Jump to ratings and reviews
Rate this book
Rate this book
The first volume of the series introduces us to Tomie, a girl who simply will not die.
In the opening story, Tomie incurs the homicidal wrath of a lust-driven schoolteacher and his students.
In "Photograph," she returns as a member of the oppressive Public Morality Committee and entraps an aspiring young photographer, Tsukiko.
"Kiss" continues Tomie's pursuit of Tsukiko and her favorite schoolteacher.
In "Mansion," Tomie and one of her minions take control of an old man, his house, and his only daughter, with grotesque results.
"Revenge" finds the demonic girl as the object of jealously rivalry between two bone-weary mountaineers.

Collected Works:

Tomie
Photograph
Kiss
Mansion
Revenge
The Basin of the Waterfall

248 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1987

156 people are currently reading
3977 people want to read

About the author

Junji Ito

260 books14.3k followers
Junji Itō (Japanese: 伊藤潤二, Ito Junji) is a Japanese cartoonist and illustrator, best known for his horror manga.
Ito was born in Gifu Prefecture, Japan in 1963. He was inspired to make art from a young age by his older sister's drawing and Kazuo Umezu's horror comics. Until the early 1990s he worked as a dental technician, while making comics as a side job. By the time he turned into a full time mangaka, Ito was already an acclaimed horror artists.
His comics are celebrated for their finely depicted body horrors, while also retaining some elements of psychological horror and erotism.
Although he mostly produces short stories, Ito is best known for his longer comic series: Tomie (1987-2000), about a beautiful high school girl who inspires her admirers to commit atrocities; Uzumaki (1998-1999), set in a town cursed with spiral patterns; Gyo (2001-2002), featuring a horde of metal-legged undead fishes. Tomie and Uzumaki in particular have been adapted multiple times in live-action and animation.

Ratings & Reviews

What do you think?
Rate this book

Friends & Following

Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!

Community Reviews

5 stars
1,304 (36%)
4 stars
1,243 (35%)
3 stars
805 (22%)
2 stars
157 (4%)
1 star
36 (1%)
Displaying 1 - 30 of 279 reviews
Profile Image for Tawfek.
3,659 reviews2,213 followers
July 30, 2023
What?!
the last thing i would have expected is to read something scary, i have had great immunity to horror for the longest time, i still do, but Junji Ito is out of this world.
i think i finished Drifting Classroom this year, it wasn't scary, yes it should be horrifying for the kids involved, but you ended up just feeling sorry for them!
That's not the case with Tomie, scary females in horror literature or movies freak me the fuck out, its a strong inaccurate expression for my case, but they are the closest to scared you can get me.
For the longest time, i have viewed the girl from Ringu as the scariest horror creation ever, and her reincarnation in F.E.A.R. video games, Alma was a horrific beauty to behold, and then i met her again in The Evil Within video game, this time walking on 8 legs, and can climb walls, and can only be killed with fire.
I am really open to reconsider my position on the most horrifying female creation ever, when it comes to Tomie.
She is Great, but she is limited somehow, not as persistent as Alma, and not as decisive as her.
Alma while she played with the Protagonist of FEAR so much, she was really final with everyone else, we rarely see this in Tomie.
Tomie is really an unusual creation too, So she attracts men, they are hypnotized by her, and fall in love with her, But Hear this out, they want to stab her!
Like for real, that's also part of her power, that not only she attracts the men, she also somehow make them think its logical to stab her for the most superficial reasons.
And it plays well with her freakiness, because if you stab her, cut her to pieces, make her bleed to death, she then can multiply from her blood or her flesh, you end up with an Abundance of Tomies!
each one eliciting the same emotions from men, and each one able to multiply the same way.
Junji Ito has a really freaky penciling ability too, his many variations of Tomie, were each uniquely horrifying, and had a unique growth pattern.
Anyway, This is the kind of Art that make me feel glad i am still alive, its uniqueness in its own field, its effect on the whole medium of Manga, People like Junji change the landscape of writing and penciling forever, you have to learn from him, and somehow find a way to become as unique, and offer more for the next generations of Writers/Artists.
We are in a constant motion of evolution, but each once in a while, there comes that huge leap forward, Junji Ito quite easily presents this leap from my perspective in his field.
Profile Image for ☾❀Miriam✩ ⋆。˚.
952 reviews481 followers
September 18, 2019
Even though Tomie is one of Junji ito's most famous works, it has never been my favourite. There is just something about it that doesn't spark my interest. For one thing, I don't find it as scary as some of his other works (especially the short stories), and also I don't particularly like Tomie as a character.

