Tokyo Ghoul #4-9

This review was comissioned by @Estro


Where last we left off on Tokyo Ghoul, unfortunate college student Ken Kaneki had tried everything short of going to the authorities to try and un-ghoulify himself. After giving in to despair at ever regaining his humanity, he met up with local ghouls Touka and...the old man hasn't been named yet, so I'm still calling him Pickman. He's been given a cautious, but still fairly warm, welcome into the Tokyo ghoul community, and handed a parcel of conveniently impersonal-looking human meat.

He hasn't eaten it yet. It's man versus nature, but with this kind of setup it really is a rigged game in nature's favor.


Chapter 4, "Coffee," balances the darkness before and after it with a little streak of levity. And a cleverly foreshadowed streak of it, at that. It turns out that human flesh isn't the only thing that tastes pallatable to ghouls. There's one other exception, one taste that humans and ghouls both experience the same way and can hold their enjoyment of in common.

There's a reason Pickman and Co are operating out of a coffee shop, specifically.

It doesn't solve Ken's problem. The flavor of it isn't enough to mask the disgusting taste of other foods and make them edible, and coffee itself isn't going to sustain him. Coffee by itself sustains me, but not Ken apparently. Still, it's a sensory reprieve from his new state of being, and one that he intends to cling on to as much as possible.

Unfortunately for Ken, that rather silly revelation is all the levity the story gives him before going back to what it was doing before. Only now things turn out to be even worse, as we enter chapter 5: "Feeding Ground."

On his way from buying a selection of instant coffee brands and flavors to try out, an appealing smell brings Ken into a nearby alley, where he finds another ghoul hunched over a fresh corpse. This encounter is much less friendly than Ken's previous meeting with Touka and Pickman, with the ghoul acting like (essentially) a solitary predator who perceives others of his kind primarily as competition. This ghoul isn't animalistic, to be clear. He can talk, and pass for human, and all the other things we've come to expect from ghoul kind. He just shows absolutely no interest in friendship, and assumes from the outset that Ken is either here to challenge him for the meat or to challenge him for this entire hunting ground.

Ken is "saved" by a fellow shopper who had given him coffee recommendations in the store. Said fellow shopper now shows up in the alley, beats up the other ghoul for hunting on her territory, and then tells Ken he'd better get the fuck out unless he wants the same treatment; if he'd known he was a ghoul earlier, he wouldn't have even exchanged a single word with him. The reason he was nice to him before was because he'd been planning to track him here and eat him.

Okay, so there is a little bit of silliness still persisting. Just a little.​

He isn't sympathetic when Ken tells him he's new around here. More just contemptuous. Fortunately, another new arrival in the form of Touka gets Ken out of trouble, and we learn something very important about ghouls. Or at least the local ghouls. They have a kind of culture war going on, and the hunting ground of the late Rize - Ken's unwitting organ donor - has become a battleground in it.

Some of the ghouls, including Touka, Pickman, and presumably other associates of the Anteiku coffee shop, want to live in a cooperative society where ghouls help each other find enough food and allocate things like hunting grounds based on ability and need. Others, like the two who we just met this last chapter, prefer the law of the jungle; each ghoul carving out as much as their personal strength and resourcefulness allows, with territorial borders etc being based on pacts between individuals alone.

Unsurprisingly, the "law of the jungle" faction tends to include the individually stronger ghouls. The dialogue sort of suggests that ghouls continue to get stronger as they age, so these tend to be older individuals as well. That said, there does appear to be some universally agreed upon lines of communication, with the more sophisticated policies of the Anteiku group being recognized as "official" even if others may dissent.

These details make me unsure which paradigm is the old status quo and which is the new alternative. I'd normally assume that the solitary predator model was the default, with the social ghouls being a new development, but the way these two argue about it doesn't give me that impression.

Although, on the other hand, Touka's internal monologue after she finally gets the shopper ghoul to leave them alone suggests that attitudes like hers are fairly pervasive, even if they aren't necessarily the "status quo" for ghouls as a whole.

