Junji Ito’s Tomie Kawakami is no ordinary femme fatale, and she’s even harder to classify as a monster. As an evil entity with a physical body capable of regenerating, she appears to fit the Japanese definition of a youkai. On the other hand, there is also a consistent way to how she victimizes people that's more in line with onryou behavior.
With Tomie shrouded in so much mystery, it’s easy to see why she’s a compelling horror villain. She is the most iconic of Junji Ito’s works that spawned a highly successful live-action film franchise in Japan during the late 1990s and early 2000s. She’s even been adapted into live-action television shows, one of which was recently canceled before production began. So why doesn’t Tomie have her own anime series?
With over 20 stories published, Tomie isn't short of source material to adapt into a full-length anime series. She does, however, have plenty of obstacles that get in the way of a successful adaptation, such as Japanese censorship laws for television broadcast. This is especially a problem since many of Tomie's stories center on her being repeatedly murdered by the people she victimizes.
The recurring theme in every Tomie story is that she is the quintessential narcissist. Tomie has a grandiose sense of her own importance and believes herself to be an unparalleled beauty. She is starved for admiration, lacks empathy for others, is chillingly manipulative and uses tactics such as gaslighting and triangulation to hurt others for her own amusement. Tomie typically makes men think they are less talented than they really are, or that they are unworthy of her attention. She similarly triangulates other women in their own relationships with men to make them feel insecure about their appearance or make them question their partner's love. These are the behaviors that typically drive men and women to brutally murder her.
The manner in which Tomie is murdered by her victims is grisly and unsafe for depiction on television. Regardless of the cause of death, it often ends with her being dismembered in graphic detail. Since Tomie never actually dies and her body parts simply regenerate into new copies, this usually leads to more violent depictions of body horror. One example of this occurs in the story "Waterfall Basin," where a salesman attempts to sell pieces of Tomie's meat to mountain villagers. The villagers don't fall for his scam but do force him to dump the meat into a nearby waterfall basin, where they grow into new copies of Tomie. During the regeneration process, the multiple Tomies take on unusual shapes, hunting and eating anyone who swims in the water with graphic depictions of cannibalism.
Another reason Tomie is difficult to adapt into a full-length anime is that her manga stories are more anthological in nature and lack an ongoing narrative structure. Apart from Tomie herself, she doesn't have a supporting cast, nor much in the way of recurring characters. Her high school teacher, Mr. Takagi, shows up in a few of her earlier stories but ceases to appear soon after. Likewise, Tomie as a protagonist never actually changes, meaning she works best as an antagonist with a different character fulfilling the protagonist role.
Interestingly, the lack of an ongoing narrative structure ties into the other reason Tomie is hard to adapt: there is little to no variation in the way her stories play out. While Tomie's manga stories place her in different scenarios and allow her to occupy different roles to keep her tales interesting, they also follow a set formula. The setting, characters and even the time period change, but the story itself tends to remain the same.
Every story starts with a chance encounter between her and an unsuspecting protagonist. Tomie then finds a way to integrate herself into that person's life either by moving in with them, stalking them or becoming their problem in some capacity. From there, she starts to drive the protagonist insane, and she either succeeds in destroying their life or they end up murdering her, sometimes both. Every story then ends with the protagonist realizing they can't get rid of Tomie even after killing her, effectively ending on a cautionary note. While seeing all the different ways Tomie drives people insane is by no means boring, it also makes her stories predictable. This can make it difficult for audience members to stay invested in a longer anime series about her.
On the whole, Tomie isn't short on adaptable material for anime. But for a full-length series to work, much of the violent content would need to be toned down in order to comply with Japanese censorship laws, which could reduce the impact of her horror. Her anime would also need to adapt a different narrative structure that supports more varied storytelling and establishes a core cast of characters viewers can easily invest in. For a more faithful adaptation of the source material, some of Tomie's stories would need to be paired off with other Junji Ito stories in another season of Junji Ito Collection, or possibly be adapted as feature-length films.
