Tokyo Ghoul #1: "Tragedy"

This review was comissioned by @Estro.


"Tokyo Ghoul" is a seinen dark fantasy manga by Sui Ishida that ran throughout the early 2010's, and received an anime adaptation in 2014. I remember hearing a lot about it throughout the following years. Including a lot of controversy over how dark and fucked up it was, with some people praising its boldness and effective use of extremely bleak and violent concepts, and others dismissing it as juvenile pizza-cutter material. I know it was quite popular, so I guess the former camp was the larger of the two. Hopefully I'll find myself joining it by the end of this review.

In terms of plot...I remember hearing a *little* bit about it. It's set in a fantastical version of modern Tokyo that is being plagued by super-strong cannibalistic humanoids called ghouls, and...I think the main character becomes a ghoul at one point? Or IS a ghoul from the start? One of the two. I think I also remember hearing more recently that Tokyo Ghoul may be one of the things that Chainsaw Man takes after and/or is deliberately spoofing, which...well, it definitely sounds like there are similarities at least.

Anyway, I've got the first three chapters of Tokyo Ghoul comissioned for review. Conveniently, the same three chapters that are available for free from the publisher. Anyway, that's more then enough preamble, time to start the actual amble. Chapter one is called "Tragedy."


This comic isn't shy about its premise. Page one pretty much lays it right out.

There's also a brief glimpse of a ghoul attack, including one panel where the actual ghoul is visible. The name had me envisioning either zombie-like creatures, or Iranian style dog-devil-humanoid things, but the comic isn't going with either of those. These "ghouls" have got sort of a tentacley, Slenderman-ish look to them.

The narration says that ghouls enjoy the "dead" flesh of humans, but going by the visuals they prefer it very freshly dead.

The art style is quite a bit more simplistic than I expected. Although, in the next few pages it gets much more detailed and traditionally seinen-y, so that may have just been an artistic choice for the ghoul attack scene. Anyway! The morning after this deadly nighttime encounter, a pair of young men are hearing about it on the news. From the sound of things, ghouls are a new and mystifying threat that caught the world off-guard and that society is still trying to figure out how to fight back against. Some people still don't even believe the ghouls actually exist yet.

The general presentation makes me want to say that the ghouls have been openly talked about and officially recognized as real for about a year or so. There was likely a period of "mysterious murders happening all over" for some time before that, before the culprits were confirmed to be nonhuman. Again, I'm just going off the vibes here.

Also, the wording of the newscast might be implying that the ghouls are a Tokyo-only phenomenon, rather than a worldwide or even just nationwide one. This could be a translation hiccup, or it could really be that the monsters are - for whatever reason - bound to that one location. Huh.

Anyway, the two boys watching the news - college freshmen Ken Kaneshi and Hide Nagachika - strike up a morbid conversation about how near that attack site is to their own location and how poorly they would fair if the ghoul were to attack them next. There's plenty of darkly humorous ribbing here, as you'd expect from teenaged boys, with Hide in particular teasing his petite, bookish friend Ken about his lower odds of survival.

Seems like the big problem with ghouls is that they can perfectly disguise themselves as humans. To the point where it isn't even common knowledge what they look like when NOT in human form; if anyone's ever photographed a ghoul in its Slenderman attack form, that photo hasn't made it onto mass media.

Ken and Hide have their own ideas of what the ghouls might actually look like. Though I think Hide is being more than a little facetious with his own proposal, heh.

Eventually, Hide says that they should stop being all morbid and worried about ghouls for now, and instead be excited and optimistic about goyls. Ladies. Femoids. Whatever you wanna call 'em. Ken has a crush who frequents this very establishment, though he's been too nervous to approach her. Part of the reason he and Hide are here together is because Hide wants to get a look at this girl he's been hearing about and bully Ken about being too nervous to go for it.

We've all had a friend like Hide. Some of us have been a friend like Hide, heh.

An attractive waitress comes toward them, and Hide asks if this is her. Ken rolls his eyes and says that no, it's a regular patron, not an employee. Which prompts Hide to stand up, get up in her face, ask for her name, and then do...this:

Jesus fucking christ and he has the audacity to pick on Ken for being awkward lmao.

The waitress flees, and Ken tells Hide to stop being cringe before he gets both of them kicked out. As he's scolding him, the actual crush walks in, and Hide starts lecturing Ken about how she's way out of his league so he should get any thought of her out of his head.

Okay, I may have been too charitable toward Hide, at this point he just seems like an all around creep.