We already know she disliked being a ghoul for comfort and quality of life reasons. Now she's actually showing contempt for her people themselves, rather than just resenting their lot in life.

This is all still in Touka's head when chapter 6, "Homing," dawns, and Touka sees that Ken still hasn't eaten the meat Pickman gave him. When he speaks his unwillingness to eat humans, his insistence that he won't be like the ghouls, he's not a ghoul, he's better than the ghouls, he plucks at a nerve. One that has Touka - growling with rage that seems to be directed just as much inward as against Ken - forcefeed Ken the meat. Without so much as bothering to sprinkle coffee over it first.

I really like this scene. Not that it's pleasant to read or look at (it certainly isn't), but it just does such a good job at showing us what we've previously only been told about Touka. She knows. She agrees. Everything Ken is saying now, she's in total consensus with.

But if she's had to live with this reality, then goddamnit, he's going to do the same. And he's not going to deny her the one measly bit of kindness and generosity that her kind are capable of by refusing to eat the meat. He's not just reminding her of how horrible everything is; he's actively stopping her from placing the only band-aid over that reality that she has to place.

Did she do a good thing here, by forcing him to eat? I don't know. I don't think even she knows. I doubt she's proud of herself for it, though.

When she leaves him in the alley, Touka tells Ken that he doesn't have a choice to be a ghoul or a human any more than she does. He can try starving himself if he wants, but she doubts he'll be able to endure it for long; no ghoul can.

The question of whether Ken can continue being a human while also being a ghoul lingers throughout the rest of "Homing." In an attempt to see if there's anywhere and anyhow that he can still be his old self, Ken returns to classes and tries spending time with his kinda-douchey-but-still-loyal friend Hide. Hide is happy to see him at first, but Ken is too anxious and meloncholy for things to be normal. It doesn't help that that one small box of meat wasn't enough to sustain him for long, and so the smell of Hide and the group of new friends he tries to introduce him to is making him salivate. Distracting, to say the least.

When asked if he'd be interested in joining their extracurriculars, Ken quickly shuts them down. Leaving Hide to rather hilariously apologize for the forcefulness of his friend's response.

Ken walks onward with Hide, all the while wondering if (and for how long) he'll get to continue just walking places with his friends. The answer comes quickly, and lands with a sickening burst of pain and fear, when Hide brings him to some other student who he wanted to borrow something for his new club from.

It's the guy from the grocery store. He has an immediate, barely-subdued, hostile reaction to seeing Ken again. He clearly remembers.

The other ghouls won't let him pretend he's not a ghoul. Even though (seemingly as a consequence of his hybrid nature) they can't recognize him onsight as one of them, it only takes a few of them being able to recognize him to ruin everything. Now he's forced to take sides in a culture war between the monsters who eat people and are mean to each other, and the monsters who eat people and are nice to each other. When the people who both sides eat are literally individuals like himself and other members of his human social group. One can forgive Ken for not really giving much of a shit, and also sympathize with him for being forced to.

With as tough as he is now, it's not clear if Ken even *can* commit suicide if he decided that's all that was left for him. The curse of the jungle, the hard truth, isn't one he can opt out of OR choose to ignore at this point.

...

Tokyo Ghoul wasn't kidding when it called itself, explicitly, a tragedy. Despite the monsters and the nighttime maulings, the pervading mood is one of sadness and despair, not fear or tension. The worst outcome has already happened. The story is about how to live - or fail to live - with that ultimate misery.

That said though, it seems like there really isn't anywhere to go from here but up. And the pieces for that are there. Some ghouls are trying to make the best of their atrocious existence, in whatever small ways they can. If it's a choice between that and nothing, well...it's an almost insultingly small compensation for having to kill innocent people. And Ken most likely WILL have to kill people. Even the social faction aren't likely to let him eat for free indefinitely. At the very least, they're going to expect him to help cover up the killings, or process the meat, or guard the murder basement.

Which sort of brings the story back around to a thread I pulled at a little in my last Tokyo Ghoul review. Is this really any different from taking part in modern, first world society? Well, yes, it sort of is I think. The ratio of consumers to corpses has got to be a lot less favorable in the ghouls' case. But still, it's the same principle, even if the math is even more damning in this particular instance.

