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souichipresents · 7 years

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Souichi Presents: Tomie, tOmie, toMie....

Kyahaha! Welcome, welcome back to Souichi Presents! The home of a true madman's task... to one day have reviewed every single Junji Itou story ever made! However... perhaps if you’ve noticed, even leaving aside the holiday hiatus, there’s been an unusual uptick in Non Mr. Itou Reviews.

Why would this be? Well, I could say that I try to take in new horror as much as possible, to keep refreshed... but if I had to be honest in myself, it’s possible... I might be avoiding something.

THERE'S JUST SO MANY OF HER. THEM. THESE STORIES. There’s so many of them. But that can’t stop me in my sacred duty because I swore an OATH... well I had a random idea when I was a freshman in college which I picked back up again for absolutely no reason I can recall and I’m sticking to it.

Of course this is a labor of love, make no mistake. And there’s still a lot to love, as we get to...

JUNJI ITOU’s, TOMIE: THE BASEMENT

(See part 1, MORITA HOSPITAL, here.)

Alright so if you weren’t here for the last part of this series, here’s a QUICK rundown.

A girl is in the hospital while her not-boyfriend visits, until oh no! Tomie does that weird thing she does where her only enjoyment in stringing dudes along eems to be tormenting girls about it which isn’t weird at all. Sad hopsital girl is very sad, and also absolutely dying from Vauge Anime Organ Failure. But luckily for her, she’s able to get a transplant! Bad news, it’s a Tomie, signed off for the transplant from the sketchiest man alive claiming to be Tomie’s father. Again. Which is creepy because he is 100% actually the teacher from the very first Tomie story who may have impregnated her, was absolutely dating her, and 1000% killed her. So that’s creepy.

Then it ended with ‘everyone with a uterus screamed internally during THIS bit’, alternate title ‘Aliens but with Tomie’. Now that we’re all caught up...

(remember this is one of the very early translations, back when official publishers mirrored the art, so it’s left to right. God forgive us.)

Oh right, so this is early EARLY translation here, so it’s left-to-right again. My favorite part of this is that if theres a RUMOR about this, it indicates two things, really: one is that a patient happened to SEE this, which is just hilariously terrible. You get up, maybe getting some water, see- oh hey they’re operating and hhHOOOPS THATS A TINY HAND BYEEEE.

Or option two: just some real gossipy nurses. “You would not BELEIVE the shit I put up with... yeah between this and whoever put the plastic wrap over the toilet seat, I’m out. I don’t care if it includes dental.”

...sorry, the heck is this?

Why it’s Fumihito! He’s... totaly unrelated to the story so far, and any future stories! But he’s sure here now. Good for you, Fumihito.

Sure I make fun, but I’m pretty sure he might actually make it out of this ALIVE. Maybe the secret to surviving Tomie is to lack personality. Well he has one personality trait: checking out creepy things for No Reason. It might not get you very far at a party, but it;s gangbusters for moving a horror plot along.

Well so much for my recap. This one’s probably more factual. Also can I just say I appreciate how in stride these doctors are taking this? Maybe they got all their ‘NO, THIS CAN’T BE’ out of their systems earlier.

Well this has to be better then the goldfish bowl of hydrocloric acid the last tomie head was in. But whatever THIS is is... opaque... but not from... this side...?

....Mr. Ito, did you just have worries about drawing the doctors through the water at an angle? Well, god knows I wouldn’t want to.

Now this is interesting, because it’s really the only go at a scientific explanation for Tomie’s... tomieness. But all he’s *really* saying is, hey, she can regenerate! I don’t think the real secret to this story is that Tomie turns out to be a large pile of planarians. ...though that would be amazing.

...though it does speak badly for earths survival rate... do you eventualy wind up with a Tomie ‘apocalypse’? Crowds of tomies... gigantic tomies, like terrible lighthouses of adoration? Who knows, maybe every second tomie just kind of wanders into the ocean to keep overpopulation down... but still, you imagine it ends poorly.

Yes well luckily rules don’t apply to NOSY MALE PROTAGONIST MAN! Able to use his amazing powers to satisfy his own vauge curiosity with a single bound.

“And why are you in my room exactly?” “Plot contrivance! Need a character to follow to see the story happen, you know.” “...Isn’t that *me*?” “Don’t... don’t worry about it.

