So, I really like Ito's work, especially because of how complex it can be, and Tomie is one of those works where I think people mostly misread it. People often debate if she is "the victim" in the scenarios, if she herself is bad, and that is why I wanted to come here and give my own take - that Tomie is not real.

Not, obviously, in a meta-sense, she is fictional, but otherwise, in the universe of the story, the girl that Tomie was is dead. The thing that we see throughout the story? That is not her - rather, I believe, she becomes the manifestation of the worst qualities of the town. She, essentially, becomes a demonic tulpa that exists to plague the city for it's sins; not that uncommon for Ito, when you think about it.

And what are those sins that she manifests? Guilt, shame, and remorse - but not in this "boohoo" kind of way, but rather, how guilt and shame can't simply be hidden or buried. You can't simply unmake the murder of a little girl, you can't simply "share the responsibility", the only thing you are sharing is guilt. And guilt, when spread and left to rot, spreads. And so we see Tomie spread, as a form of social shame, turning into this eldritch thing in the process. The story is rich with the examples of it when you stop to think about it; from the reason behind the initial murder, to that scene with little boy, and, oddly enough, to the artist, who was, essentially, obsessed with a little girl. Tomie herself, in turn, is an example of feminine toxicity told through the medium of the self-inflicted oppression that women often come to as a result of patriarchal society.

At it's core, I think Tomie is a story about shame; shame of a city that killed a little girl and attempted to hide it, critique (as we often see with Ito) of (in this case) Japanese people falling in line due to social pressure, and how this social pressure, in turn, becomes a disease that we push on when even no one is looking simply because, at the core, we are ashamed at ourselves and take this shame out as aggression on others. It is about how disgust with oneself leads to objectification of others and, in turn, poisons one to be nothing more than a monstrosity, which is what Tomie ends up being. Tomie is a story about a pathetic town drowning in its own guilt as it sodomizes itself into oblivion - as I said, pretty average for Ito, tbh