A beautiful high school student named Tomie Kawakami is found dead, her body scattered among piles of garbage on a street. Yet this is only the beginning. She returns to reunite with her former boyfriend, re-entering his life as if nothing happened, while a mysterious man in a trench coat and an eye patch stalks her with a camera. The ex-girlfriend, driven by jealousy and suspicion, confronts Tomie on the school rooftop and exposes her true nature. In the chaos that follows, Tomie is thrown from the roof to her apparent death. The couple buries her deep in the woods, believing they have finally ended her influence. But when they walk to school the next morning, Tomie is waiting for them, alive and smiling.

This is the core premise of Tomie: Another Face, a three-episode Japanese horror television drama that aired on Kansai TV from December 1999 to March 2000. The series adapts the manga by Junji Ito and unfolds as an anthology where the titular character reappears in different settings and circumstances, always with the same cursed nature. Tomie is identified by her long black hair and a distinctive beauty mark below her left eye. She possesses a supernatural ability to make anyone fall obsessively in love with her, driving men to violent jealous rages and women to the brink of madness. She is murdered repeatedly throughout the series, yet each time she regenerates and returns, making her effectively immortal.

In the second episode, Tomie appears as a dancer at a bar, reigniting the passion of a photographer who had lost his love for the art. She resembles a girl from his past who originally inspired him, and he receives her permission to photograph her extensively. When he develops the film, each image reveals a horrifying secret: alongside Tomie's beautiful face is the face of a ghoul. Tomie challenges him to kill her to prove she is not a ghost, reasoning that a ghost cannot die. When he does, she simply returns to life in his car during transport, causing him to flee in terror. His escape leads him to a cliff where he encounters both the Tomie he just killed and the Tomie from his past, revealing they are the same entity. He falls to his death as one Tomie stands over his body making a V sign while the other takes a photograph.

The final episode finds Tomie as a young woman about to receive a marriage proposal from her boyfriend. The stalker with the eye patch, a former coroner named Oota, attempts to attack her. Tomie manipulates her boyfriend into trying to kill Oota to prove his love. During their confrontation, Oota reveals his backstory: Tomie was once a corpse on his autopsy table, and she stabbed out his eye before crawling away. Her disappearance cost him his job, his wife, and his children. He shows the boyfriend crime scene photographs documenting Tomie killed in various ways across multiple locations and years. The boyfriend eventually brings Tomie to an industrial incinerator where Oota successfully burns her body. But from the ashes, Tomie's face reforms in the air, declaring that she will never die and that every single ash particle will become a new Tomie.

The series is set in contemporary Japan, moving through urban streets, high schools, apartments, bars, wooded areas, and industrial facilities. The tone is one of creeping dread and body horror, emphasizing how Tomie's beauty corrupts everyone who encounters her. The stalker character Oota appears throughout all three episodes, representing the only person who truly understands what Tomie is and seeks a permanent way to destroy her.

A separate American live-action television series adaptation was announced in July 2019, to be developed for the streaming service Quibi. Alexandre Aja was attached to direct, with David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick writing the series. In July 2020, Adeline Rudolph was cast in the title role. Quibi described the series as beginning with a beautiful high school girl going missing, after which pieces of her body are discovered scattered across a small town, turning a murder mystery into something far more horrific. However, Quibi announced its shutdown in October 2020, leaving the fate of this adaptation uncertain.

A later live-action project, a Taiwanese Netflix series titled Bloody Smart, is scheduled for release in 2026. This ten-episode series incorporates Tomie alongside other Junji Ito characters including Souichi and the Hanging Balloons, weaving them into a single narrative set in a strict school town dominated by a legendary Bloodfruit Tree that awakens suppressed desires.