Characters / Tomie

Tomie Kawakami

Portrayed by: Miho Kanno (Live-Action Films)
Voiced by: Rie Suegara (Anime, JP), Monica Rial (Anime, EN)

"Me? I am Tomie."

The titular Villain Protagonist of the series. Tomie is a young woman and horror monster whose nature is left intentionally unexplained in full. Men (and in rare instances, other women) can't seem to stop themselves from chopping her into pieces, but Tomie is able to regenerate from anything into brand new Tomies. Some stories, particularly later ones, feature new Tomies distinct from the one featured in a previous story, but that Tomie is sure to act in exactly the same way as all the others.

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• Achilles' Heel: She has at least three weak spots:
  • On a more practical level, fire is the only way to prevent her cells from regenerating and creating clones of herself;
  • On a more personal level, she can be “defeated”, either by simply ignoring her (the Attention Whore’s worst nightmare) or by calling her a “monster” (her Berserk Button, which for some reason makes her lose control over her body)
• Adaptational Sexuality: While it's ambiguous whether Tomie is actually attracted to men (or just using them), she shows no interest in women in the manga; in the movie series, she is more clearly bisexual.
• The Ageless: Played with. A Tomie born from infecting a normal person with Tomie is able to grow older, with an infant Tomie being shown growing up to adulthood and old age. The moment she multiplies via regeneration, she stops ageing—and presumably the Tomies that split off from her don't age either.
• Allegorical Character: Junji Ito has stated he wrote Tomie as a representation of his fears of emotionally manipulative women. She's also been noted as a stand-in for the cycle of abuse, representing a regenerating, cyclical force that was created as a result of her teacher committing statutory rape and getting her killed by accident. She haunts the world by relying on parasitic exploitation and driving innocents into either obsession or hatred, which both lead to their doom. Similar to real-life abusers, the most viable tactic for survival (assuming you're not willing to risk suffering the legal consequences of setting somebody on fire, at least) seems to be to ignore her.
• All Take and No Give: Tomie is the Taker and the other people in her relationships are always the Givers. Men who become attracted to Tomie will be influenced to spoil her rotten for seemingly no reason besides how damn great she apparently is, while Tomie does nothing but verbally abuse them and supernaturally drive them to madness (intentionally or not). Tomie tries to find positions in society where she can mooch off of others for as long as possible before the relationship inevitably implodes, either by her or the other person dying, and then she'll move onto someone else, often leaving behind ruined lives without a care.
• Alpha Bitch: She has that role when in a school setting, most notably "Photograph" and "Kiss".
• Ambiguous Situation:
  • Is Tomie a monster, a girl with supernatural powers, an alien, or an embodiment of human lust and abuse? It's never explained why she can regenerate and hold such sway over others, and other characters can only guess at what happens and why based on what they observe of her. It's not even clear whether Tomie herself knows just what she is.
  • Is the first Tomie we see the original, or is she merely another instance of Tomie with an original somewhere out there?
• Anthropomorphic Personification: Not outright confirmed, but her entire eternal existence does completely embody everything associated with lust and abuse, with her being simultaneously the abuser and the victim every time.
• Asshole Victim: Her awfulness leads to her being slaughtered many times. This is subverted, however, as she uses people's hatred of her to regenerate, though it's left unclear if this is intentional or not.
• Ax-Crazy: Usually during her Villainous Breakdowns, though this would overlap with her suitors who throttle her.
• Bad Liar: The first Tomie tries to win Tsukiko over by making up ridiculous stories about how rich and influential her family is, but Tsukiko sees through them.
• Beauty Breeds Laziness: Played for Horror; she's a Femme Fatale who seduces people into buying her expensive luxuries to the point of bankruptcy, and she prefers to manipulate others into killing others unless she has no other choice.
