There is a single panel of Junji Ito's manga Tomie that continues to haunt me. It isn't particularly memorable among the series’ chapters, no more eerie than a woman plainly sitting in a chair. Long flicks of hair part like a stream around her shoulder and her body is drawn in a casual slouch against her padded seat, dimples of ink dotting her knitted top and arm warmers to create a cozy sense. Her eye is turned to the black hashes of the enveloping space and away from the viewer's gaze, with an inscrutable quality to hers as we look at her profile. 

Is she tired? Sad? Lonely? Frustrated? Looking at someone? Looking through them? The way we look through her? All around her, a man's narration bubbles up in word balloons, telling another man that he wants to annihilate her. She makes him want to rip her apart. He's scared of the way she makes him feel, he says, because he isn't sure it will be enough to satisfy his desire.

She knows this, his intent, even if she doesn't hear or see the words for herself. It's only a matter of time. That's the story of Tomie, after all. 

For a single panel, she is an object who is aware of her audience and their intent. She can only look away. We can only look at her. I can only look at her.

***

So early in the year, it feels like a good time to put together a list. Best of lists. Worst of lists. Top ten favorites. I don't really have a need for qualitative lists, personally. I keep a rotating pile of ten to fifteen favorite things around as a general rule. Shows, movies, albums, comics, art projects. That sort of thing. Just a pile of things I like enough to call, with some degree of certainty, my current favorite things.

As 2023 came to a close, I found myself with a pile of things that I really enjoyed for one reason or another. It was the year I became thoroughly obsessed with Alex Casanas's Monument Mythos series and The East Patch's Angel Hare. Me, my partner Melissa, and my mother-in-law became equally obsessed with two television shows: The Glory, a tightly-wound clockwork revenge drama about the interpersonal violence of women, and the slick crime caper Vincenzo, which blends mafia intrigue with far-reaching corporate corruption. Indulging in my interests in crafts, sculptures, and miniatures, I fell down YouTube rabbit holes of life-sized Nier Automata clay statues and anime figures repainted jn Hirohiko Araki's style. 

I started listening to more podcasts, and actually following them on various platforms to keep up with episodes instead of just haphazardly enjoying them. (Horror Vanguard, Something Rotten, Mangasplaining, and Udder Madness are my top recommendations, just FYI.) For some reason or another, I also decided to make my way through Prince's discography in chronological order. Then I got lost somewhere in the late 90s and ended up listening to The Golden Experience until I was asked to stop.

However, a handful of things lived rent-free in my head for the whole year. I can't call them my favorite things, but they are the things that would not leave me, for some reason or another. For my first newsletter of 2024, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on why that was.

***

Back in March or April, I wrapped up reading the eighth part of Hirohiko Araki's Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, JoJolion. It took me far too long to read it. After coming off the high of Steel Ball Run the year prior and taking a break to finish up Chainsaw Man's first arc, JoJolion felt like a heavy thing to tackle. I picked it up, put it down, thought about it, and picked it up again. Came back to it a week later. A month later. Two months later.

I said it didn't work for me. It felt too different from what I loved about JoJo's. Josuke, this timeline's Josuke, I just didn't gel with him. His story grated on me for all its similarities to the original JoJo's timeline in parts one through six. I enjoyed the departures from the timeline in Steel Ball Run for how Araki remixed and reimagined some of his oldest characters for this wild new setting. Johnny Joestar and Gyro Zeppeli are so weird and delightful to watch as their friendship unfolds, and I thought Diego Brando was a cool way to continue exploring Dio’s themes.

JoJolion didn't endear itself to me. It took the settings and characters of Diamond Is Unbreakable and reshaped them in ways that I found off-putting. The family lines of the Joestars, Kiras, Kujos, and Higashikatas intersect in strange ways, producing children I didn't recognize and didn't like. In fact, by taking my favorite characters from my favorite chapter of the series and essentially throwing them in the bin, JoJolion felt like it was primed to put me, specifically, off to the whole thing. 

