The Tomie series is a pretty disturbing set of horror stories. All of them feature (what seems to be) a beautiful girl called Tomie. Men fall helplessly in love with Tomie, unable to refuse her wishes; and Tomie herself is destructive and greedy, using her charm to ruin other women's relationships and families, and to get luxury and wealth. Wikipedia describes her as: "a living embodiment of lust and all the negative emotions that go along with it, such as jealousy."
About half of the time Tomie ends up being brutally (and gratuitously) murdered, usually compulsively by one of the men who love her. One character explains: "I just... wanted to kill her, detective... when I saw her... For some reason, I felt this urge to dismantle her." But that's just the start of the horror. Every part of Tomie which is cut off is capable of budding an entirely new Tomie, which returns to the living, often to drive her murderers insane, though sometimes to simply move on and cause some new chaos. The other half of the stories focus less on lust'n'murder, and more on Tomie's regenerative capabilities, showing Tomie's inherently unstable flesh bursting open into new heads in stressful situations, or simply following the consequence of Tomie parts being dispersed in a variety of places (and on at least three occasions, in other people's bodies).
The most disturbing element is in the first type of stories, where the author takes male sexual violence and externalizes it onto a female-looking-demon-monster-thing. Men can reassure themselves that they are not powerless because of unrequited lust but because of a woman's evil power; and their desperate urge to hack Tomie into pieces is in fact something she has forced them to do. Similarly, Tomie looks like a beautiful girl, but is really a monster, who secretly does just want to torture men (it isn't that she's disinterested, it's that she *wants* to make them feel small!), and to selfishly accumulate material wealth (she's just using them anyway). The horror is *not* the crimes that people commit. It is the callous beauty that has emasculated them by taking away their free will, and that completes its emasculation in defying their attempts to reassert dominance with violence.
There's something deeply icky about that as a reading experience. It's like... when you read one of those badly written scenes of fictional rape by male authors... and you feel like they're compulsively picking this need-to-confess mental-rape-fantasy scab in public, and it's gross. Ultimately, you feel dirty and complicit and you just want to scrape the whole reading experience off your brain. From his other works I've read, I think that Junji Ito is an intuitive writer. I doubt he cared to think through any of the above when putting together Tomie, but I'm sure that it is this symbolic power that drove the writing. This led-by-intuition tendency is also why Ito is interesting (and in some cases - e.g. Spiral - disatisfying) as an author, because he never lets the symbol set a logic for the narrative. He just gets lost down some new sidetrack that's also got a powerful ick factor to it, and stories are often an exercise in capturing that essence, ending evocatively on the moment of that horror's realization - the what-happens-next being irrelevant as far as he's concerned.
Reading over what I've written above, I feel like I should stress that Tomie is not AT ALL a rape-sex-death extravaganza. It's just that these ideas bubble away in the background. There's no sex at all and apart from a few stab-fests, the narrative is classic 80s movie, essence-of-pulp-horror stuff, with a good dose of Lovecraftian crawling, cancerous masses of flesh and eyes and polyps.
The very best of the collection is a set of three chapters in the middle of the book about a young girl called Tsukiko, who incurs Tomie's wrath when she fights back against the monster by spreading a series of photographs which manage to capture her true demonic face. This really captures that sense of terror I associate with films like Halloween or Nightmare on Elm Street, where a chilling monster is planted squarely in everyday suburbia, and a gutsy heroine, though seemingly doomed, is repeatedly allowed to overcome the usual rules of the narrative, and emerge unscathed, thanks to bravery and a good dose of luck. The girl v. girl set-up takes the emphasis off male attraction, and the more watchful tone deepens the mystery, suggesting a sometimes human-seeming consciousness to Tomie (albeit evil). You wonder what she thinks, this monster, doomed to mutating and being endlessly dismembered.
One other thing I'd like to mention - shamelessly ripped off another reviewer on GoodReads - is the great black humour in these stories. Charles Dee Mitchell writes:
Although they know she has regenerated herself from a severed head kept in an aquarium, two doctors have this exchange:
"What an ungodly monster!"
"You're telling me. And yet...an extremely alluring one."
He's right, it's amazing! :)
On the whole, I'd say this is a pretty good volume, and if you like Ito, you will get what you're looking for. For those who haven't read this author before, I'd recommend trying to find a volume that features a range of his short stories that feature lots of different characters and scenarios - shorts like Falling, Thing That Drifted Ashore, Slug Girl, The Enigma of Amigara Fault... A lot of these you can read online for free thanks to the wonder of scanlations, but of course, if you enjoy them, do the author a favour and buy yourself (or a friend) one of the official published volumes.