whatever creepy thing - become a carpet or a drink but only for that story - for no reason other than contrived horror, and he ends his stories very abruptly which often left me feeling unsatisfied and unimpressed with what I’d read. What happened to the hundreds, if not thousands, of Tomies created in these stories - surely they’d keep replicating and eventually overwhelm the planet like the Tribbles did on the Enterprise? Nah. That was just for that one story - forget it ever happened! Marge Simpson hmm…
The art in the beginning of the book is crude by Ito’s standards but becomes more polished as the book progresses until it resembles the high quality of his current work - and Ito’s art is, as it usually is in his manga, the highlight of this book. The imagery in Boy, of Tomie flailing around on an empty beach smiling, is wonderfully unsettling, and her “real” self appearing in photographs is an interesting detail. Babysitter has a compelling premise and some of the eerie settings - an abandoned hut in the woods, a gothic mansion, a rural town - made the formulaic stories seem a bit less monotonous.
Tomie is basically horror for horror’s sake - it’s one meaningless, samey story after another that looks and seems like horror but comes off as silly and superficial most of the time. Tomie may be Junji Ito’s most written-about character but she’s also among his least interesting. Is this one of Ito’s better books? Not to m(i)e.
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