Tomie-v01-c02-053

The artwork is also less refined than some other works by the author, and the story itself is entertaining but not as great as others. This first volume gets better towards the end, and the last few chapters are my favourites as I find them closer to Ito's usual atmospheric genius. I actually believe that Ito gives his best in short stories so, with the exception of Uzumaki, I sometimes have problems following a plot that spreads across several chapters/volumes.

Tomie-v01-c02-067

I also believe the horror of Tomie is specifically tailored for a male audience, because it reminds me of the myth of the mermaid, a woman who attracts young men with her apparent beauty, but turns out to be a horrible monster hungry for their flesh. Anyway, I may be immune to Tomie's charm, but I am not immune to Ito's art, so it was still worth re-reading this one.
Profile Image for Norah Una Sumner.
880 reviews516 followers
May 22, 2021
Surprisingly not as disturbing as some of Junji Ito's other works. Sure, the body horror is still just as present but perhaps it's the fact that the characters are barely flashed out or that we don't really have that much background knowledge of that that makes this fall short in terms of scaring me much. Creepy? Absolutely. One of his best works? Not even close.
Profile Image for Brenna.
199 reviews33 followers
September 20, 2019
Tomie was a beautiful schoolgirl in those days before her body parts were discovered scattered throughout a Japanese plateau.

But this did not stop her from being the beautiful Tomie, for with her death came about the presence of other Tomies. Identical in every way to the (presumed) original, these Tomies lived throughout Japan, seducing men and boys alike. Looking at her caused a sort of spell, enticing the unfortunate being into following her commands unto their own deaths.

Never clarified is whether or not the horrible, horrible death of the first girl in Tomie 1: The Junji Ito Horror Comic Collection was the initial death which set off the series of events within the series. While on a class field trip, Tomie raised the ire of her betrothed and her high school teacher through her fiery passions, which directly led to her subsequent death and dismemberment. However, as each following story proceeds, it is discovered that the (seemingly) resurrected Tomie has learned only one thing from her experience; how to better manipulate through words.

“Boys don't understand,” says the man presumed to be Tomie's aged father. “They get really into her but... for some reason, they try to cut her body into pieces. What is it about her that so attracts these boys?” As the story unfolds, it becomes less clear as to whether these are the words of a concerned father... or of Tomie's bizarre insecurities made manifest in the form of an older gentleman.

What begins as a truly fantastic horror story becomes more and more plausible (within the parameters of horror story logic, anyway) by the end of the first volume. Perhaps the maladjusted girl from the first section of the book was but an extension of some earlier incarnation. Or maybe she truly was Victim Zero, as it initially appears. But as the stories become more and more independent, the characters less and less interrelated, it becomes obvious that there are a multitude of Tomies wandering the hills and valleys of Japan, haunting the springs and snow-capped mountains, driving masses of men and boys willingly to their deaths.

And her motives are never fully revealed. For while a reader can sense that Tomie is somehow more than human by the first few pages, her own base humanity cannot be overlooked. Is she looking for that perfect love, which becomes so entrenching and all-encompassing that no mortal mind can retain its grasp on life? Or does she deliberately set out to destroy others using her stunning beauty as the fatal bait? Or - yet another feasible possibility – is Tomie some manner of demon which procreates through its own dismemberment, and finds that it must callously lure the unsuspecting into committing this task?