This really highlights the difference in horror as a genre, you know? In most other stories someone being able to miraculously heal from major surgery would be a GOOD thing. Or at least even odds.

See also: reading mysterious books, talking to strange new people, investigating odd noises. Don’t blame horror protags for doing those things; any other genre going into the magic furniture leads to narnia instead of hell.

Similarly, only in horror is it possible for cancer to not be the worst outcome.

Now, I do feel the urge to make a joke here about just deciding to irradiate the monster why not, but they do actually have a logical train of thought here. They’re assuming something like cancer is happening; so they’re trying to see if radiation therapy could destroy the cells.

WHICH is in turn interesting to me, because the “rules” of Tomie aren’t... clear. But they do seem to work. For the record-

Acid works. Fire works but you gotta be REAL thorough. Cutting is the opposite of working, bludgeoning not really much better. Water- laughable. Poison- untried. Concrete- ???? Radiation... well you’ll see in a minute.

Meanwhile we get more of this. You wanted more of this, right?

Tadashi sucked. Suuuuucked. This guy... exists.

This does clarify a little more about her- it sounds like she has kind of a lonely life. ...I’m also going to throw this guy a bone and assume whatever he said in the original japanese might have been more of a “Oh, is that right?” then... that.

Oh right, the monster. Radiation turns out to just make Tomie go from a kind of head-disaster to “barbie doll left on the stove.” Why? It’s a little late to want a scientific reason why THIS happens, because tomie already endlessly self replicates with no apparent need for outside energy... kind of.

More then a few times we see her eating things (people) to regenerate from, but theres also times where nothing like thats around. Maybe having outside energy just speeds it up...? Or maybe she’s a nonsense curse monster.

You know, I really didn’t think I’d like RE7 when the demo was out, but I like a lot of what they wound up doing with it in the main game.

...And you are....?

Okay. Y’all. My dear friends. I love these comics. I love mr. Ito. I do. But we spend FOUR PAGES on, essentially, “Freddy hears noises behind the door, and briefly sees a walking figure.” I’m hitting the fast forward.

There she is. The crux of this mystery- this and so many more. A living ghost? An endlessly self replicating memory? The guilt and fixation of a murderer imprinted into a endlessly replicating form? The grief of a murdered (pregnant!) teen girl horrifically cut down by a man?

If nothing else, a strange naked girl, in a fishtank, in a hospital basement he just saw a dude walk out of. What a strange sight. What a genuinely beautiful panel, highlighting a subtle, aberrant moment.

...well. I mean, from a meta point of view, he took the safest available route, but... you can’t help but be disappointed, right?

Well Tomie has better things to do anyways. People to see. Short haired girls to loom over.

No seriously, always with the short haired girls. Tomie has a.... type? Is that even what you could call it?

I’m not sure it really is about Tadashi, Tomie. I’m not really sure it is.

Speaking of which, this is actually really unusual for Tomie. While she tends to generate terrible violence and suffering around her, I can’t really think of any time when she actually directly attacks someone. Usually she would have male ‘lackeys’ that she’d assign or manipulate to kill someone for her. This is an unusually direct motion on her part.

Hey remember when she had slightly curly hair? We’re in the odd midpoint art wise where her design takes a odd turn. I can never figure out if it’s just a drift, or if it’s closer to how Mr. Ito wanted Tomie to look.

Anyways it was nice knowing you, Dr. McDoctorson.

Meanwhile, this is going to get a lot worse, and never get better. Note the interesting framing of the flowers here. I wish I knew if this was made before or after Dying Young. It feels like a very similar story thread, but Dying Young focuses more cleanly on the specific idea of ‘an illness making you beautiful, but at a terrible cost’. While this is... well. Tomie tomie tomie tomie.

In the meantime, the doctors have been debating if tomie material can be used to cure illnesses (spoiler: hhhhooo boy no), and our main character went to visit John Smithee here. Who... does... this.

...What the hell is he talking about? Her only personality change is she’s suddenly a little happier, and flirting with him. Also, he’s the one who’s been nonsensical in her grill hitting on her? Is this supposed to be like, ~oh I liked you for how you looked before~.

I hate that. I hate every half-witted story where some boy is praised for seeing a girls ~natural beauty~. Like the discover of a girl is more important then whatever her plans for how she wants to look and feel are. And while this isn’t exactly because she just straightened her hair and got makeup, he doesn’t actually know that. So it just... grates on me. Endlessly.

