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Tomie Kawakami (in Japanese: 富江) is the titular main antagonist of the Tomie franchise.
Though Tomie appears human, she has an array of bizarre biological abilities which she uses to her advantage.
In the live action adaptations of the series, Tomie is played by a different actress in each film. As such, this ever-changing roster of faces has allowed for a range of interpretations and subtle shading to the part, the most popular being Miho Kanno, Miki Sakai and Miu Nakamura. Miho Kanno was Junji Ito's own personal choice for the role.
In the 2018 anime series Junji Ito Collection adapted from Junji Ito's works, Tomie makes her appearance in an adaptation of Painter and a two-part OVA adapted from the first two parts of Tomie.
In the anime, she was voiced by Rie Suegara in Japanese and Monica Rial in English version.
Biography
Tomie's origins are shrouded in mystery for the most part. The Tomie film series implies that accounts of her date as far back as the 1860s in Japan and stretch into modern times.
In the first issue of the manga, one girl named Reiko claimed to have been friends with her since childhood. Meanwhile in a later chapter of the manga, Tomie herself claimed to have been born in France and that her grandfather knew Picasso; something which may be backed by her repeated requests to her lovers to get her foie gras and caviar, however, this is debatable as Tomie is noted by other characters to be a pathological liar and her tastes may simply be due to her self-perception as royalty, thus leaving the true origins of her and her powers as a mystery.
Manga
Tomie is a serial manga that is the first work of the well-known Japanese horror manga artist, Junji Ito. It tells a story of how the titular Tomie, formerly known as Tomie Kawakami while still a human, was attacked by a group of jealous and hate-filled students after rumors began to spread that she was having a love affair with their beloved head teacher, Satoru Takagi, something which in fact was true.
After the students accidentally killed her when confronting her about her actions, the students were forced to mutilate Tomie to hide the evidence and threw some body parts off a cliff. After her mutilation, Tomie's cells somehow gained demonic powers of an unknown origin which transformed her into a regenerative monster in human shape. A single cell following her transformation is enough for her to come back from death and dividing up her parts, organs or blood, just leads to multiple clones being formed much like cutting the limbs off a starfish will just lead to multiple starfish being born. The only known counter to this regeneration is fire (though so far fire has only been able to stop one clone at a time).
The most horrific turn of Tomie, besides her monstrous transformation, is her change in personality. Every last shed of humanity she once held in her human form had been torn away by her transformation, and she became a manipulative, narcistic and murderous woman who would seduce any male under her power and manipulate everyone to do her biddings without a second thought. Her seduction would eventually draw any male to fall in love with her, save for a certain few, before brainwashing them into insanity and eventually leading them to start mutilating her. The mutilation though would only result in more clones of Tomie herself being produced. She also convinced her teacher, Satoru Takagi, to become her obedient right-hand for further plans.
It should be noted that all of the clones of Tomie shares the same memory and personality, although some of them do have slightly different facial features and hair colors. Furthermore, they all hate each other and attempt to kill each other so that there can only be one Tomie, even manipulating innocent people to do their bidding and murder the other clones.
Tomie's power, in a way, is also like a virus. In the chronologically second arc of the story, the two-part Morita Hospital arc, a clone of Tomie used an alias to got closer to Yukiko, a sick girl, and lied to Yukiko about the infidelity of her (Yukiko's) boyfriend Tadashi, whom Tomie claimed had become her boyfriend instead. After pushing their relationship to the edge, Tomie brainwashed Tadashi and made him kill her, prompting her kidney to be transplanted into the body of Yukiko. However, during the operation, Tomie's kidney grew itself into a head inside Yukiko's abdomen forcing its removal, whilst leftover Tomie's cells proceeded to infiltrate Yukiko's body,
In the second chapter of this arc, Tomie's head was locked up in the basement of Morita Hospital, while some of her cells were taken to the lab for research. However, Tomie's head regenerated into a fully-grown Tomie, who seduced the chief doctor and manipulated Satoru Takagi into infiltrating the hospital, destroying other specimens of her cells to prevent more of her clones being formed.
This Tomie died alongside the chief doctor in a fire set up by Satoru Takagi, but earlier than that, Yukiko started to change physically and emotionally to be similar to Tomie, becoming more vainglorious and caustic in the process. When the basement was burnt to the ground and the fully-grown Tomie perished in the fire, it turned out that Tomie managed to regenerate once more through Yukiko's body and escaped the hospital, killing her host from body to mind in the process.
Tomie's evil acts only continued to escalate in later installments though her tactics of seduction, manipulation, murder, brainwashing and cell infiltration remained the same. Among her acts was breaking an artist's mind by continually telling him his portrait could do nothing to show her true beauty, driving a sculptor insane with the same method leading him to destroy every statue of Tomie he carved, infiltrating a rich elderly family and planning their death after becoming their adoptive daughter (though she inadvertently did do some good by killing their gold-digging and murderous maid in the process), and so on.
In another chapter, Tomie and Satoru also infiltrated the house of an old man, before chaining up the old man and turning his daughter into a monster through experiments with Tomie's own cells, before taking their place as the house's owners.