Very few answers are given in Tomie 1, but a fascinating series of questions are presented. Sadly, with the 2005 demise of publisher ComicsOne, it may become more and more difficult to find subsequent volumes of Tomie which may answer them.

(*Tomie contains perhaps the single most horrifying image I've ever seen in manga - that of a multi-faced worm-beast crawling along the floorboards of an old mansion in an attempt to help the protagonist escape from Tomie. Yes, the hideous creation is actually the misformed body of a formerly beautiful young girl who had suffered such a metamorphosis at Tomie's bequest. The disturbing image of all these twisted faces capped with the partially-formed giant head of Tomie and tailed with the segmented body of an earthworm is truly nightmarish, yet fascinating at the same time.)
Profile Image for holden.
644 reviews10 followers
April 30, 2023
HAHAHAHA KOLIKO JE OVO BOLESNO JA NE MOGU VIŠE HAHAHAHA
Profile Image for Keiko, the manga enthusiast ♒︎.
1,251 reviews180 followers
April 6, 2023
Imagine a 42-pieces-mutilated-Tomie scattered around some city in Japan, each piece resurrecting at a certain place, at a certain time, just to be killed and mutilated again—Soon enough, Japan will be filled with Tomies. I'll be damned. This must be the reason why I found it confusing before, without actually finishing it. I'm thinking of only a particular body, but there are a lot of events I can't put side by side with another. Anyway, now that I've seen Tomie in a fuller picture–incredible haunting. I kind of like this.
Profile Image for Juan Carlos malik.
918 reviews335 followers
December 2, 2024
De los monstruos y seres del horror mejor creados por Junji Ito. Donde utiliza al perverso femenino, la obsesión y la belleza como elementos de horror, aue lleva a los seres humanos a caer en caos, desesperación y muertes. Amoo a este personaje de ito.
Profile Image for Meisha (ALittleReader).
246 reviews62 followers
March 25, 2020
This wasn’t bad. I just wasn’t intrigued enough to carry on to the next volume. Maybe it’s a personal thing. I don’t really care for manga much and I’m starting to think that the format just doesn’t connect with me as much as an actual book. I feel like the stories are too short and the stories felt some what bland to me. It felt like a more high school version of Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark. Interesting story just not scary and the meat of the story isn’t there... However I do find Tomi a very interesting character. And had it been done differently, I could see this being potentially truly terrifying. Just not my cup of tea. That being said, I do recommend it. I’d recommend it to people who love manga and love horror! :)
Profile Image for Dimitris Papastergiou.
2,478 reviews80 followers
October 23, 2022
It was ok.

Could be much much MUCH better.

Here's my problem, I get it. Junji Ito is the new sensation and everything, he's awesome, his artwork is great (mostly) and his stories from what I've read so far are mostly good, with amazing ideas but the execution is what I have a problem with.

See, there's a main theme in his stories and there are episodes of sorts of each chapter after chapter that something happens to someone you don't care in the slightest and it's pretty much insignificant to the main story most of the time but it happens so you can see some creepy dismemberment or something like that.

There's no character development and that's just what hurts me the most. The characters' reactions and choices are mostly dumb as fuck without reason or logic and that also hurts my intelligence.

Other than that it's fun to read and you for sure want to see what happens next and at the end but it was a chore to read some of the stories and that takes it down a star, sadly.

PS. No. It wasn't as good as Uzumaki.
Profile Image for Rob.
458 reviews36 followers
May 14, 2012
(This review is for both volumes of Tomie.)

(7/10) From the ad copy for this manga, it sounds like another installment of misogynistic horror that expresses a deep anxiety over young girls with unregulated sexuality and the uncomfortable ways they make men feel. But things are a bit more complicated than that. In the best of these stories (like the first few) Tomie isn't the real source of horror at all: through her abberant being, she reveals the horrific nature of the ordinary people around her. Even when she's more of a straightforward villain, she seems more like a brat than a seductress, and is too grotesque to be really sexualized. Of course, there's a strain of the misogynistic in the monstrous feminine as it's presented here, but it's not as bad as I initially feared.

