{Blu-ray Review} Monster Girl: Revisiting the Roots of Tomie

“It seems like this is going to be my life’s work.”

Junji Ito is practically a household name these days, even here in the States. In 1998, however, that wasn’t the case. About a decade earlier, Ito had burst onto the manga scene with the first installment of what would become a long-running series about a girl named Tomie.

To this day, Tomie remains one of Junji Ito’s most famous and striking creations. For those who aren’t familiar with her story, Tomie can be described as something almost like a reverse final girl. A figure of monstrous vanity and narcissism, Tomie is nonetheless the perpetual victim. Everyone who meets her becomes obsessed with her, driven by a desire to possess her and, eventually, to kill her. But no matter how many times Tomie is killed, she always comes back.

There is plenty to unpack when it comes to the meaning behind Tomie, and the character has inspired considerable scholarship in the years since her debut. As for Ito himself, he writes a bit about the origins of Tomie in his recent nonfiction book Uncanny: The Origins of Fear. “So there I was, thinking about how to express death’s true weightiness, and I came up with the device of making the killer the victim,” he writes. It’s one of many times that Ito creates horror by inverting expectations.

As for Tomie herself, “She’s different from ghosts and monsters. She can’t walk through walls, she can’t use any shady telekinetic abilities. She lives in the real world, she has a body that can be touched, and she can even be killed like a regular person,” Ito writes. “Thus, the only unknown is why she won’t die. There’s something disturbing about this single point being incomprehensible, and it makes Tomie forever the object of people’s fear.”

The series continued on and off in the Japanese magazine Monthly Halloween from 1987 until 2000, so by the time Ataru Oikawa directed the first feature-length adaptation of one of Junji Ito’s manga – Tomie, of course – pretty much the entire series had already seen print, meaning that the film had a lot of material to play with. Contrast this with Higuchinsky’s 2000 adaptation of Uzumaki, which came out while the series was still underway and, as a result, had to sort of make up its own ending on the fly.

For the movie, Oikawa pulled elements specifically from the stories “Photo” and “Kiss,” the fourth and fifth installments of the series. However, Tomie (1998) is not really an adaptation of any of Ito’s stories. It is, more accurately, a sort of abstraction of the Tomie mythos which was, by then, already familiar to readers of horror manga and had already begun to make its way overseas in translation.

Before directing Tomie, Oikawa had made a name for himself as a screenwriter, beginning with the creation of the scenario for the 1988 cult hit Door. With Ito’s approval and input, Oikawa wrote a new script for Tomie, stating that he didn’t want to make a movie “where people scream with fear. I didn’t imagine that kind of horror movie. I wanted this to be more like a drama for youth.”

He certainly got his wish. I first saw Oikawa’s Tomie years ago, when I was just discovering Junji Ito’s work. I remembered not caring for it, which was also in keeping with the movie’s generally poor reputation overall. Despite this, the cinematic Tomie was enough of a hit to kick off a series of its own, which currently includes nine installments, not to mention episodes of both the Junji Ito Collection and Junji Ito Maniac anime series featuring storylines involving Tomie.

I’ve seen… several of them. I couldn’t tell you how many for certain. But I hadn’t revisited the original in a very long time, until the new Arrow Blu-ray arrived on my doorstep.

Taking the journey back to Tomie’s first cinematic appearance is undeniably still a little disappointing if what you’re looking for is a proper Junji Ito story. Video Watchdog called it “too mild and slow-going,” and they’re not wrong. However, they also said that it was “attractively photographed and Ms. Kanno, with her soulless eyes and utterly creepy smile, remains the quintessential Tomie.”

And they’re not wrong about that, either.

The “Ms. Kanno” in question is Miho Kanno, who was purportedly hand-picked by Ito himself for the role. Wisely, however, the film underplays her – keeping her face hidden from the viewer nearly its entire running time. For the most part, we don’t see Tomie. Instead, we see the reverberations caused by her presence, and how they affect the lives of those around her.

This time around, I was better able to appreciate the slow, simmering drama of urban malaise that Oikawa conjures with his version of Tomie. In this, he is helped along considerably by the film’s eerie and unsettling soundscape, especially Tomie’s weird theme song, performed by Japanese pop group World Famous.

Everything in this Tomie is diffuse and hazy and tinted. People have conversations about their futures while smoking cigarettes a lot, while the Tomie stuff just kind of sizzles on the back burner. For fully a third of the film, Tomie herself is just growing in a box in the downstairs apartment and never interacting with any of the main characters.

For anyone who comes to Tomie looking for a faithful adaptation of Junji Ito’s ideas – or, for that matter, much of a rumination on what the concept of Tomie herself might mean – disappointment with Tomie (1998) is inevitable. But for those who are susceptible to Oikawa’s droning, end-of-the-millennium vibes and “drama for youth,” this Tomie is a haunting and frequently gorgeous meditation on… well, something, anyway.