Most notably, a chapter titled "Boy", was the first instance of the victim of her schemes being a child. In this chapter, Tomie brainwashed a child who happened to meet her, by manipulating him into stealing her some clothes and convincing him to become her son. Then overtime, the boy was slowly driven to become obsessed with Tomie and eventually began to firmly believing that Tomie was indeed his true mother. What made this scheme even more horrifying was that throughout the chapter subtle hints seemed to imply that she was also sexually molesting the boy. Later when the boy found her having an affair with a man, the boy killed the man under the influence of Tomie's brainwashing, and was then driven to a mental breakdown when Tomie rejected his claims that she was his mother. At the end of this story, Tomie went to the boy's home, which only exacerbated his insanity even further, before seducing the boy's father and leaving with him, never to return. This final act of manipulation mentally broke the boy for the rest of his life, leading him to commit an unknown crime which lead to him being imprisoned and executed.
In the finale of the Tomie manga serialization, in a chapter titled "Old and Ugly", Tomie arguably met her ultimate defeat by having her only known remaining body be sealed in concrete by the combined force of Yasuko Nakamura and Ryo, a disfigured former fashion model and one of her few surviving victims.
Years later, Ryo unsealed Tomie's prison and saw her as a crying and frail old woman, much to his pleasure and relief as he thought he had finally avenged himself. However, that turned out to be merely a delusion of Ryo's, since in fact, there was no trace of an old woman to be found. Yasuko later discovered after closely examining the concrete block that Tomie had somehow escaped through the cracks that had formed on the concrete over the years, and that the wailing sound they previously heard was only noise of the wind blowing through the cracks in the concrete.
After this finale, Tomie would not make her next appearance until Souichi Possessed, which showed that an elderly clone had indeed survived the concrete incident, and after escaping, spawned a new younger clone, who proceeded to seduce Souichi's brother.
Adaptations
In addition to the original 20 chapter manga which ran from 1987 to 2000 (later collected as 3 volumes in 2001), there have been several animated OVAs and 9 live-action Tomie films to date.
- Live-Action:
- Tomie
- Tomie: Another Face
- Tomie: Replay
- Tomie: Re-Birth
- Tomie: The Final Chapter -Forbidden Fruit-
- Tomie: Beginning
- Tomie: Revenge
- Tomie vs. Tomie
- Tomie: Unlimited
- Animated: Junji Ito Collection
Personality
When Tomie was an ordinary human girl, she was kind, yet slightly ditzy and even manipulative at times, oblivious to her own beauty. Due to this, she only really had one friend and other girls often picked on her. However, when she gained her regenerative abilities she became stripped of all kindness and became almost a living embodiment of lust, jealousy, greed, envy, and wrath. She is the ultimate self-destructive entity, yet she survives anything due to her regenerative ability. She is mercurial and sociopathic in nature, exploiting people for her own amusement and entertainment before discarding them or being killed by them. Upon regenerating from her various deaths she will typically seek revenge on the perpetrator barring extraordinary conditions. She acts as though she is a noble with no one else's life being of any worth other than to serve her.
She sees men as interchangeable and dumb accessories and as a habit tends to be dismissive of women unless they get in her way or can be used to her advantage (noticeably, in the film series, she sees women and men the same way and is shown seducing women as well). She is seemingly unused to rejection and those few extraordinary instances of individuals refusing her (usually due to the person having some sort of psychological trauma which prevents her seduction from taking hold) have typically lead to her first feeling shock, then to a short-lived obsession over the person, before finally causing her to revert to anger at not being able to turn the person.
Her normal strategy is to manipulate others to do the killing and dirty work for her, however, she is not above taking care of matters herself especially if the victim is vulnerable or unable to retaliate. She is also noted to be a consummate liar a fact that she uses to her advantage. Though her clones are like-minded and capable of short term alliances for mutual gain or in the quest for vengeance they will typically turn on each other at the first opportunity in order to avoid having to "share".
Ironically, despite her weakness to fire, at least one clone of hers was shown to have a fascination with fire and arson, though this may in fact be due more to the suffering it inflicts on others or the fact she enjoys the flames scarlet color (which she implies is her favorite color) rather than the act of burning itself.
Appearance
In terms of appearance Tomie is a beautiful, typically dark haired girl who can be identified by a mole under her left eye. She usually appears/ regenerates into a teenager age-wise however in at least one instance a duplicate spawned by her regeneration grew to be a young adult in her 20s.
Powers and Abilities
Tomie possesses an undisclosed ability to make any human male she encountered fall in love with her. Through sleight of hand, or emotional manipulation, she drives these men into jealous rages over her affection that inevitably lead to brutal acts of violence. Her skill with emotional manipulation has been shown to work well on females too if she desires, as Tomie can easily sway women into being her friends only to pit them against each other with the resulting jealous frenzy leading them to kill each other.
This ability to manipulate while useful has also resulted in her being killed time and time again by people she has driven to murderous rages, but she has survived regardless thanks to her regenerative abilities which allows her to quickly heal wounds and goes so far as to allow her to regenerate back after death from individual blood drops.
