The manga was Ito's first published work that he originally submitted to Monthly Halloween, a shōjo magazine in 1987, which led to him winning the Kazuo Umezu award.

Tomie Kawakami, identified by her sleek black hair and a beauty mark below her left eye, 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.

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.

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.

[5][6] Asahi Sonorama released an omnibus volume in February 2000 titled, Tomie Zen (富江 (全)).

Most of the manga stories occur during the dark of night for its sense of eeriness, and the films generally follow suit.

In the manga, Tomie's attitude towards women seems to range between thinly-veiled hostility and outright murderous rage (unless she stands to profit from them), while the film incarnation is known to seduce women as well as men, and in many of the movies in fact befriends a solitary girl, though their friendship tends to have lesbian undertones.

In July 2019, Alexandre Aja was announced to be developing a television series adaptation of Tomie for Quibi, in conjunction with Sony Pictures Television and Universal Content Productions, with David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick serving as writer and executive producer and Hiroki Shirota on board as co-producer.