Josuke's story is a jumble of unspooling questions and menace in every strange look, created as part of Araki’s personal response to the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. Made up of two dead men who have been, quite literally, put together to make a new one, Josuke is an amnesiac in a sailor suit with a gap in his teeth and all the common sense of a newborn. Despite the amusing lack of social graces, Josuke is virtuous, kind, and self-sacrificing. He lives in a strange house with an even stranger version of the Higashikata clan. In living with them, he takes on their burdens, secrets, and ominous family curse, though he is very much an outsider to their internal struggles. His Morioh is not my Morioh, the crazy noisy bizarre town of Diamond Is Unbreakable now a city cracked in half by disasters both vast and intimate.

Beyond being repelled for butthurt fan reasons, it took me a while to figure out exactly why it was hard to dig into the book in those months it took me to read it. It took me a day or more to figure out why it left me with such a profound sense of sadness after I finished it. 

Simply put, JoJolion is one of the most impactful stories about grief that I've ever experienced. Grief for a nation, a community, the dead, the living. The stark loss of identity and purpose that follows a devastating event leaps off the page in Josuke’s unwinding mystery and his companion Yasuho’s disorienting homelife. It feels like grieving to read it. Though my experiences with grief are much smaller and more self-contained than the machinations that play out across JoJolion's pages, the feelings spill out of me the way they do for Josuke, Yasuho, and their allies, touching every corner of Morioh and the fingertips of everyone they meet. 

The grief is a deep, black thing. Heavy as it climbs my throat and out of me in a tenebrous limb, winding tighter and tighter toward my lips until I can't breathe. Tighter and tighter with every hard-won battle. A reveal. A heel turn. A mystery undone. A meaningless loss. It is a story where the answers to the mystery don't bring peace, and the win isn't good enough to fix what's broken. But still, you must persist. 

Even, and most importantly, when it hurts. 

I feel, on a very intuitive level, it's the best part of the series. I don't think I really enjoyed reading it, but I do think that it's the most successful part of the series I've read so far. As much as I hooted and hollered reading the chaotic highs of Steel Ball Run, JoJolion stayed with me long after I closed the book. Perhaps I can't speak so highly for the totality of its narrative, which has its share of plot conveniences, brain-breaking logic, and Araki-isms that rub me the wrong way. Rather, I take comfort in how beautifully it communicates the sensation of loss, and how deeply it continues to move me even now. 

JoJolion isn't perfect, but neither is grieving. And it feels like grieving to me, in a way that feels raw and real and humbling. I don't think I can ever forget that feeling.

***

Over the last year and change, I've been doing my due diligence in trying to expand my palate when it comes to manga. I was coming off a period of reading primarily romance and erotic titles, getting into a bit of battle manga with the occasional horror to cleanse my palate. Assembling an ad hoc reading list, I looked at the early works of Tatsuki Fujimoto. Then I hemmed and hawed about picking up Fire Punch, and settled on Look Back and Goodbye, Eri instead. I finally got back to Moyoco Anno, long dog-eared in my mind, to properly read what a teenaged me only got from scanlations. Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen was a sensuous portrait of difficult loves and even more complex losses. Buffalo 5 Girls was a psychedelic trip and a half. I still need to finish Sakuran.

I decided to dig into josei more than anything for something, hopefully, a little more mature. Not in content, per se, but in the tone and delivery of the material. From 2022 and into 2023, I got really into Yumi Hanakoji's Duet of Beautiful Goddesses. The series tells the story of two identical women who switch lives, navigating the tensions of social expectation and libidinal desire across class divides. That prompted me to get off my ass and finally read the works of Kyoko Okazaki. Specifically Helter Skelter and Pink, after months of them sitting on the top of my to-read pile. 