One new element we're looking at now is how the act of preying on other people who look, talk, and think very much like themselves seems to have effected ghoul society. Frankly, I can see the antisocial ghoul faction's logic. They do so much evil and ignore the personhood of so many people around them, just as a neccessity of survival, that...what does it matter if they're nice to other ghouls? Why should they extend each other the courtesy that they know they can never extend to humans? Humans aren't any dumber or less self-aware or less "person" than them. They all know this. So, really...if you're going to murder humans without feeling anything, why SHOULD you treat ghouls any different? It's rank hypocrisy.

Maybe trying to make things better for themselves as ghouls is, actually, the wrong thing to do?

Ken didn't choose this. But neither did they. He just has a frame of reference that they aren't cursed with.

...

Chapter seven, "Deception," is probably the first chapter since number one to turn the scales back from tragedy to horror.

Heh, I just realized how ironic it is that the least tragic and most conventionally horrific chapter up until this point was titled "Tragedy." That's kind of amusing in retrospect. But anyway!

The hostile ghoul, now named as Nishio, manages to disguise his unhappiness at seeing Ken again as just normal prickliness. Apparently this is only a slight outlier from how he acts normally, so Hide doesn't notice anything particularly off about his reactions to Ken. Where anxiety starts shifting into horror is the point that Nishio tells Hide that the disc he needed to borrow from him is back at his apartment, and he'd like him to come with him to grab it.

He invites Hide to head there with him with a smile, and seems to be watching Ken out of the corner of his eye as he does so.

lt's also clear from context that Hide hasn't known Nishio for that long, and that he certainly has never been to his apartment before. Let alone, well...alone.

Ken hurriedly invites himself along with the two of them. Nishio obviously isn't happy about this, but he can only be so reluctant without tipping Hide off about something being wrong. Has Ken just saved Hide's life? Well, maybe. Maybe.

Before going back to get the DVD, the three of them wander around campus for a bit. Ken is surprised when Nishio asks the others if they want to grab a snack from one of the food vendors hanging around the quad. Ken refuses the offer, naturally, but Hide accepts, and both Hide and Nishio eat one. Nishio eats the entire thing without gagging, or choking, or even hesitating. As best as Ken can tell, there was no trickery involved either; he actually swallowed each bite.

This seems like a flex on Nishio's part. Demonstrating his fortitude, resolve, and self-control to warn Ken away from continuing to challenge him. Either that, or some ghouls actually have a way of making human food besides coffee taste not-totally-disgusting for themselves, even if it won't sustain them.

Nishio gives Ken another opportunity to part ways with him and Hide before they go to get the DVD. Ken, once again, despite his mounting fear, refuses.

It turns out that the route to Nishio's apartment takes them down a dark, lonely alley. Ken knows what's coming, but he has no idea what he should be doing about it. When it happens, it happens incredibly fast and without any warning whatsoever.

Those shirt textures are still bothering me.

Hide is down, bleeding out the mouth, after one surprise-kick. Knowing that the human won't be getting back up any time soon, Nishio then turns his attention on Ken.

He seems to have assumed that Ken was grooming Hide to be his own victim at the same time that Nishio himself was. And that he came along today in order to stop Nishio from poaching his meal. Well, if Ken thought that would discourage him, he was wrong.

There's that sadism again. How common is that gleeful cruelty among ghouls, I wonder? Probably more common among the solitary hunter faction than among the communal feeding faction, but how common? And...is this something that just comes naturally to ghouls, or is it a kind of psychopathy that their lifestyle encourages them to develop as an emotional defence mechanism?

Anyway, Nishio's gloating comes with a vicious beating. Worse than a beating, actually; he actually stabs his claws right through Ken's torso. Even with ghoul healing factors, that's going to leave a mark at the very least. He only stops because that street food he had earlier is making him sick to his stomach.

Meaning that yes, human food is disgusting and mildly toxic to him just like it is to Ken. Nishio just has the willpower and determination to eat it anyway when he needs to sell his human act.