Hilariously, when Ken tells him that the girl sometimes smiles at him a little when they make eye contact, Hide tells him that she's just nervously trying to diffuse his attention because some creepy guy is trying to make eye contact with her. And scolds Ken for being a creep.

This fucking guy...

Well, Hide finally leaves, and Ken is left pining for the attractive woman who most definitely will not turn out to be a ghoul from across the cafe. He silently informs us that it's not just her looks and her subtle smiles that has him interested in her. It's also their shared taste in reading material.

Sen Takatsuki isn't a real author, apparently, but in the world of the manga he seems to be basically Japanese Thomas Harris. All dark psychological crime novels about serial killers and their weird relationships with each other and the lawmen they gambit against. The notably Lovecraftian-titled Takatsuki novel that they're both reading at present is about a female serial killer and her son who is trying to resist the murderous urges he seems to have inherited from her. Definitely not foreshadowing.

The woman gets up from her seat to get her drink, and then - on the way back to her table - bumps her tray against Ken's book and ends up dropping it.

The misshap does provide the natural conversation opportunity that Ken had been hoping for.

It goes better than it has any right to. To a degree that would have started making me suspicious, if it hadn't already been obvious that she's going to be a ghoul.

...well, I guess there could be a subversion where she actually isn't the ghoul. Or even the ghoul's next victim right in front of Ken's eyes. Maybe. It's overwhelmingly likely that she's one of those two things, but not quite guaranteed.

Later that day, Ken tells Hide that he and that girl are going on a date. Ken's first-ever date, it seems. Her name is Rize, and she and him are going to a bookstore for their first outing. Aw man, bookstore dates. Remember when there used to be big bookstores, with little cafes built right into them? Those were perfect for dates, and they existed as recently as when this comic was being written, but they don't anymore. Where was I? Oh, right. Hide tells Ken that it's obviously just dumb luck, because of course he does. Ken's enthusiasm isn't dampened though, and he spends all the rest of that day and night planning for his and Rize's date. The next morning he agonizes over what to wear, paying no attention to the news report of a second ghoul murder in as many nights in their neighbourhood.

The date goes...well, we only see some key glimpses of it, but it seems to go well as far as Ken can tell. He and Rize talk about books and authors. He comments on her lack of appetite as they eat at the adjacent restaurant. She deflects. Then, as they step outside into the dark night streets, she innocently raises the subject of blood types.

Yeeeeeeeeeeahhhhh.

As they walk, Ken too delighted with how well this is going to notice the full hiking trail's worth of red flags, another pair of girls walk passed them. For a few panels, the comic seems to switch to their POV, one of them watching Ken and Rize warily as her friend asks her what just got her attention.

Hmm. Maybe Rize is (somehow) a red herring, and this is our actual ghoul? Or maybe this is a ghoul hunter or something, and she thinks she caught the scent of the enemy? Split the difference, with them both being ghouls competing for territory? No idea. Anyway, we'll see these two later at some point I'm sure.

Back to Ken and Rize. They walk on along the street, with Rize's flirtation continuing to have sinister undertones that go completely unnoticed by the starry-eyed Ken. Before they can part ways after an enjoyable first date, Rize asks Ken to walk her home. She lives across the street where those ghoul murders have been taking place, and she's kind of scared to walk it alone. Especially with it being so deserted now, on account of other people not wanting to walk there.

-_____-

Was I as dumb as Ken when I was 18?

Eh, I probably was.

Well, he lets her lead him onto the lonely nighttime street. And then onto a construction site, where they are hidden from any potential witnesses by high walls and yellow warning tape. Then she turns around on him and starts giggling about how ironic it is, that they should be brought out into the dark night together by a book about a serial killer. As she speaks, she removes her glasses, and without the lenses her eyes clearly have something off about their texture and reflectiveness.

Ken is in denial, and perhaps just shock. As such, he doesn't react until she's taken her first bite out of his shoulder and then thrown him onto the floor across the half-constructed room they're in. As he tries to scrabble away, she finally shifts into her true form and cackles openly about her nature and his fate.

Turns out that without the prologue's simplified art style, the ghouls are less Slenderman and more...hmm. Honestly, the overall design reminds me more of Infested Kerrigan than anything else, with the four alien limbs coming out from in back and the semi-corpselike skin.

Rize demonstrates a great enthusiasm for playing with her food. Less of a predator pragmatically doing what it needs to do to survive, and more of a malicious torturer milking this for all it's worth. I don't know if this is a trait that all ghouls have in common, of if it's just Rize who happens to be an over-the-top sadist.