• Berserk Button: In "Photographs" Tomie is attempting to manipulate Tsukiko with a saccharine attitude, but Tsukiko accuses her of being a compulsive liar, calling it a disease. Immediately upon hearing the word "disease" the smile drops off Tomie's lips and rage fills her eyes, and being called a "monster" pushes her to the Rage Breaking Point—which for some reason causes her to start splitting.
• Big Bad: The focus of the series and her powers cause endless misery and pain for everyone around her.
• Blatant Lies: She's actually not too great at constructing cover stories (at one point she claims to be a survivor from a plane crash when something like that would've made the news), but all it takes is for people to drop their suspicions for even a moment for her to worm her way in.
• Blessed with Suck: A situation where she is both this trope and Cursed with Awesome. Everytime Tomie seems to have reached her goal (being worshipped and having her every whim fulfilled), exposure to her very presence means that she can never get to enjoy those things for very long, and she has to start over from zero. Sure, she can regenerate, but this means that she has to get murdered and chopped into pieces every single time, and we know she can feel pain. Not to mention that any temper tantrum or other sudden stress can lead to a tumor growing out of her head, a process which she appears to find extremely distressing. It doesn’t help that “matured” Tomies really hate each other and will try their best to eliminate one another by scheming or simply setting their harems on each other.
• Break Them by Talking: Tomie stokes such an obsession among her admirers that she can (and has) talked them into committing suicide or destroyed their sanity with just a few harsh words.
• Brown Note Being: Anyone who just so much as makes note of her slowly becomes obsessed with her. She always exploits this obsession to get the victim to cater to her every whim, though it always inevitably ends with the victim going insane and killing her, typically after killing several other people as well.
• Character Tic: A very subtle one, but Tomie has a habit of pausing and staring for a few seconds while thinking of what she plans to do next, which usually involves doing something terrible.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Tomie is loyal to no one but herself and is willing to use and discard literally anyone else. And by that, we mean each singular Tomie is loyal only to herself. In the instances where there are multiple Tomies around, they immediately conspire to kill each other.
• Compelling Voice: Things Tomie says have a way of affecting people, gnawing away at them even if they brush her statements off at first. Of course, she can also use this more directly once she has someone on the hook.
• Death Glare: She's got a scary one which always stops the target in their tracks, at least for a moment. In "Passing Demon", three of her even get into a glare-off!
• Didn't See That Coming: As a way of mocking Isumizawa and getting her into trouble, Tomie has her take a bunch of pictures, even telling the girl that she can put them on flyers and spread them all over the school if she wanted to. So she does, and that's how Tomie learns that cameras can reveal her true nature.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: In the first story, Tomie was much less of a jerk (while she was definitely manipulative, she did genuinely seem to be in love with Takagi, cared for others and for the most part acted like a normal girl), her madness-inducing allure is never mentioned, and her extreme Healing Factor is only vaguely alluded to in the ending. It isn't until Hospital and Basement that a lot of Tomie's defining traits (her greedy Alpha Bitch demeanor, Tomie's partners being compelled to murder her, Tomie's flesh and blood being able to convert other women into Tomies) were properly introduced and solidified.
• Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette: Tomie has black hair and a pale skin complexion, enough to make any man fall for her.
• Even the Girls Want Her: A truly horrifying example. The few ladies that fall for Tomie fall for her so much that they'll murder others and even Tomie herself, just as the men do.
• Evil Is Petty: Arguably part of what makes her so horrifying. Despite her powers, she has no real long-term goal to use them for; if she did, then she might stop once she had achieved it. Instead, she exists merely a human cancer that does nothing but make people's lives worse.