He stops and throws it up, before going back to villain monologuing to the broken, bleeding Ken almost without breaking pace.

See what I mean about this being more of a horror story again? The entire chapter was just a slow, dread-building ordeal as we learn just how bad this world of ghouls is, and how impossible it now is for Ken to escape from it. The final violent confrontation also reveals that, either due to being a hybrid or just because of his lack of fighting experience, Ken is not up to fighting other ghouls. At least, not the stronger, more independent other ghouls. He's stuck with the worst of both worlds; the moral costs of ghoul feeding, and the powerlessness and helplessness of being prey in a world of predators.

The next chapter, "Kagune," apparently takes its name from the alien tentacle-like appendages that the ghouls can extrude from their bodies. Nishio deploys his kagune in this chapter, on account of Ken's refusal to withdraw. And, by the chapter's end, we learn that Ken has inherited the ability to deploy Rize's own kagune himself, which he uses in a surprise move to suddenly turn the fight around on Nishio.

The bulk of the chapter isn't actually about ghoul physiology, though. It's about Hide.

For all that he sells himself as the vapid dudebro, Hide has always had a remarkable sense for people. As he watches Nishio prepare to eat Hide, Ken remembers how the two of them first met back in elementary school.

That's always been who Hide is, according to Ken. Not only more insightful into the people around him than he lets on, but also more compassionate toward them. Ken even wonders if the reason Hide tried to discourage him from following him to Nishio's place today was because he had a sense that there was something wrong and was trying to protect his friend even if he wouldn't consciously acknowledge the danger to himself.

Hell, he even asked Ken if he'd been eating right when they first met up today. He's good. Better than he himself ever realized. In fact, Nishio himself acknowledges that one of the reasons he decided to eat Hide was because people with his kind of insight are the most dangerous humans for a ghoul to spend time around. They have the best chance of discovering them and alerting the ghoul-hunters.

And now, Hide will die. To this asshole.

It is Ken's determination for this not to happen that lets him figure out how to flex that supernatural muscle that apparently sprouted from his new kidneys and deploy Rize's old combat-tentacles. Bringing the story into its ninth chapter, "Hatch."

The name comes from that same Herman Hesse quote that the Utena student council is always reciting.

I really need to read Hesse's Demian, apparently. If I'm going to keep analysing Japanese pop culture, and Japanese pop culture is going to keep referencing Demian, then it would behoof me to at least know what the hell it's even about.

Anyway. Ken has never even been in a physical fight before, but the wimpiness of his performance up until this moment is exactly why Nishio left himself open when Ken's kagune comes out and impales him even more brutally than what he did to Ken with his hand.

Ken may have actually killed Nishio, there. It's not entirely clear. At the very least, Nishio is a lot more fucked up than Ken is, and it'll take him a lot longer to heal himself shut again than it took Ken.

...

Going by Nishio's reactions, Ken's escalation here was actually further than Nishio himself was planning to go. These ghoul territorial battles are not typically lethal, it seems. Ken's behavior here is something that even a ghoul of the antisocial faction would consider psychopathic.

And, I mean. It's hypocritical and morally myopic, obviously. It's a set of norms that puts ghoul life on a pedestal while leaving human life in the dirt. But...is that any different from human morality? From humanism, specifically?

It's a little harder to tell when cows can't talk. But, well...how much of a difference does that actually make, beyond the level of aesthetics?

...

After deploying his combat tentacles and leaving Nishio either dead or unconscious, Ken is overcome by a ravenous hunger. Healing his stomach wound and sprouting those tentacles took a lot out of him, it seems, and now the ghoulish hunger is overwhelming his rational mind. He's about to lose himself completely and eat Hide right after saving him from Nishio, when Touka arrives on the scene.

Okay, her knack for showing up just in time to pull Ken's ass out of the fire over and over again is starting to get more than a little deus ex machina-y, I must say.

She also, surprisingly, tells Ken that he shouldn't eat Hide. She's picked up on him being a friend of his, and - with Ken's unique history as a previously-human ghoul - she knows that if he kills him it will destroy him.