Of course, Okazaki is the GOAT. For as much as I truly love Pink, I think I enjoyed my time with Helter Skelter more. It is a haunting book. Liliko's bitingly funny and scary spiral of paranoia, sex, and dread really worked for me. The more subliminal and hallucinatory imagery stuck with me, too, its jumpy pace incorporating jarring segueways to full-page illustrations of dead bodies or nightmarish visions.

Liliko is such a wonderful monster to watch, moving from magazine covers to dreams like a stalking panther. Helter Skelter really reminds me of everything I loved about Fire Walk With Me, my personal favorite slice of the Twin Peaks viewing experience. It captures the devastation of being a woman in a cruel, consumptive world, and the trauma of autonomy stolen by systems of gendered dehumanization. So too does it capture the self-annihilating impulses of someone trapped within those systems.

That said, Pink is simply a revelation to read. I can only describe it as being inside the cramped jungle of Yumi's steamy apartment. It sings with such an uncomfortable intimacy, like watching her strange dream of a life with Croc unravel into both predictable and unforeseen sadness. 

Okazaki's stories are small and dreamlike. They are bubbles of worlds that slowly open with the unraveling neuroses and eccentricities of her characters. Growing, taking on new, terrible shapes. Every character is beautifully, relatably off-putting to one degree or another. They swim in charisma and tragedy, and they are so very often cruel. It's that casual kind of cruelty, the kind that comes from harsh words spoken over the phone at night and the selfishness of romanticizing one's life until other people can no longer occupy space within its frame.

Okazaki's cartooning is gestural, disarming in its sparseness. Each character is so light on the page, every shape so delicate, that it makes the violence that eventually spills out of them that much more striking. Office worker Yumi struggles to make meaning and magic from the meaninglessness of 1980s Bubble-era city living. She reaches out through sex to establish connections beyond education and careers, salaries and apartments. She wants the extra money that sex work provides her, yes, but her entanglements with men for both money and love are rendered with a jarring honesty. It's pointedly beautiful in how raw it feels, how big it feels in those moments of connection between people that occur as if by magic. 

Yet, it rings so hollow when her plans collapse back into the meaningless of that romanticism. Yumi's beloved Croc is killed and turned into a suitcase. Her plans to go on holiday with the moody writer she wants to be with fall apart when he dies in a random accident. Her alligator suitcase, the empty signifier of class and luxury, is all that soothes her when there is no one and nothing left. Closing the book, we are left only to wonder what comes of her when the bubble of the Japanese economy inevitably bursts.

It is so terrible and heart-breaking, and yet seemingly inevitable when looking back. In the months since, long left with the memories of Yumi's foiled plans, I found a small blue alligator toy and added it to my little collection of bits of bobbles. He lives in my room, by my bed. I look at him every day and think of Croc.

***

This, of course, brings me to the reason I decided to write about all of this in the first place. I initially wanted to put this piece out in December for a year-end sort of wrap-up. Then I wanted to put it out in January, to spend the early days of the new year still considering how I ended the old one. But then I changed my mind and chose to dedicate December to the aforementioned Angel Hare to split the difference. And then January came and went while I was still too sleepy and feeling too lazy to push myself to put out a new piece.

All the while, I thought about Junji Ito's Tomie. 

To start, I have to admit that I tend to run a bit hot and cold when it comes to Ito. I gorged myself on his manga in my youth, drawn to the hypnotic grotesqueries of Uzumaki and the uncanny terror of The Enigma Of Amigara Fault. It was my gateway into much harder and more disturbing manga in the years following, like my long-time favorite, Ichi the Killer by Hideo Yamamoto. 

Into my 20s and later my 30s, I kept up with Ito's translated collections. I found them enjoyable, but what I enjoyed in them began to drift in time. My interests began to drift, as well. I found Ito less scary than I did profoundly absurd and funny. Which isn't to speak ill of his truly grisly and unnerving draftsmanship, which has only sharpened in its precision and grasp of human psychology. But that's where I drift away from Ito, as often the circumstances are so heightened and reality-shattering and the characters so deadpan in response that I simply have to laugh. 