The anthology format has its advantages and disadvantages. It's neat how the stories seem to be based around a shared mythology that agrees on a lot of things, but are always just a bit incompatible with each other. It seems like a bunch of urban legends centred around the same figure. On the other hand, reading the stories together helps to highlight how repetitive Ito's storytelling and art is. Maybe it's just because I've also read some of his previous work, but at this point I'm no longer shocked or horrified by a bunch of limbs being where they aren't supposed to be, and the recurring nature of Tomie's powers don't help that. The uneven quality of the stories also makes this one hard to read from cover-to-cover.

If you're a horror comic fan and you've already read and liked Uzumaki, Tomie might just scratch your itch. It's an interesting work, if not an entirely successful one, and that makes it worth checking out.
Profile Image for Eni Gajanova.
306 reviews13 followers
May 14, 2023
Plašim se sebe koliko sam zavolela bizarno uz Đunđi Ita.
Profile Image for Dragana Zečević.
270 reviews15 followers
November 16, 2023
Nemam sa čime da je poredim jer mi je ovo prva manga ikada,ali mi se zapravo i dopalo. S tim što je na momente bilo previše scena nasilja nad ženama,u najgorem i najneprijatnijem smislu. Ali opet,tako morbidno mi se dopalo.
Profile Image for Maja.
283 reviews35 followers
May 14, 2023
Moj komentar za sva tri toma Tomie.
Odvratno. Tragedije, bodyhorror i nasilje (prvenstveno nad ženskim telima) na 1001 način! Ume da bude maksimum mračno. Ali ako je to baš onaj horor koji želite, samo napred. No judgement here. Meni ga je bilo malo previše, iako su mi se par priča odavde baš, baš dopale, zajedno sa scenama nasilja. Najbolja mi je epizoda je ona sa sake-om.
Moja glavna zamerka je što autor nema nameru da objasni odakle je Tomie i šta je ona. Tu sam bila onako tužna i razočarana.

Svaka epizoda je za sebe (ima izuzetaka), sa novim okruženjima i postavkom likova, kao i svojom varijacijom razvoja užasnih finala. Pročitaš dve i već imaš ideju kako će se razvijati ostale, pošto određeni narativni elementi tokom epizode često dožive istu metamorfozu (mada ljudska izopačenost uvek nađe način da iznenadi svojom unikatnom pojavom). Lica sporednih likova se ponavljaju, pa deluje kako de se svi oni prolaze uzastopne reinkarnacije, proživljavaju različite nasilne sudbine, da bi se posle smrti ponovno vratili u pakao zvani Tomie.

Ne preporučujem da se celi brojevi „progutaju“ za jedan dan, kao ni da se previše gugla o priči pre čitanja.
Profile Image for Petra.
412 reviews40 followers
August 28, 2022
My least favorite of all Junji Ito's work. It feels a bit repetitive and less gory and scary than his other work. The character felt flat to me and I wished we at least got Tomie's backstory or found out more about her motivation.
Amazing artwork as always.
Profile Image for Brittni Kristine.
190 reviews174 followers
November 21, 2020
I'm a massive Junji Ito fan, but frankly, I've never understood the appeal of Tomie. The stories about her get incredibly repetitive. Like, I get it. Tomie's hot, and she's gonna use her hotness to murder. Over, and over, and over, and over again. If you're going through his works, I think this one is a pass.
Profile Image for Hany entre letras.
600 reviews31 followers
October 12, 2024
No mi favorito de Junji Ito, en cuanto a historia (supongo porque los protagonistas van cambiando y te cuesta empatizar enteramente con ellos), pero sigue manteniendo su esencia de loquito.

El primer relato creo que fue el que más me dejó 😲🫣😀 pero ya luego eran repeticiones de un poco de lo mismo.