• Failure Is the Only Option: She will never experience anything resembling long-term enjoyment for her eternal existence, as she inevitably drives those around her to brutally murder her all so she could be reborn and have it happen all over again.
• Fate Worse than Death: Zig-Zagged. She seems to enjoy jerking people around for her amusement, but she gets no long-term fulfilment from anything she does, existing only to be painfully and brutally slaughtered yet again.
• Fire Keeps It Dead: Burning is the only thing that Tomie can't regenerate from.
• For the Evulz: Tomie often goes out of her way to ruin innocent lives for no reason. Special mention goes to Boy, where Tomie: molests an 8 year old boy, mocks his mother that the boy is hers now, drives the boy to murder, drives him to despair by saying she was only playing with him and then making the father of his family run off with her.
• From a Single Cell: Tomie is able to regenerate into a new Tomie, or several new Tomies, as long as some part of her remains. This even extends to infecting other people to turn into her with a handful of her cells, and one early story has her starting to form out of a rug with her fresh blood on it.
• Glamour Failure: In "Photographs" Tsukiko Izumisawa's pictures show Tomie's horrifically unnatural nature. Upon seeing them for herself, the furious Tomie orders her male admirers to hunt down and kill Tsukiko. Following this incident, she becomes extremely reluctant to be photographed. Takagi claims that his photos of her don't do this, but a later story shows that a random guy photographing her managed to have it happen, so it might be a matter of Takagi being too far gone to notice.
• Grand Theft Me: Just putting her cells in a female human's body causes them to transform into her in a matter of days, in body and mind.
• Hate Sink: Of Junji Ito's many horrific monsters, Tomie is explicitly designed to be hated by the audience and is made after the emotionally manipulative women Junji Ito fears the most. Resembling a bratty teenage girl, she behaves in an obnoxious and narcissistic fashion, driving those who see her to obsession and lavishing her in gifts and praise while complaining about everything being insufficient. In truth, however, she is a horrific, cruel abomination with infinite regeneration powers who merely resembles a teenage girl and uses her manipulation to target the vulnerable and inevitably drive them to madness and insanity. Her most hateable moment comes when she emotionally manipulates and molests a young boy, and causes the young boy to be driven to madness and turned into a deranged serial killer. Lacking any mitigating factors of likeability and not even being particularly bright, and even factoring in her depressing backstory which fails to excuse her inhumanity, Tomie is uniquely and unambiguously despicable.
• Healing Factor: Each instance of Tomie heals very quickly, even after their apparent death. It seems that eating flesh or being buried in the earth helps accelerate this. One Tomie, as she's dying, asks to be buried and regenerates from her stab wounds in a day. "Little Finger" indicates that she can control this factor to some extent as the fingers deliberately left "Pinky" in a partially-developed state in order to get sympathy from the protagonist, who allowed herself to fully develop after the ploy worked.
• Hive Mind: A strange case; all Tomies act with almost the exact same personality, and some Tomies are shown to share memories between each other as well, but they only sometimes act under a single intelligence; other times, they're even competitive against other "rival" Tomies, though this typically happens with Tomie-infected humans like the ones in the last arc who refer to each other by their original names. A few exceptions to this are shown in "Little Finger" or "The Basin of the Waterfall", where the Tomies there got along/acted as one while they were still regenerating. Tomies seem to be able to sense the presence and physical condition of each other, as well.
• Humanoid Abomination: She looks human, even acts human to a degree. But her ability to induce obsessive, homicidal madness on all who gaze upon her features along with her utterly horrifying ways of cheating death prove that whatever she is, human isn’t even close.
• I Love You Because I Can't Control You: She'll fixate on any male who manages to ignore her, obsessively trying to find some way to get him to open up and to her, because she can't stand to be ignored.