I suppose I mean that, as an adult, Ito's horror feels the most real to me now, as the world continues to go to shit at an Uzumaki- or Remina-like scale, and yet I still find something to laugh at within it.

Tomie, however, did not make me laugh.

It was always the Ito work that I was the least interested in. Tomie was very much t-shirt and fanart fodder in my little corner of the world. I only knew of it as that comic about that girl who won't stay dead, like the living death of bisected worms or severed lizard tails,  and I didn't really investigate further. But I got an itch to read it after watching somebody on YouTube talk about it, and so I thought I would finally give it a chance.

Tomie is just…it's horrifying. I don't really know what else I can say to convey how deeply it unsettles me. At the most surface level, it's the story of a succubus. She is a selfish, consumptive woman who feeds parasitically off her chosen prey. Men immediately fall in deep, possessive love with her, becoming so obsessed that their desires turn violent. Tomie is cursed to drive men mad, their love for her spiraling into a rapacious bloodlust satisfied by her total annihilation. Then she comes back and spreads, generating more Tomies, more parasite girls to torture men in a self-destructive bid for survival.

But this reading misses the point of Tomie, you know? While there are increasingly convoluted attempts to rationally contextualize what she is and how she operates, Tomie is just a girl. She may be ancient, a primordial force, or she may be a product of contemporary social systems pushing and pressing at her. Either way, Tomie is a teenager. Flawed, sure, but a teenager nonetheless. When she is introduced, she is a flighty, flirty, and selfish girl. She is pretty, the kind of pretty that sees her in a relationship with her teacher. Upon revealing that she's pregnant with his baby, the teacher kills her. He then ropes her classmates into participating in her dismemberment, including her own best friend, and they cover up the crime.

But Tomie comes back. No matter how many tiny pieces she's chopped into, she arrives at school as if nothing happened. Boys and staff at school become obsessed with her. The lie of her death unravels. The boys and men pursue her until she can't escape them and she is once more consumed. So begins the cycle of Tomie. 

It’s easy to see Tomie as a parasite as the story progresses. Taken at face value, we’re certainly not primed to empathize with her. She never seems to grow up, physically or emotionally. She doesn't work or maintain an acceptable standard of living through traditional means. Portrayed as cruel and selfish, Tomie goes on to live off of the money and gifts provided by her suitors. She inserts herself in their lives and stays around to keep herself fed and cared for. A perpetual kept woman, a professional sugar baby, she endlessly drifts from one man to the next, with the added complexity that each man will inevitably be driven mad by her presence and tear her apart. And each time they do, more Tomies appear and spread.

Shouldn't she stop doing this?

Shouldn't she know better?

Isn't she responsible for this fate?

To me, Tomie is a complicated and, though thoroughly unlikeable, deeply empathetic character. Yes, she does horrifying things to survive throughout the series. Her monstrosity shines through gentle smiles. Tomie preys on lonely men and bereaved parents to sustain herself through their devotion. She attaches to psychologically vulnerable people primed to accept her and gleefully leaves misery and death in her wake. We see her assume a maternal role to target a young boy in a very distressing chapter, where she can't, or chooses not to, distinguish between paternal or romantic affection. There is absolutely no justifying what she does, but I can understand it in a way that makes it hard to hate her as those around her do.

Perhaps my interpretation is a bit colored by the opening chapters of Tomie and the circumstances of that first death. I tend to think of that Tomie as the Ur Tomie, although the when, where, and why of Tomie gets hazy with the passage of time. Despite her initial victimization, Tomie immediately becomes the antagonist of everyone else's story. She is an object of desire, fear, or scorn. Men want her in a frenzied cocktail of possession and loathing. Other girls and women fear or despise her. Some may look at her with a degree of recognition, maybe a waning pity, but they understand that Tomie is something to be rejected. The kind of girl who can't be allowed to live.