¿Me voy a leer el segundo volumen? Obviamente, quién creen que soy
Profile Image for Pâmella Pregun.
Author 1 book5 followers
October 28, 2022
This was a great reread!
And I like the way there are several small stories that come together into something bigger.
Profile Image for Katarina Markovic.
43 reviews15 followers
January 26, 2023
Tomie mi se na momente dopala, prva priča mi je bila fantastična, ali posle toga mi je bila delom konfuzna. Nije mi bila kao "Fragmenti Strave", ni približno.
Profile Image for Jupiter.
45 reviews9 followers
March 4, 2023
This is made for meeee 🖤🖤
Profile Image for Habiba♡.
347 reviews21 followers
July 15, 2021
i admire junji ito's works..It's been always scary & disturbed. I hate how i like them.
but Tomie 1 wasn't that scary but the artworks as always were remarkable.
Profile Image for Filipa.
463 reviews83 followers
October 9, 2023
Mas que.... mas que.....?!?

Foi a minha estreia com Junji Ito.

Estou no limbo entre as 3 e as 4 estrelas, isto porque, quando iniciei a leitura, quase me pareceu que não estava a perceber nada do que estava a ler, o que me fez... continuar a ler, a forçar a leitura, graças à minha incapacidade de desistir de livros.

Ainda bem que o fiz pois ao início só pensava que assim que acabasse, não iria querer o segundo volume e, agora, que acabei, vou continuar a querer seguir a Tomie.

É um horror que, por ser um manga e as pranchas aparecerem a preto e branco, atenua de alguma maneira a visualização, mas temos desde esquartejamentos a canibalismo...

Sangue, muito sangue onde Tomie se regenera.

Um manga que foi preciso imaginação para criar. Não queria estar na cabeça de Junji Ito.

Sobrenatural, sangrento e com uma boa dose de obsessão, passando essa obsessão para o leitor, aqui jaz a mestria de Junji Ito.

Ah!
Não tirem fotografias a Tomie para não se perder a magia da beleza...
Profile Image for Daniel Ausente.
Author 14 books88 followers
August 13, 2014
Estupendo manga de horror sobre un espectro con forma de hermosa muchacha que vuelve locos a los hombres al mismo tiempo que está condenada a ser asesinada y despiezada por ellos. De cada extreminadad o resto brotará una nueva Tommie. Aunque al principio titubea y se nota que es lo primero que hizo Ito, luego mejora mucho mientras el mangaka, como ya haría en Uzumaki, juega a darle todo tipo de vueltas al tema en historias autoconclusivas generosas en imagenes impactante e inquietantes. En España La Cúpula publicó dos volúmenes de historias, pero creo que quedaron más inéditas.
Profile Image for DeAnna Knippling.
Author 172 books280 followers
September 10, 2017
For what should be a really predictable story--"OMG, WOMEN ARE MONSTERS THEY ARE SO MONSTERS THAT THEY HURT OTHER WOMEN SEE SEE THIS IS WHY IT'S NOT OUR FAULT WE MURDER WOMEN IT'S BECAUSE THEY'RE MONSTERS"--this is pretty good. Lots of variety in Japanese students/body horror tropes. Some of the tropes completely surprised me; others had me cracking up as they riffed on historical horror tropes from Western fiction. I'm sure there were more than a few things that went over my head...I'd love to see this annotated, although it'll probably never happen.
Profile Image for Precious.
173 reviews10 followers
February 20, 2020
Yo, I had never heard of this author until the book caught my eye in the bookstore. I decided to take a chance. I am glad I did! This was creepy. This was gory. This somewhat triggered my trypophobia a bit though because of the multiple emerging of Tomie. Overall, great! I’m excited for volume 2.
Profile Image for Kouki.
147 reviews13 followers
November 7, 2016
My first freaky asian comic by horror master Junji Itou : a lot of weirdness, exactly what i need!
Displaying 1 - 30 of 279 reviews

Can't find what you're looking for?

Get help and learn more about the design.