Tomie

8The letters of this title total 26, an 8 — the number of money, authority, and the machinery of ambition.

What it is

Tomie was Junji Ito's first published work. It won an honourable mention in the Kazuo Umezu Prize in 1987 and appeared in Asahi Sonorama's horror magazine Monthly Halloween, and Ito returned to it in stories published until 2000. Tomie Kawakami is a beautiful, manipulative schoolgirl. In the first story, her classmates and teacher murder her and dismember her body. The next day she walks into class.

How it works

The stories are loosely connected episodes. Tomie attracts men, who become obsessed with her and eventually try to kill her. She cannot be destroyed: every piece of her body, even a drop of blood, can grow into a new Tomie, and the new Tomies hate one another. Each story shows a different person, family or town falling apart around her.

The horror

Tomie is less a monster than a force that brings out jealousy, desire and violence in others. Ito draws her as calm and perfect, while the people around her become grotesque. The recurring image of a body regrowing from a fragment is one of his most disturbing.

Why it matters

It launched the career of the most celebrated horror artist in manga and established the themes of obsession and bodily horror that run through his work. It has been adapted into a long series of films beginning in 1999.

The title by its numbers

Tomie26total26 → 8

総画 strokes18 → 9years serialised14 → 5debut year1987 → 7

Counted letter by letter this title comes to 26 — 8 once reduced.

The reference files it as a reckoning. The number's contribution is money, authority, and the machinery of ambition — and with it the 8's concern with power, money, and who is really in charge, which is the thread the reference follows here.

Split the title again and the vowels give a Heart's Desire of 2 (cooperation) against a Personality of 6 (responsibility) in the consonants — cooperation underneath, responsibility on the surface. The gap between them is where the subject is most interesting.

The letters give 8; the subject's own figures do not agree. 総画 strokes is 18, a 9, years serialised is 14, a 5 and debut year is 1987, a 7. Where the two part company the reference trusts the figures, because a title is a decision somebody made about the thing, and these are the thing.

Read on the 8's terms, this entry asks you to follow the money before you judge the decision. The 8 measures what is countable and calls the rest noise. Several entries record industries that optimised themselves into exhaustion. The other entries that reduce to 8 are collected on The Ledger.