Tomie's regeneration can be slowed but not negated by acid while in contrast it can be accelerated if she eats human flesh, something she is more than willing to do if conditions require it. Furthermore extreme emotional stress or emotional upheaval can cause her to instinctively spawn a duplicate which will bud off of her body perhaps as a kind of survival mechanism. Decapitating her will only result in two separate clones, one spawned from the head the other from the body.
Despite many attempts by others to kill her, most conventional attempts to end her horror have been less than successful with many more clones of her still at large. Only the total and complete incineration of a clone's entire body to the point of carbonization seems to permanently kill a Tomie's clone and as a result, it is used throughout the movie and manga series to dispose of her. Interestingly the movie Tomie: another face (1999) is a noted exception to this, as after one of her clones was shoved into an incinerator her ashes formed into a face in the air before her killers and claimed that each and every one of her ashes would grow into another Tomie.
This exception, however, could have been due to a failure to totally burn every last cell remaining amongst her ashes, something which was shown in the manga chapter "Little finger" in which several severed fingers of a Tomie clone managed to regrow into complete clones despite being thrown into a campfire. Intriguingly that same manga chapter seemed to imply that Tomie's regeneration can be controlled or suppressed to a degree as one of the clones seemingly delayed her own regeneration to full health in order to gain the sympathy of one of her victims and upon finally receiving his confession of love the clone quickly healed herself and left him to die.
Implanting organs/pieces of her into others will result in one of several outcomes depending on their age and gender of the recipient:
- In the case of women (and men in the movie continuity) whole organs and tissues implanted in them will attempt to regenerate into a full clone Tomie within their body and if not removed quickly the duplicate may burst out of the unfortunate's body much like the chest-burster stage of the Xenomorphs from the Alien movie franchise.
- Cell infusions such as skin or blood will gradually turn a female victim into a clone of Tomie. If the female in question was around the same age as her the result will be a transformation of the victim into a normal clone. In contrast, if the cellular infusion was done to an infant the newly made clone of Tomie unlike in the other case is seemingly subject to the effect of aging and has to grow up like a normal human being.
- The movie Tomie vs Tomie (2007) implies this is due to the resulting child being an impure clone and having become infected with normal human cells from the host, a fact which may result in her body breaking down though such degeneration is not always the case. When it does occur this breakdown can only be counteracted by infusions of blood from a pure clone or the original herself.
- However, regardless of whether the imperfect clones are subject to degeneration all are subject to aging with the final chapter of the manga even going so far as to hint that one blood infusion transformed individual who had been imprisoned for decades in a block of cement by a vengeful former lover of Tomie's had not escaped before she became a withered old hag.
- Hair samples are debatably the only known exception to the above mentioned rules of regenerating. Such samples will only replace the victim's hair before burrowing their way into the victim's skull and brain. In doing so the victim will briefly be able to communicate with Tomie and fall under her sway however the effects are temporary and ultimately fatal as the hair sample will eventually grow out of control and crush the victim's organs before emerging from them as a mass of hair. It is unknown if the mass subsequently will attempt to grow into a full clone of her.
The origins of her powers are mysterious as is how they operate, but one issue in the manga implied that in addition to using other people's flesh as fuel for the process she may also be capable of turning specific kinds of energy (such as radiation) into bio-matter in order to aid in the process. In that issue, a doctor upon discovering a kidney of a Tomie that had had been transplanted into another girl was attempting to regenerate into a full Tomie clone inside her tried to stop the process by removing the kidney and bombarding it with gamma rays only for the kidney's regeneration to be vastly increased instead. This may also imply that her powers are partially fueled by the absorption of background radiation.
Her only seeming weakness beyond total incineration appears to be in the form of the photographs which is especially ironic given her vain nature. Initially, she was seemingly unaware of this fact and it wasn't until the first time someone tried to photograph her extensively that she realized the truth. As she and the photographer discovered for reasons unknown the developed photographs will typically show the true extent of her inhuman nature in the form of a horribly distorted image of her featuring a second malformed and ghoulish looking head growing out of her normal human one.
The reason for this phenomenon is unknown, but it may be indicative of the fact that while the humans are easily distracted and biased by what they believe to the point they may miss something right in front of their eyes, camera lenses are incapable of bias and thus are not fooled by the act a being like Tomie puts on, something that allows them to perceive a person's soul (per certain beliefs) and thus capture proof that she is a "two-faced" monster in the truest sense of the phrase.
Interpretations
While Tomie is considered a villain by the vast majority of readers, some argue that she is the opposite.
Raechel Dumas, in her book The Monstrous-Feminine in Contemporary Japanese Popular Culture stated, "Tomie, in 1980s Japan becomes symbolic of the rise of Japanese girlhood that actively resists established models of female desirability and desire".[1]
YouTuber Sage's Rain argues that Tomie is a victim and one of the few good characters in Junji Ito's works, as she was dehumanized by men who sexualized her. He notes how Tomie's situation is a parallel to women who are victim-blamed for being attacked by men, saying "when she can't be controlled, or tamed, or possessed, she's killed. When they're embarrassed by her, when she mocks them, she's killed".[2]
Gallery
External Links
- Tomie Kawakami on the Pure Evil Wiki
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