• Indirect Serial Killer: She prefers to manipulate others into killing for her rather than dirty her own hands.
• Jerkass: The woman is thoroughly unpleasant and loves ruining the lives of others for her own amusement.
• Karmic Death: Each instance of Tomie causes suffering and misery, and each instance of Tomie is eventually killed by someone she manipulates.
• Kill It with Fire: Other Tomies will suggest killing their "rivals" by burning them, and it's eventually confirmed that the only thing that can kill a Tomie for good is to cremate her at the highest temperature possible. As "Little Finger" demonstrates, though, anything less than cremation won't be enough.
• Laughably Evil: Downplayed. The manga gets a degree of Black Comedy of the idea of a supernatural Alpha Bitch who complains about not getting enough caviar and foie gras, but she is still truly horrific.
• Lascivious Beauty Mark: She has a mole underneath her left eye, and has the strange ability to cause numerous men (and a few women as well) to become self-destructively obsessed with her through sight alone. She additionally knows this, and regularly exploits her skin-deep beauty to get what she wants.
• Love at First Sight: Just one look at Tomie is enough for most men to become obsessed with her—if not immediately, then after a few words.
• Meaningful Appearance: The vain Tomie, whom many men fall for, is characterized by a mole just under her eye.
• The Mirror Shows Your True Self: Not mirrors, but photos of Tomie reveal her for the monster she is.
• More than Mind Control: She does appear to have supernatural compulsive abilities, but at least one story ("Little Finger") shows that if you keep your heart closed to her and stay suspicious she can't hook you. She's so attractive that her appearance alone is often enough to get people to drop their guard. Sympathy also works. If she doesn't naturally end up in a position which would elicit sympathy or compassion after being killed, she's pretty good at engineering situations.
• Mundane Horror: Tomie's powers are certainly creepy, but the true horror of Tomie isn't that she's inhuman, but that she acts like a perfectly mundane malignant narcissist and/or low-functioning sociopath.
• Narcissist: Aside from her supernatural abilities, Tomie is shown to be rather mundanely self-centered and hits all of the marks of this trope. She has a grandiose sense of self worth and sees herself as the pinnacle of beauty, and much of her insults towards other women are based on their physical appearances. However, she gets incredibly angry when others don't see her this way, making it clear that her self worth hinges on the validation of others. Tomie acts incredibly entitled to the affection of others, particularly men, and wants to be pampered, but doesn't actually care about them as people and discards them once she grows bored or they are no longer useful to her. She tries to reach positions which allow her to indulge in all of her vices with the least amount of physical repercussions, such as infiltrating a rich family to make off with their riches or finding a boyfriend who will give her whatever she wants, for as long as she can before things implode. All of her relationships are self-serving, explosive and dysfunctional for these very reasons. Like a typical narcissist, the best way to avoid Tomie's wrath seems to be to ignore her and avoid her entirely (although this doesn't always work).
• Orcus on His Throne: Despite being the titular character and being horrible beyond any reasonable doubt, Tomie is first and foremost verbally abusive and keeps her actual crimes to mooching off of others (usually men), messing with people emotionally, and all around being a childish bully. Most of the actual horror comes when others react to her, as most of the series' most gruesome acts are done to Tomie herself; people who are under her spell tend to do all of Tomie's gruesome biddings, and those who fight back against Tomie merely create more Tomies and drive themselves mad in the process. Theoretically, if everyone found a way to ignore her, she'd get bored and move on to someone else.
• Power Incontinence: Maybe. Assuming the cycle of her manipulating people, them going insane and killing her, and her being reborn isn't something she's consciously invoking, every one of her deaths is a result of her charm abilities spiraling out of her control.
