"Tomie" by Junji Ito

One issue I’ve had with Junji Ito’s work is that none of the other longer-form collections have resonated with me in quite the same ways as Uzamaki did. Were I not to have read Uzamaki, I’d perhaps allot another star to this work, but as it stands its hard for me to not compare anything I read to it.

The artwork is excellent. Junji Ito’s style exists in a world of its own, and the way in which he can have a reader turn page to page with baited breath, waiting for the horrifying, inexplicable reveal is unlike anything I’ve read before. Unfortunately, perhaps because I couldn’t get invested into the story of this collection, said reveals were not as impactful as they should have been. At the end of the day, the collection is repetitive. Though it happens in different ways, the end result and motivation is always the same. This strengthens the inversion and rejection of the pattern at the end of the book, and makes the payoff of the final few stories by far the strongest segment of the book, but it comes at the cost of the first three-quarters dipping into the mundane.

Perhaps I am just desensitized. Perhaps the story itself desensitized me. We are given far longer to familiarize ourselves with Tomie and her rules than the phenomenons explored in Junji Ito’s other works, which tend to be left more vague. I think that vagueness works to his advantage, and as it is stripped away, the horror suffers for it.