I had a pretty interesting conversation with Jason Thompson about Junji Ito’s Tomie stories and related matters on Twitter. Seemed a shame to just let it disappear into the twitter-hole, so I thought I’d reprint it over here.
Jason started out:
Nice article on Junji Ito’s Tomie. While it’s always interesting to analyze undercurrents in horror fiction, I’m resigned that these currents are usually reactionary. In real horror, there IS no role for any character, male or female, other than villain or victim. Horror which has any kind of positive or empowering message to any group isn’t really horror. Action-horror, maybe. ‘Aliens’, thus, is action-horror, not horror, because Sigourney Weaver kicks ass at the end. Contrarily, Night of the Living Dead is horror because the heroine is catatonic/useless and the hero gets killed pointlessly. The ‘update’ of Romero’s catatonic heroine, I guess, is Tobe Hooper’s heroine in Chainsaw 2, who ends up a manic/deranged killer. But any horror story which ends with the protagonist in a better space than they started isn’t much of a horror story, IMHO.
I replied:
Glad you liked the piece! I’m always pretty leery of defining “real” horror. Genres are arbitrary demarcations, and designed to crossbreed. In any case, I don’t think “progressive” means “uplifting.” Presenting a bleak worldview can easily have progressive overtones (as in the Stepford Wives.) I’d agree that Ito is fairly regressive…but that’s because of how he deals with gender, not because the stories are bleak. Not even clear they are bleak, exactly; you never care about the characters; the whole point is to kill them off. It’s gruesome…but not sad. Probably meant to be exhilarating/funny/cool more than anything.
And Jason finished up:
Very true, Stepford Wives is a good example! You reminded me, Ito also did an (untranslated) 1-shot graphic novel about a beautiful bishonen who ensnares’ women’s souls. Yet even in that story, it’s the women zombies eternally following the ghostly bishonen who are the true sources of disgust. ;) That said, I think if Tomie were sorta the ‘heroine’ avenging herself on men the stories wouldn’t be very scary/very good horror. Tomie is definitely about men’s fascination/disgust with the female body. Tomie’s personality attributes are all stereotypes of the femme fatale, including her obliviousness/shallowness. Tomie’s shallowness is such she doesn’t even seem ‘aware’ she’s a monster in most stories. This must be meant as a comedy element.. …while sort of reinforcing her as an inhuman ‘thing’ that doesn’t really act, it just reacts. Dave Sim could get with that idea. So yeah, it’s pretty sexist (or self-consciously plays with sexist imagery? Who knows). But I wouldn’t be a HP Lovecraft fan if I couldn’t stand seeing offensive ideas played out in genre form to their logical extreme.
Now I’m thinking of “The Iron Dream”, Norman Spinrad’s exploration of ‘what if Hitler were a genre author’…
Pardon the ramble! It’d be interesting to see an essay on the depiction of women throughout Ito’s work… The ‘heroine’ of Uzumaki is pretty much a reactive figure too (though so is every character in that story of predestination).
Pingback: MangaBlog — Tomie on Twitter
You are both shallow, uneducated idiots. I have read your “Woman All Over” article and have came to the conclusion that you clearly have no idea what you are talking about, but I figured I should leave my comment here.
I am quite possibly the biggest Tomie fan there is, I run a blog dedicated to her. “Tomie” is not explicitly a story about “men hating women” or “women hating men”, it is a social commentary and a story about humanity in general. Tomie can be seen as a a living embodiment of all the world’s negativity (including lust, selfishness, misandry, misogyny etc…) and is also a story about us (the influencers of of this evil and negativity) ultimately falling victim to it.
Tomie is portrayed as a superior “human” being – a lovely girl who drives men crazy and who girls envy, an “ethics officer”. She possesses what all of the people in the world seek for – eternal beauty. If anything, this series can be viewed as violently misandristic. There are 9 Tomie live action films so far, in case you didn’t know. And in the seventh one Tomie herself boldly states that “Men are so stupid, and all men everywhere should just die. So stupid they’re disgusting!” She also blames men for wars, poverty and everything wrong with the world. Which is true. Have you turned on the news lately? This is seconds before she gets killed by a man yet again. The mangas portray shallow men as not caring about a woman’s (Tomie’s) personality who simply get blinded by her looks. Once they find out what Tomie truly is (read: turn into delusional, over-controlling pigs) they viciously murder her. This ultimately leads them to their own demise.
“In real horror, there IS no role for any character, male or female, other than villain or victim. Horror which has any kind of positive or empowering message to any group isn’t really horror.” Wow really? Are you still stuck in the dreadful 80s slasher exploitation era? I don’t know how many horror films Jason has seen or how many novels he has read but I’d quess not many.
Speaking of women in most vintage slasher films: they usually served a purpose of looking good (sometimes getting naked) and then dying a violent death for the viewer’s entertainment. Tomie does cause her own deaths, she does make men murder her in an indirect way. Intentionally or not? Left as ambiguous. But Tomie is a complex, multi-layered story. She is the “slasher victim” come back to life to terrorize her killer, not by actually DOING anything, but merely by living, and unnerving him with her unshakeable presence.
And I don’t know if you accidently skipped a few chapters in the manga but Tomie does “victimize” females as well, and in one of the films even gets sexually involved with a young woman. However, she appears to be only slightly hostile towards women and does acknowledge that they are most likely jealous of her. Which they are. What woman wouldn’t want to stay young and pretty forever? As Tomie says: “You will marry a incapable guy one day… You will give birth to a dumb, you will be a wrinkled old lady soon. This is the happiness of being a woman. But since I am a “monster”, I will be lovely forever… Poor me.”
Tomie is not a moralistic story, it does not have a heroic lead character who defeats all evil. You can choose who to root for, or simply not root for anybody at all. The main, titular character is the fabulous and monstrous “villain” who is a self-destructive entity, yet survives anything.
This manga has won awards and has gained a cult status over the years for a reason. It has a very large female following as well, which you may not know judging by your ignorant, pretentiously written analysis. It’s all fine though, as long as you use words such as “bifurcating” and “parthenogenesis”.
Thanks for the info. I don’t know that any of what you say actually precludes my reading, so I’m not really sure why the hostility is necessary…but that’s the way it goes sometimes, I guess.