• Psychopathic Womanchild: Tomie's wishes never go above those of a shallow teenage girl: handsome young men to fawn over her, fashionable clothes and jewelry and eating expensive luxury food. She"s also proven to be just as petty and mean as her human counterparts. The only difference is that Tomie is capable of destroying lives and getting people killed, and death won't stop her in the slightest.
• Radiation-Immune Mutants: Exposing her severed parts to lethal levels of gamma radiation just makes them grow faster.
• Sinister Nudity: Tome herself shows up nude from time to time, but she proves herself much too deplorable for anyone to appreciate her nudity; such instances demonstrating this usually involve making men into murderers or commit suicide. She even has them kill her to have more bodies to use.
• Skewed Priorities: Tomie's priorities skew exclusively toward the short-term comfort and pleasure of Tomie alone. And, if she enthralls someone, so will theirs.
• Smug Snake: Assuming she isn't invoking her cycles of death and rebirth, she definitely fits this to a T, being a manipulative and entitled brat who always believes she's in control of the situations she finds herself in, only for that to be proven to definitely not be the case when her victims inevitably kill her in a painful fashion.
• The Sociopath: By human standards, she indeed is this. At her core, she is a manipulative narcissist who only cares about her own desires. People are disposable to her when they are no longer of use to her, and she'll discard them without a second thought. She knows what she does is wrong and doesn't care about the pain she causes.
• So Beautiful Itsa Curse: Tomie is a bewitchingly beautiful woman but that doesn’t help that her victims gets obsessed with her up to killing her!
• Succubi and Incubi: Tomie is described on the back of the omnibus version as a succubus. In true Junji Ito fashion, however, who or what she is never confirmed.
• Thanatos Gambit: In later stories, its clear Tomie intentionally endeavors to anger men and make them cut her into pieces, so as to create more Tomies.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Caviar and foie gras- she appears to dislike just about everything else and will get mad at anyone who gives her something else to eat. It's unlikely she actually enjoys it; she probably orders her victims to get her those infamously expensive foods just to wind them up.
• There Can Be Only One: Whenever there are multiple Tomie at the same time, each of them are egoistical enough to try to get rid of others.
• Tragic Villain: From a certain point of view, anyway. While Tomie is evil and atrocious beyond redemption the story makes it very clear she is trapped in a truly horrific cycle of resurrection she has little to no control over. Being surrounded by slavering, crazed followers who inevitably dismember her quite likely robbed her of the ability to mature or develop as a person. What's especially tragic is that if Tomie were just a regular human instead of an immortal Hive Mind abomination, she probably would've been a far different girl than the monster she is now.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: Infants infected with Tomie in infancy grow up to be little girl versions of Tomie. Yasuko's Tomie sister, Ayaka, is shown as being bratty and trying to seduce older boys. By the time she's eight, she's also trying to get her rival little-girl-Tomies killed.
• Ungrateful Bitch: Tomie seems incapable of feeling any gratitude for what other people do for her.
• Vague Age: Originally she was presented as a teenage school girl but the story continues her age becomes more ambiguous as she multiplies and takes on multiple roles
• Villain Protagonist: Played With. She is clearly the focus of the series, but stories themselves are vignettes taking place from the perspective of those who come into contact with her in order to obscure her origins and intents.
• Viral Transformation: Another way Tomie spreads herself; if some of her cells or blood is left in an unwitting victim (at least a female one), they end up transforming into another version of her.
• Was Once a Man: Possibly. It's ambiguous if the Tomie in the first story is the original one or simply got infected. Of course, people who were infected by Tomie clearly count.
• Would Hurt a Child: Tomie is shown sexually molesting an eight year old boy in one story.
• Zombie Infectee: For a female, even having some of Tomie's cells in your body is enough to start turning you into her, body, mind, and soul.

