Manga creator Ito is a master of his craft. His beautifully haunting and detailed artwork is memorizing and uncanny to the eye. Ito's stories are unsettling, often taking the mundane and the comfortable and twisting them into untold horrors beyond comprehension. Such is the case in one of his most beloved classics, Tomie. This widely acclaimed series is a tragic and terrifying tale of a beautiful young woman and the men who obsess over her. It is easy to call Tomie herself somewhat of a femme fatale, but that would do this terrific tale a disservice.
A femme fatale is a classic trope, typically seen in old noir, of a woman who brings rot and ruin to the men around her. Usually, these men know this woman will cause them problems, but their love and obsession for her keep them at her side. Sometimes they are seduced and end up paying dearly for that vulnerability. However, Ito does not bring readers a typical noir story in Tomie. Like most of his fantastic manga, the story quickly takes an unnatural and dark turn. While Tomie does have the uncanny ability to use her beauty, it always ends with deadly consequences for Tomie herself, rather than just the seduced men.
Every man who falls under Tomie's spell murders her viciously and violently in the end. The body horror and twisted ways Tomie dies in Ito's story are pure nightmare fuel. And yet, which each new installment of Tomie, readers see her return in different forms, lives, and circumstances. In this way, no one is ever free from Tomie, and she is never able to escape her fate. Perhaps once she was a regular girl, but now she is some sort of horrific creature who is never satisfied. Femme fatales have always been able to manipulate the people around them through gaslighting, emotional manipulation, and of course, their beauty, but Tomie adds the supernatural factor to that list as well, offering a terrifying spin on the well-known trope.
Despite his choice of monochrome art style, Ito is also very good at not making Tomie's story purely black and white, allowing readers to sympathize with her. Yes, Tomie is a horrific thing spreading like a virus and causing destruction to those who gaze upon her, but she is clearly not the only monster, with the men far from innocent in their thoughts of her. The men who murder Tomie often do it because she wants to leave them or is unnecessarily cruel. While no one deserves to have their feelings played with, murder takes it to another level. While it's fair to call Tomie a monster, she exposes the similarly monstrous behavior of those around her, making her even more of a force to be reckoned with.
Whether it is something as simple as the Uzumaki or the aftermaths of small earthquakes like in short-story The Enigma of Amigara Fault, Ito can take the common and traditional and turn them on their heads with ease. He is able to destroy the common tropes any reader is used to and rebuild them in a monstrous new image without losing what makes that trope popular to begin with. While at times hard to read in its horror, Tomie is well worth revisiting.
