Maniac: Japanese Tales of Macrabe

Characters

Tomie Kawakami

Tomie is a mysterious, beautiful woman identified by her sleek black hair and a beauty mark below her left eye. Tomie acts like a succubus, possessing an undisclosed power to make any man fall in love with her. Through her mere presence, or through psychological and emotional manipulation, she drives these people into jealous rages that often lead to brutal acts of violence. Men kill each other over her, and women are driven to insanity as well —though there are some who are strong enough to resist her. Tomie is inevitably killed time and time again, only to regenerate and spread her curse to other victims, making her effectively immortal. Her origins are never explained, though it is suggested by some older men in the series that she has existed long before the events of the manga; in Boy, she is revealed to have known her future teacher Satoru Takagi since he was a child.

Each story showcases various characters that encounter Tomie in her many (often hideous) forms, with some having their own arcs or returning in later chapters. Tomie's regenerative abilities (partly fuelled by cannibalism and assimilation) are also showcased: aside from recovering quickly from gruesome and seemingly mortal wounds, she can also replicate herself by sprouting unnaturally from any part of her body, whether it be from severed limbs, organs, or even her spilled blood. Radiation accelerates her healing/regeneration process. Her cells are also capable of transforming a victim into a Tomie via an organ transplant. Multiple characters are even driven to dismember her corpse, unwittingly allowing more Tomie copies to grow and spread throughout the world. Even locks of her hair are dangerous, burrowing into its victims' brain to possess them, and eventually killing them when it grows wildly within the body. It is also shown that even if Tomie's body is not injured, her body will attempt to sprout another Tomie through tumorous growths, usually when she is emotionally stressed. Some Tomie copies, however, cannot stand one another; one is seen killing one personally, while others order it done through the boys they seduce/enslave. Fire is the only known method to destroy a Tomie for good, though only if the flesh is completely carbonized.

The next story arc, beginning as a prequel, reveals that a baby girl can grow naturally into a Tomie via a blood injection and that she can age if she has not yet copied herself. The man responsible for these injections is a horribly burnt stranger — once a supermodel disgraced by a Tomie in his past — who seeks revenge by making one of these "natural" Tomies old and ugly. He manages to encase a Tomie named "Ayaka" in a block of cement with the help of Ayaka's older sister. The two then wait for many years — endlessly hearing her tormented cries — before finally breaking the block, revealing that Tomie had somehow escaped through a tiny crack, her apparent wailing being nothing more than wind blowing through the hollow block.

An arc released exclusively with the DVD release of the Junji Ito Collection, titled Tomie: Takeover, features Tomie encountering a man capable of body-switching, who finds her various abilities difficult to handle.

A four-page crossover arc with Souichi Tsujii, titled Souichi Possessed, was released in 2018. In the story, the titular's Souichi's older brother Koichi tells a younger Tomie of his attempted mischief of a brother's encounter with a different elderly Tomie, the arc serving as the prologue to a larger confrontation between the pair, as the younger Tomie requests an introduction.

Souichi Tsujii

As an adult, Souichi somehow masters a high level of dark magic as he now can generate nails from his mouth and put a binding spell to turn his family into hideous figures to do his bidding in his haunted house business. At the same time, he marries Miss Fuchi and fathers a son who is a cannibalistic monster just like his mother. Due to his wife's terrifying personality, he has to live a nomadic life to get away from her as he goes from town to town opening haunted houses to get away from her. Eventually, his wife tracks him down and drags him away with her whilst threatening to kill him if he leaves her and their son again.

Souichi is cunning and specializes in Black Magic. He uses Katashiro Dolls and can harm others by hammering nails into the dolls, which he used once to send someone to the hospital. He can use the Katashiro Dolls in other ways as well, like burying or drowning a person. He can cause others to hallucinate by dropping something on their doll; For example, causing someone to hallucinate a giant spider, due to Souichi dropping a spider toy on their doll. He also can create human-sized dolls who are able to talk and move.

He can cause mischief to others simply by cursing them repeatedly. He can bring back the dead to life and change the weather by simply using a curse. He has also stated that he can talk to any doll. His curses seem to have no range limit as, Souichi's curse on his cousin Yuusuke who is in Tokyo, affected him. The amount of curses that Souichi possesses is unknown, though it seems to be large.

One of his oddest abilities may be that he can not only build a soundproof room with the help of his black magic, but he can imitate cicada sounds. This is shown when he creates a four-layered room for his brother to study in, only to crawl into the walls and annoy his brother with insect noises.

He otherwise can generate and shoot nails out of his mouth.