Even in the rare instance when she is given her own subjectivity and voice, Tomie enacts such suffering on others that she is held at a calculated distance from the reader. Tomie is never a person, because she is never allowed to be. She is something unknowable, a force of nature. You are compelled to hate her for what she is and does. However, in my reading of things, Tomie isn't about punishing wicked women or exorcizing our collective fear of the diabolical feminine. I think Ito manages, whether intentionally or not, a much more nuanced contemplation on the experiences of women and girls.

In the most basic terms, Tomie loses her ability to participate in society through her initial murder. Death leaves her frozen in time, fated to come back as a teenager whenever she resurrects. Her youth and beauty are valuable, but limiting. She is a young girl no longer productive and therefore no longer valuable to the school system, workforce, or economy. While she has conceived a baby in the past, Tomie is now only a mother to herself. She spawns an endless number of self-serving replicas to maintain her existence, giving birth to doppelgangers from gaping wounds or severed digits. Her reproductive value, her inherent value as a woman in society, is now as perverted and self-absorbed as she is.

Stripped away of its pseudo-scientific rationale and fantasmagorical elements, Tomie’s story is one of girlhood’s many terrors. I think that's why it worked so well for me. Those quirks and flourishes of the fantastic are there, but it's deeply rooted in real, palpable social anxieties. While a book like Remina uses its planetary scale to discuss how society-wide pressures drive people to chew up and spit out young girls, Tomie uses its mundane settings to discuss far more intimate horrors. The anxieties of the family, school, and home. The uneasiness of friendships and romances and the suffering contained within. The anxieties around birth, maternity, and the body as site of reproduction.

Tomie is just a teenage girl, barely entering puberty before adult men begin preying on her. She enjoys the attention because it makes her feel like an adult, and because she doesn't understand that she is being abused. (It can't be abuse if she seeks the attention, you know. It can't be abuse if she thought she was in love.) Boys at school like her. Girls at school hate her. Society, it seems, has failed her already.

Once Tomie becomes an inconvenience to her abuser, she is destroyed. Hacked to bits. Her peers play along with the scheme. It's better that way. (It was an accident, right? They can't let this ruin anyone's life or career.) Rather than remain a silent victim, the role assigned to her as the consumed, Tomie comes back. Not to haunt or seek revenge for her death, but just for the act of survival in and of itself. Tomie chooses to live on by consuming others as a response to the world that created her. Her life has value beyond social roleplay and biological obligation. Existing for its own sake proves that.

Even so, it's hardly a victory. She never grows beyond the most transactional understanding of human care and intimacy. Everyone else is simply a means to an end, and she can never be vulnerable. Even in her victory over death and social constraint, Tomie can't escape the ever-present threat of intimate partner violence. Being hurt by a man isn't a dreadful possibility -- it's the inevitable conclusion of every encounter or relationship she has ever and will ever have.

There's…an animal sort of tragedy in that, I think. 

People love Tomie, but they don't care about her. Tomie is not allowed interests or desires, or any kind of interior life beyond survival. Base instincts animate her from one objective to the next. Food. Shelter. Pleasure. She is solely an object to be acquired, consumed, and discarded. Understanding this, she leverages her only currency in this world to extract whatever value she can from the men who want her. Diamond rings and designer shoes are not enough to fill the void inside her, but they entertain her until she is finally consumed by the fires of the love she feeds on. 

And then she does it again, and again. 

That's why that panel haunts me. The one of Tomie in her chair. It is such a lonely, lightless existence. What is it like to be Tomie? To hear the men outside baying and hollering for her with their sharpened knives? To know she can never be loved? To know she is doomed to be eaten the way society eats young girls, spitting out their bones before anyone is caught choking on their kill?

A sentimental part of me hopes that Tomie, in one of her daughters spawned from a severed pinkie finger or a cell in a petri dish, can find a way to leave the world that hates her so much. That there exists a farm on a parcel of land, where a girl lives in a little house and sits in the sunshine on fair days. I want Tomie, some Tomie somewhere, to know peace.

But she can't. 

And that's why Tomie won't leave me alone.