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 | Tomie 1: The Junji Ito Horror Comic Collection by Junji Ito | Reviewed by Amy Harlib | |
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| Publisher: ComicsOne Corp.,
http://ComicsOne.com ISBN: 1588990842 Genre: fiction Subgenre: horror graphic novel Release date: Mar. 2001 Format: trade paperback Pages: 220 Price: $9.95 | |||
| http://junjiito.mutagene.net/
Junji Ito (b. 1963), an award-winning creator of Japanese horror manga (comics), now gets another cycle of stories published in compact trade paperback format for English-speaking audiences. Tomie 1 (of 2 so far released in the USA) contains six interconnected stories all set in contemporary Japan and focused on high school teenager Tomie. The first tale, “Tomie”, is narrated by female classmate Reiko. She recalls that her friend was discovered dead, not all the pieces of her body found. While the teacher, Mr. Takagi, concluded speaking to the class about accepting the painful tragedy of Tomie’s death, Tomie herself makes an entrance apologizing for her tardiness. Tomie seems different, though, and, to make things more troubling, her infatuation with Mr. Takagi creates turmoil that leads to her death (again) on a class excursion to a local park. There, in a chilling sequence of depictions, the teacher persuades the class to assist him in the incriminating body’s dismemberment and disposal of the remains. Not surprisingly, Tomie does not stay deceased for long. “Photograph” and “Kiss” concern Tomie’s moral objections to her classmate Tsukiko taking pictures of the cutest guys and then selling her work to their female admirers. How Tomie recruits some helpers to put a stop to the shutterbug leads to gruesomely bizarre consequences, including Tomie getting killed and resurrecting in a fiendishly peculiar manner. “Mansion” offers a believable rationale explaining how Tomie came to acquire her strange resurrecting powers. “Revenge” goes in a new direction, where three male mountain climbers discover Tomie in a deceptively helpless state. Their rescue effort goes horribly awry. Finally, “The Basin of the Waterfall” depicts a mysterious traveling salesman venturing into a remote rural village where he attempts to sell some very odd seeds. When his offerings fail to attract any customers and the hostile residents chase the vendor out of town, his merchandise gets thrown into a nearby stream. The submerged stuff eventually grows into beautiful young females who lure some of the local young men to their deaths. But when no more prey is forthcoming, what happens next is eerie and unexpected. Tomie 1 offers a fine representative sampling of Junji Ito’s style of horror manga featuring highly skilled black and white art. The character design realistically delineates distinct personalities in a pleasing style that refreshingly lacks certain highly stylized manga conventions (exaggerated, huge eyes, excessively triangular faces, and tiny mouths that annoy me personally). Paradoxically, the beautiful, clear, intricate rendering of the art also makes the horror believable. Ito achieves his emotional impact by combining gross-outs with psychological suspense and the perennial genre technique of portraying dreadful things happening to ordinary people. His stories generally follow a pattern in which he exposes the monstrous hidden in everyday life. Ito’s protagonists seldom emerge from their ordeals unscathed if they survive at all. The Tomie stories also fascinate in the way they exemplify a distinctly Japanese cultural variation of a prevalent pan-Asian and even worldwide theme that underlies the ubiquitous patriarchal, male-chauvinistic domination of society that still prevails despite all the efforts of the feminist movements. This is the “woman as monster” plot device that illustrates the age-old male fear of women – women’s power to create life out of their bodies. Although men have sought for millennia to control and dominate women for their procreative ability, the resulting female anger and resentment generates a negative atmosphere that, even though it is usually subliminal for the sake of propriety, always represents a threat. That men sense this tension and magnify it into monstrous proportions gets well illustrated in Junji Ito’s Tomie tales. Thus, these yarns have value not just for their perversely entertaining thrills and for the fine quality of the artwork, but also for the way they reveal how deeply covert and basic aspects and assumptions about life and relationships can create horrific consequences. Junji Ito’s horror manga ranks among the best of its genre. | |||
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