The way she carries on while throwing and clawing him around the site seems...I don't know if she's just making fun of him for thinking she was actually into him, or if she's actually getting a sexual thrill out of doing this, but well...there's definitely more than a drop of eros to how she carries on.

At any rate, with Rize as our introduction to ghoulkind, the comic is definitely conditioning the reader to not expect them to be sympathetic monsters. She may turn out to be an outlier, of course, but even if that first impression is misleading it's definitely the one the author wants us to have at this stage.

Also, I'm curious to see how this scene was adapted in the anime. The way Rize's movements and words seem to...twitch around...so much, as well as Ken's staggered reactions, seem like they could give animators and voice actors a lot to work with. I hope the studio didn't squander this.

As Ken's brain slowly unfreezes and he realizes how all his delight and excitement over the last couple of days were built on a lie and that Rize had been luring him into her trap for weeks with those little smiles of hers. Maybe she had been giving her previous victims those exact same smiles, on some of those exact same days.

Hmm. She must have done some digging into their medical histories before picking them, if blood type really is important. Though she did make a point of verifying that with Ken before attacking, so maybe she still wasn't 100% sure with him.

Rize makes a fatal mistake, however, when she grabs a fleeing Ken with her tentacles and flings him against one of the walls hard enough to make him slump down to the floor coughing up blood. Well, that wasn't the fatal mistake, really. That would be Rize walking over to the wounded Ken and leaning over him to take another bite, without looking up to see the mass of loose steel beams that had been dislodged by the impact.

Heh. Well. For all their strength and cunning, ghouls don't seem to have better peripheral vision than a normal human's.

The noise brings people over. Even the fear of the ghoul isn't enough to outweigh the loud metallic crashing noises, and the interlopers are coming as a group. They find the two bodies - one dead under the rubble, and one unconscious against a nearby wall. Police. Ambulances. Ken has flashes of consciousness, seeing the inside of an ambulance, then the ceiling of a surgery ward. Overhearing bits of conversation through the haze of blood loss, pain, and drugs.

From the sound of things, ghouls' human forms are actually their resting state. No one saw anything odd about Rize's corpse when they removed what was left of it from under the debris. No tentacles. No oozing black eyeballs. Just the body of a teenaged girl who'd died from extreme blunt force trauma.

As it so happened, the dead girl had the same blood type as the dying boy. Normally there are legalities to take care of before making someone an organ donor, but damnit, the boy is about to die and the girl obviously wasn't going to have an open casket funeral anyway!

The doctor decides to save the young man's life using her organs and deal with whatever legal penalties there might be when they come.

Oh. I see.

I had been wondering if these "ghouls" reproduce by transforming humans into more of themselves, or if they were totally nonhuman creatures who had a disguise power. Rize reverting to human form in death was already a strong indicator of option A. Now we get confirmation.

Ken's retrospective narration tells us that he'd always been in love with books and stories. He'd always thought of himself as a character in the story of his life, and had occasionally wondered what genre that story was. Now, he knows. It isn't a horror story though. Not exactly. At least, not the way he's come to see it.

Ghoul organ transplants are turning him into...something. Probably not just a normal ghoul though, or this wouldn't be much of a story. Whatever process they normally use to reproduce - ritualistically feeding a victim their own blood or something would be genre-appropriate - this medical procedure is probably going to cause things to go not-quite-right.

End chapter.


So far, this is competent but sort of basic. Aside from the creative detail of an organ transplant being what makes our freshly turned hero different from the rest of vampirekind, this is really, really well trodden ground.

Still, a skilled execution can go a long way, and Tokyo Ghoul's is skilled enough that the cliches had me nodding along with them instead of shaking my head at them. Part of it was that Ken and (though we only saw him briefly) Hide were idiosyncratic enough to stand out as memorable characters rather than just "hapless victim" and "hapless victim's douchey friend." The way it built up their characterization and interactions around the plot device of Rize's catfishing was very economical, giving the characters as much time and space as they needed to introduce themselves to the audience without slowing down the plot.

I also am quite taken with the art style. Especially the way the stark semi-realism of the human characters contrasts with the shadowy liquid grotesqueness of Rize's monster form. I mentioned earlier that I'd heard this series was an influence on Chainsaw Man in terms of story, but now that I'm looking at the panels I wonder if Sui Ishida might have also been a big visual inspiration for Tatsuki Fujimoto. The art styles and character designs really are similar, with the teenagers walking around Tokyo's nighttime streets in particular reminding me a lot of Look Back and Rize's monster form looking like it would fit right in among Chainsaw Man's rogues gallery.

Overall, promising start. Hopefully the next two chapters will bring the story further out of the realm of cliche.