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Is Tomie commentary or misogynistic indulgence? I struggled to answer that question during my entire reading experience. There are arguments for both, and I found that sometimes the same chapters contained contradictory implications.
The reason I tend more towards commentary, personally, was because of how the other women were written, completley unlike Tomie. They were also her victims, but without enacting as much violence towards her as men did (that being said, I think a stronger sapphic angle was missing from this collection). The tone that I read into scenes where men lose their minds and become unhinged over Tomie was exaggerated, over the top, mocking — mocking of the men acting like that. They hurt themselves and each other in their obsession over Tomie. This might be an unintentional effect produced by Ito's exaggerated writing style, or it could be intentional satire, but I found that the narrative was making fun of the men who acted so irrationally over Tomie, not portraying them as reasonable or justified at all. And, weirdly enough, I liked Tomie. I liked watching people blame her for their own expectations of her, then try to harm her only for her to multiply and become stronger.
Tomie cannot be entirely dissociated from the femme fatale archetype, either, because part of her power lies in her beauty. At the very end of the volume, a man who was a survivor of Tomie and a woman he meets conspire against Tomie to take away her power: keep her isolated until she naturally ages, the ultimate destruction of beauty, and thus her defeat. But this plan fails, not because Tomie remains powerful despite having aged, but because she outsmarts them and escapes. But I don’t think that Tomie is a straightforward femme fatale either; those characters are dangerous to the men they seduce, but they also offer them pleasure through sex (which is sometimes the moments they choose to strike). Tomie often does not engage in any form of contact with her victims besides eye contact, she is pure threat with no benefit, she torments her victims and uses their own fetishization of her beauty against them.
Then again, there’s also the reading that Tomie making men violent through her otherworldly beauty implies that women are responsible for their own assault and for the violence of men. I go between this reading and a more satirical reading. Some aspects of the story and certain scenes definitely made me uncomfortable, and I'm not sure if it was for the reasons that the author intended. Since Tomie is a superhuman monster, she is a predator, but ultimately she is violently mutilated for being petulant and mean, so she is simultaneously a victim. I have to wonder if this was all intentional, or if it’s the accidental byproduct of an author's indulgence.
The reason I tend more towards commentary, personally, was because of how the other women were written, completley unlike Tomie. They were also her victims, but without enacting as much violence towards her as men did (that being said, I think a stronger sapphic angle was missing from this collection). The tone that I read into scenes where men lose their minds and become unhinged over Tomie was exaggerated, over the top, mocking — mocking of the men acting like that. They hurt themselves and each other in their obsession over Tomie. This might be an unintentional effect produced by Ito's exaggerated writing style, or it could be intentional satire, but I found that the narrative was making fun of the men who acted so irrationally over Tomie, not portraying them as reasonable or justified at all. And, weirdly enough, I liked Tomie. I liked watching people blame her for their own expectations of her, then try to harm her only for her to multiply and become stronger.
Tomie cannot be entirely dissociated from the femme fatale archetype, either, because part of her power lies in her beauty. At the very end of the volume, a man who was a survivor of Tomie and a woman he meets conspire against Tomie to take away her power: keep her isolated until she naturally ages, the ultimate destruction of beauty, and thus her defeat. But this plan fails, not because Tomie remains powerful despite having aged, but because she outsmarts them and escapes. But I don’t think that Tomie is a straightforward femme fatale either; those characters are dangerous to the men they seduce, but they also offer them pleasure through sex (which is sometimes the moments they choose to strike). Tomie often does not engage in any form of contact with her victims besides eye contact, she is pure threat with no benefit, she torments her victims and uses their own fetishization of her beauty against them.
Then again, there’s also the reading that Tomie making men violent through her otherworldly beauty implies that women are responsible for their own assault and for the violence of men. I go between this reading and a more satirical reading. Some aspects of the story and certain scenes definitely made me uncomfortable, and I'm not sure if it was for the reasons that the author intended. Since Tomie is a superhuman monster, she is a predator, but ultimately she is violently mutilated for being petulant and mean, so she is simultaneously a victim. I have to wonder if this was all intentional, or if it’s the accidental byproduct of an author's indulgence.