Mr. Takagi

Portrayed by: Yoshiyuki Morishita (Live-Action Films)
Voiced by: Hozumi Goda (Anime, JP), J. Michael Tatum (Anime, EN)

Tomie's teacher in the very first story, who was carrying on an affair with her until she was brutally murdered. He shows up occasionally in some of the early stories, experimenting with Tomie's regeneration process under the pretense that she's his "daughter".

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• Ambiguously Evil: It's unclear to what extent Takagi's actions are the result of Tomie's seduction and how much they are due to his own free will. That said, even when he's first introduced he's not the most upstanding individual.
• Arc Villain: While Tomie herself shows up through the whole series, Takagi is this for the early half of the series. He intentionally mixes innocent people up in the horror that is Tomie and experiments with her regenerative process, ostensibly to learn how to stop it, until his last appearance in the Morita Hospital two-parter.
• The Dragon: For the first half of the series, he serves Tomie and helps her find victims. He vanishes in the second half.
• Ephebophile: Is in a relationship with a young teenage girl who then becomes a young teenage girl who is also an inhuman abomination.
• Evil Teacher: He's a teacher who has sex with one of his teenage students even before he becomes a psychopath, and then goes on to assist Tomie in some of her most horrific crimes.
• Greater-Scope Villain: He (possibly) created what Tomie is now as a result of his ephebophilic exploitation, which manifested into an unknown supernatural force that gave her the horrific regeneration powers she has now.
• Mad Scientist: He takes on this role in spirit after his first appearance, experimenting with Tomie using normal human girls as guinea pigs.
• Mr. Exposition: is one of the first characters to somewhat explain how Tomie's powers work, including her regenerative abilities and the way she drives men to kill her.
• Teacher/Student Romance: The way that his relationship with Tomie started in the first story. Although at first he didn't seem very happy about it after she came back from the dead, it's implied that her influence is what drove him to be obsessed with her after she was killed.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: After a few appearances in the early stories, Takagi is never seen again. What happened to him is never shown nor mentioned, but he would not simply leave Tomie willingly as long as he was under her spell. One possibility is that Tomie simply tossed him aside when she got bored of him.

Tsukiko Izumisawa

Portrayed by: Moe Arai (Live-Action Films)

The protagonist of three Tomie stories in the first volume, and one of the few protagonists to survive her encounter with Tomie. A member of the photography club who secretly takes candid pictures of her male classmates for cash, Tsukiko's life becomes a nightmare when she takes a picture of the new rich girl in school, Tomie, and her photograph reveals her for what she really is.

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• Anti-Hero: When first introduced, she runs an operation where she takes pictures of boys for the girls that crush on them and charges exorbitant prices for the pictures. Tomie would be completely justified in ratting Tsukiko out to the teachers if this wasn't Tomie we're talking about.
• Audience Surrogate: Despite the manga's extreme violent content, it was initially written for an audience of 14-17 year old teenage girls, which Tsukiko is.
• Badass Normal: She manages to survive not one, but two separate encounters with Tomie, despite the fact that Tomie tries to kill her on both occasions. Considering what usually happens to people who cross Tomie's path, that's pretty impressive.
• Bullying a Dragon: After finding out what a cruel, unstable, manipulative monster Tomie is (though she doesn't know how literal this is) Tsukiko takes her to task and calls her a hideous monster to her face. Tomie doesn't take it well, and Tsukiko nearly gets killed by Tomie's love-crazed minions.
• Camera Fiend: Tsukiko takes plenty of pictures, and this is what gets her in trouble. Apparently her skill as a photographer is one of the reasons that her picture of Tomie showed her as a monster. By the same token, she's able to take a picture of the old man's daughter that shows her as she was before she became a horrific Tomie experiment.
• Did Not Get The Guy: At the start of the series she's in love with her classmate Yamazaki and asks him to pose for pictures claiming that they're for other girls who like him when they're really for her. Alas, he becomes one of Tomie's thralls and she ultimately moves away to get away from Tomie. He also goes missing, most likely killed, although Tomie uses his name to lure Tsukiko into a trap.
• Final Girl: Tsukiko is the last surviving named character in her introduction arc.
• Only Sane Man: She's one of the few protagonists to get mixed up in Tomie's affairs and live, mostly because she's able to keep her wits, not fall for any of Tomie's charm, and get the hell away whenever she has the chance.
• Screw This, I'm Out of Here!: How "Mansion" ends, with her escaping from the titular mansion after she finds out about the horror of Mr. Takagi's experiments. Not that she was that eager to enter in the first place.

Yasuko

The final protagonist of the Tomie series, present in the last three chapters. Yasuko is a poor, unattractive young woman who learns that her bratty little sister Ayaka is one of several children who were infected by Tomie in infancy. The man who reveals this, a disfigured male model named Ryo, explains that he did this as part of a revenge scheme against Tomie, to have her grow old and lose her beautiful looks. Yasuko is roped into his revenge scheme and charged with keeping Ayaka from getting harmed until old age. This is easier said than done.

