The series focuses on the titular Tomie Kawakami, a beautiful young girl identified by a mole under her left eye, who drives her stricken admirers to madness, often resulting in her own death.

[2][3] The film opens with the police investigating the murder of high school girl Tomie Kawakami (Miho Kanno).

The detective (Tomoro Taguchi) assigned to the case learns that three years prior another Tomie Kawakami was murdered in rural Gifu prefecture.

The detective tracks down one of Tomie's classmates called Tsukiko Izumisawa (Mami Nakamura), an art student who is being treated for amnesia.

Over the span of a couple weeks, it grows into a beautiful teenaged girl with orange eyes responding to the name of Tomie Kawakami.

In the first segment, Tomie (Runa Nagai) is introduced as a high school student whose body has just been found on the street with several piles of garbage.

The two go to bury her in the woods in a deep grave and begin making plans to conceal their work, but as they walk to school in the morning Tomie is miraculously there to confront them.

The second episode focuses on a photographer who has lost his passion for photography but regains it when he finds Tomie, this time a model/dancer of a sort at a bar.

While visiting, Takeshi is confronted by a naked Tomie (Mai Hosho), now fully grown and escaped from the basement, who asks him to get her out of there.

The next morning, Yumi, Director Morita's daughter, visits the hospital in search of her father, missing since the operation.

Meanwhile, Fumihito visits his friend Takeshi, who had gone mad after killing and decapitating Tomie in a fit of jealousy, then watching her come back to life, regenerating a new head.

At his funeral Yumi receives a note from Tomie, asking to meet her that night at the hospital, seemingly for a final showdown.

A small facial mole can be seen directly beneath the sister's left eye, suggesting that, because Takumi gave her the portrait of Tomie, she was also possessed by her.

Introspective and lonely, she is picked on and bullied by her classmates at school, and lives alone with her loving, but distant widower father, Kazuhiko Hashimoto.

One day, while admiring an ornate, jewel encrusted cross necklace in an antiquities shop, Tomie meets a strange, beautiful girl (Nozomi Ando) with a mole under her left eye.

This straight-to-video movie is a prequel to the rest of the series, shot on HD, and based on the first Tomie manga by Junji Ito.

Tomie (Rio Matsumoto) shows up as a transfer student at a high school, quickly enchanting all the males, and raising the ire of the females.

The story revolves around a young doctor (Hisako Shirata), and an unidentified, naked and wounded woman she runs down on the road one night.

A young man with a past begins work in a factory, where he attracts the amorous attention of a mysterious woman who lurks behind the scenes.

On her way home with her best friend Yoshie Kazuya (Aika Ota), Tsukiko runs into her elder sister Tomie (Miu Nakamura) who goes to the same high school.

Confused, Tsukiko stops taking pictures, and watches in horror as Tomie is crushed on her neck by a steel cross that falls from a building under construction, killing her.

One year later, Tsukiko's daily life slowly returns to some sense of normality, but she still suffers from grief and recurring nightmares over her stepsister's death.

Tomie manages to get Masashi to whip Tsukiko across the back with a steam iron cable as punishment for not showing affection towards her.

However, Tomie's behavior starts becoming increasingly bizarre and abnormal as she shows Tsukiko the scar on her neck that begins to evolve into a deranged, talking tumor.

Meanwhile, at home, Tomie's head rises from the trash bin and convinces her father to kill his wife and feed her body to her.

Tsukiko sighs in relief, believing she just had a bad nightmare which proves to be false when Mashashi starts eating hair and Kimiko’s head suddenly stretches abnormally to the point where it appears to be upside down.

Tsukiko runs upstairs and encounters Toshio and Yoshie who tell her that they are mortified by their friendship with her in her dream, and in real life they always hated her and thought she was annoying.

In July 2019, Alexandre Aja was announced to be developing a web 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, with Hiroki Shirota on board as co-producer.

As such, this changing roster of faces has allowed for a range of interpretations and subtle shading to the part, the most popular being Miho Kanno and Miki Sakai.

Miho Kanno was Junji Ito's own personal choice for the role; he apparently coached her in preparing for her audition, even suggesting she wear Tomie's trademark beauty mark under her left eye.