She knocks Ken out. How she does this, exactly, it's hard for us to tell, seeing the scene from Ken's hunger-clouded perspective as we are. But when he wakes up, he's in a hotel-like living space on the upper floor above the Anteiku coffee house. Pickman and Touka are both here, with the former patiently providing Ken with information.

The first thing that Ken notices, after where he is and who he's with, is that his hunger has been sated. Pickman grimly reminds him that there's only one way to satisfy a ghoul's hunger, so he shouldn't need to tell him what they fed him while he was out of it. He then brings him to see Hide.

He and his packmates will teach Ken the ways of ghoulkind. Starting with how to make a proper cup of coffee. No one makes coffee like a ghoul makes coffee. What with it being one of the few things they can taste, it's little wonder that the vast majority of the world's variety and artistry of coffeemaking was originally of ghoul invention. It only makes sense. He'd like to take Ken on as an apprentice barista.

What he isn't saying out loud, of course, is that what he wants from Ken is absolution. Ken, a human, a representative of the people who ghouls prey on, is Pickman's opportunity to show how he and likeminded ghouls try to live moral lives as best they can with what they've been given. Only a human can tell him if they are succeeding. Only a human is in any position to forgive the ghouls for what they do, what they have done, and what they will continue to do.

The people they eat, though? Those are all Hides. They're all someone's Hide. Not eating Ken's friend out of respect for a fellow sort-of-ghoul, well...for that to sway Ken, he'll need to accept the premise that he and his friends matter more than other people and other people's friends. By virtue of himself being part ghoul.

I don't think that Ken can give Pickman what he wants. I don't know if he should. But I also really, really can't help but pity Pickman for trying, and for hoping.

Here ends "Hatch," and with it the first volume of Tokyo Ghoul.


Damn. Just...damn.

Other stories I've consumed, both for critic-ing and on my own time, have engaged with this brand of existential anxiety. I can't think of another one that goes as in depth, hits it as hard, or keeps the focus there without letting up for as long, as Tokyo Ghoul.

As fantasy-horror, I do have my critiques of the story. Mainly with regards to worldbuilding. The story doesn't act like it's set in a world where ghouls are known to exist. People aren't afraid to go out alone or with people they don't intimately know the way they should be. There aren't constant ghoul precautions being taken even in this apparently infested neighbourhood of Tokyo where ghoul-murders happen every few days.

How often do ghouls need to feed, anyway? How many people does each one need to kill over, say, a year's time? We were told one per month or so, but with the sheer number of killings going on even without Rize that seems to be undershooting it. What percentage of missing persons in this world are down to ghoul activity, and what effect should those statistics be having on human society and culture?

Like I said in my first Tokyo Ghoul post, I feel like the author was channelling some assumptions from vampire fiction that don't work as well for his ghouls. In particular, most such stories posit that vampires don't kill someone every time that they drink from them, and that they have psychic powers that help them avoid attention. That first part is the really important bit, honestly. Hopefully, these are just growing pains that the manga eventually works its way passed.

And even if they aren't, the real meat (heh) of Tokyo Ghoul is in its philosophy. And, that's equally strong regardless of whether or not the worldbuilding ever improves. The horror of empathy. The nightmare of a world where all of one's capacity for cognitive dissonance has been peeled away.

It's probably the darkest thing I've ever read. Its darkness is the haunting kind. The nagging kind. The kind you can't get away from just by closing the book and doing something else. The coffee thing really pulls a lot of weight in keeping the story from getting too overwhelming, but even it is sort of a sobering reminder of the sheer mundanity of the monstrous world and its monstrous denizens.

But, at the same time, this isn't what I would call "edgy." I'm not even sure if it's nihilistic, exactly. Really, Tokyo Ghoul seems to be asking if it's possible to live an inherently sinful life in an inherently sinful world and still, somehow, find a place for empathy and caring. And I don't think it lacks hope for that, as bleak as the surroundings may be. It's the kind of darkness that compels you to seek the light.

Last edited: Yesterday at 11:45 PM