WHY IS THIS DUDE IN THIS STORY.

Like this is supposed to be GASP TOMIE IS TAKING HER OVER but the problem is I don’t LIKE him, and his reason for turning her down is as shallow as anything Tomie has literaly ever said.

It’s not sweet! And he has no functional personality. This story is supposed to be about her, but because she’s going through this transformation, it feels like he’s there so we see it from outside her point of view. But he just... sucks.

Me too, totes-not-Tomie.

Yeah his investment in how much more docile and quiet she was before really makes me feel the emotional weight of this terrible transformation coming over her. Which I guess is really my problem.

This horrible thing happening to HER is being framed in how it’s affecting HIM. How HE feels about how she looked and behaved. And I could not care. Less.

WHY CAN’T WE SEE MORE OF HOW SHE FEELS ABOUT THIS.

meanwhile, Tomie accidentally saves many, many lives by getting rid of the other half of Kidney-Kaijulet, because these morons were going to inject more people with Tomie.

Then this happens, and it kind of sucks. Even though it’s ~tomie~ and she’s evil or whatever... it... just kind of sucks. Which I guess is what winds up wearing me down in this series. We’re not short of media where ladies get hit and killed a lot. And I fully recognize there is context for this series as existing in japan that I’m not privy to, and will never actually be able to speak to.

But to me, what the Tomie series has thats genuinely something different gets overshadowed by the monotony of the violence in it. For how little Mr. Ito work in later years includes outright slasher type violence, Tomie just... keeps goin.

Also, she keeps dying but Creeper Teacher Dude here keeps being alive still, which also Just Sucks.

Blink and you’ll miss it, here’s the whole reason any of this happened! It’s... this shithead again. Womp womp.

Unintentionaly this might be the funniest page Ito has ever made. Poor bearded doctor just.

WHY ARE YOU CUTTING HER UP? WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WI- WHY THE FUCK DO *YOU* HAVE A CAN OF GASOLINE. WHY IS ANY OF THIS HAPPENING. I SHOULD HAVE JUST TAKEN THE JOB IN KURÔZU-CHO.

Also.... “squeak squeak?” That cannot possibly be the right sound effect.

...alright this guys a total shitstain in five directions, but this is also pretty funny. He’s basically doing a Loony Toons exit in a dark horror story.

youtube

Don’t listen to that too long by the way, it’s kind of hypnotic.

And this... this one page makes, to me, the whole rest of the story....

The intensity of the reveal. The tight closeups from her face to his, the way she seems contained inside the arc of the fire. The slant of the panels around them- leading to such a sense of unease, and drawing the eye.

This. This is a beautiful horror moment.

What a strange moment. Do they leave together? I don’t remember if he comes back again, though I suspect he must. What happens to her....?

Is she really completely gone?

And that, at last, is the end of BASEMENT.

This is a really muddled one for me. I feel like theres so MUCH in it I could enjoy, but somehow it both has too many ideas, and feels stuffed with filler.

I’d loved to see some of these ideas. A hospital researching tomie? A girl being corrupted BY tomie and slowly losing her sense of self...? Those are both amazing ideas that I wish had been their own stories. I wish the girl becoming tomie had kept the lense on HER. On how she felt, on what she was doing.

I think in a way I find this pair of chapters to be more frustrating then others because... if there weren’t good moments, I could just freely mock it, and maybe even skip past it. But there is a good story in it! There really is.

It just feels like it’s happening somewhere else, while the ‘camera’ follows this unrelated person. With a level of decompression that... doesn’t work for me.

I suppose thats a greater problem I have with Tomie. It can just feel like so MUCH, but it almost never gets bad enough i can comfortably abandon it.

Almost.

That’s all for this week, folks! Join us next time won’t you? I’m hoping to get to more Ito, and talk about the hauntingly strange short “Madame Tutli Putli”, and possibly talk about the great classic of horror cinema, Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island. And of course, the souichi presents patreon is now on monthly donations, and I’ll be updating it’s milestones soon! Even a dollar or two makes a really big difference.

And as always, Souichi WILL... return.

#Junji Ito #Tomie #Souichi Presents #Horror #Horror Review #review #comic review #blood warning #death warning #dismemberment warning #fire warning #hospital warning

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