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• Anti-Hero: At first her intentions for protecting Tomie-Ayaka are fairly pure: Ayaka's her sister, and they need Ryo's support. However, after years of trying to keep Ayaka from being killed only to get constant belittlement, even to the point of being reduced to a servant, she finally subscribes to Ryo's line of thinking and agrees that Tomie-Ayaka deserves to suffer.
• Deuteragonist: Yasuko is the main protagonist of the last arc. However, almost as much time is spent on Ryo and exploring his vendetta against Tomie.
• Patricide: Ends up having to kill her alcoholic father when he, too, falls for Ayaka.
• Protectorate: After hearing Ryo's story and learning the truth about her sister, Yasuko is charged by Ryo to make certain that Ayaka-Tomie won't be killed by the other Tomies' enthralled assassins. In exchange, Ryo promises to look after her family by supplying them with money and moving them when they need it.
• Revenge: Her motive for keeping Ayaka safe is at first because she's her sister, and because Ryo tells her to. After she accepts how horrible Ayaka really is, though, Yasuko tries to help her grow old and lose her looks as revenge for being an Ungrateful Bastard.
• Self-Made Orphan: She doesn't kill her mother (Tomie's assassins did that), but when her drunk, unstable father finally gives in to his urge to molest Tomie-Ayaka, Yasuko stabs him to death.
• The Unfavorite: As a result of her little sister being a Tomie, Yasuko is viewed as plain by comparison, at least by their father...
• Younger Than They Look: Thanks to the stress and effort involved in keeping Ayaka-Tomie from getting assassinated and dealing with their alcoholic father, at the age of twenty-two Yasuko apparently looks rather older. Ayaka-Tomie says she looks forty, but Tomie's...kind of a jerk.

Ryo

A male model who was once obsessed with his good looks, he ran afoul of a Tomie when he insisted that he was prettier than her. After being scarred by one of her goons, he tried to take revenge on her but ended up severely burned, permanently disfiguring him. Mocked and treated poorly by subsequent Tomies, Ryo hatched a plan to take Tomie's good looks away by infecting infants with Tomie and watching at least one of them grow to old age.

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• All for Nothing: His long, elaborate plan to get revenge on Tomie ends up not working, as she escapes the concrete block that he imprisoned her in. That being said, it's possible she might have escaped too late to keep her good looks
• Conspicuous Trenchcoat: Wears one of these in the final arc of Tomie as he attempts to hatch his revenge plot.
• Covered with Scars: On his second appearance, he's covered from head-to-toe with disfiguring burn scars thanks to his prior encounter with Tomie.
• Jerkass: He's not a particularly nice guy in either of his appearances, driven either by narcissism or his lust for revenge.
• Mr. Exposition: He explains even more about how Tomies work than Mr. Takagi, evidently learning a lot about them in his travels.
• Narcissist: Ryo was obsessed with his looks. Even Tomie's face was nothing to his, in his eyes. As a result the ugliness of his burns was too much for him to take.
• Offscreen Villain Dark Matter: Although he was a successful male model roughly a decade ago (give or take), he hasn't exactly been working in a while. Somehow, though, he has the funds to support a family of three for years, even with Ayaka likely having the same expensive tastes as other Tomies, and said family having to move all over Japan numerous times. Plus, he has the means to do things like make certain that dead Tomies are utterly incinerated, or encasing live Tomies in concrete.
• Revenge: His entire motivation; his looks were everything to him and Tomie took them away, so he wants to see the proud and vain Tomie reduced to an old crone (as opposed to getting chopped up as Tomies usually do).
• Villain Protagonist: Is basically this in Old and Ugly. He injects three innocent babies with Tomie's blood, knowing full well that they will turn into Tomies and grow up to do horrible things to people, so he can get "revenge" on a single Tomie out of what are likely hundreds.
• Would Hurt a Child: He intentionally infected baby girls with Tomie.