Tokyo Ghoul #10-14 (part one)

This review was fast lane commissioned by @Estro


Tokyo Ghoul is one of the series I've been most eager to get back to, and this is a nice big chunk to start Volume 2 on. So, a big thank you to @Estro!

Volume one left off with unassuming college student turned accidental human-ghoul hybrid Ken Kenichi inducted, semi-voluntarily, into a nightmarish new life. I say "semi-voluntarily" because his only real alternative, realistically speaking, is to die. Which he could do. He could choose to stop living. The fact that he chooses life for himself, of course, means the loss of any ability he might have had to condemn the other ghouls even as they threaten to eat people who he knows and loves. The accident of the organ transplant that transformed him is, ethically, no different from the accident of birth that all the other ghouls suffered.

While most ghouls (or at least, most ghouls in the surrounding region of Japan) are territorial solitary predators, Ken has been taken in by an unusually social, cooperative community centered around the Anteiku Cafe. The proprietor, an elderly ghoul who has a name other than "Pickman" that I'm never going to remember, seems determined to make a project out of Ken, in a way that I don't think is going to end well for either of them, but at least is giving our protagonist a space in which to exist for now. Also, Pickman even allowed Ken's (unconscious) human friend Hide to recover in his establishment after Ken and Pickman's righthand woman Touka rescued him from a solitary ghoul who was messing around on their turf.

We start Tokyo Ghoul's second volume with issue #10, "Anteiku." Hide, his memories of the incident he got knocked out in clouded by the head trauma, has been told that Ken and Touka saved his life from a car accident. Ken's friend is out of the lion's den for now, but that doesn't mean he isn't still in their hunting ground. Meanwhile, Ken himself is reluctantly being taught the dark rituals and macabre crafts of the traditional ghoulish lifestyle, though his soul be damned in the process.

I've said it before. I'll probably say it again. The coffee thing is absolutely vital to maintaining the tone of Tokyo Ghoul. Were it not for this, I don't know how many of the comic's readers would have been able to go on with it.

It also, in a weird way, makes the ghouls feel more real. Not just in the sense that it hints at them being a fully fleshed-out (heh) culture with more going on besides eating humans and hiding from human retaliation, but also in this naturalistic sort of...hmm, how to put this. You know how derpy lions look when they're asleep? How sharks will sometimes just swim up to a floating piece of debris and bump their noses against it over and over again like they're trying to figure out some incredibly complicated puzzle? It's like that.

While he's slowly working on the arts of subtle blends, consummate milk ratios, and foam art, Ken is taught that there's also more practical, insidious reasons besides their limited taste range for ghouls to run coffee shops.

Great place to study human behavior, staying up to date on shifting slang, fashion, social norms, etc. Here, they can even sit down and share refreshments with humans without any discomfort or performance. At any given time, Anteiku's occupants will be a healthy mixture of Pickman's tribe members, and blissfully unaware humans being used as research objects for up-to-date mimicry.

Counterintuitively, the regulars at these ghoul-cafes are relatively safe from predation. It wouldn't do for a string of murders to be connected to a single business, after all. Rize's attack on Ken that resulted in his transformation was basically the final stages of a psychotic break, with Rize doing something reckless and self-destructive for both herself and her tribe by targeting an Anteiku regular. The other ghoul who menaced Ken and Hide more recently, of course, was a rogue from outside of the Anteiku clan muscling in on their territory, who targeted Hide by coincidence.

...

Once again, I have to criticize the story's portrayal of ghoul population and feeding dynamics. And also it's portrayal of how human society has(n't) adapted to them. Ghoul attacks happening this frequently, in this small of an area, without it being the result of exceptional circumstances? And yet, people still go out alone or in pairs after dark?

I'm taking it on faith that the story is bending its world's own rules for the sake of giving us a solid illustration of the concepts. I can understand why the author might want to do that. Just, I hope that the worldbuilding gets sturdier after we've finished this early exposition.

...

Of course, it should be remembered that while the Anteiku human clientele aren't preyed on by Pickman's tribe, and many of the ghouls are friendly with individual human regulars, the latter are still ultimately disposable. Touka makes that clear to Ken when friend Hide, now fully recovered from his head trauma, comes by to thank them for helping him and to congratulate Ken on his new barista gig. If Ken ever reaches out to Hide in a way that could compromise their group's secrecy, well.

That's always going to hang over every relationship Ken can ever have from now on. He can't be open with any human. He can't be open with any being who isn't a murderer that holds Ken's former people - parents and family included - as inherently disposable lessers.

Another aspect of ghoul culture that we get into in the following chapter, "Masks," is their traditional, well, masks. I'm a little vague at this point on exactly when they supposedly wear these. When Touka (at Pickman's instruction) brings Ken to have his own mask made, she implies that they wear them while hunting, so that if they happen to get spotted in the act they won't uncover their human identities. We've s/een several ghouls out on the hunt (and during the act of the kill) so far, though, and none of them were masked at the time. I guess it's a bit more complicated than Touka makes it sound here.

The masks clearly aren't *just* a practical safety precaution, even if they're primarily one (and I'm not even sure that they are primarily that, given the above). The mask-maker - seemingly a rare, highly respected master craftsman among ghoulkind - interviews Ken about everything from his age and life story, to his taste in romantic partners, to things like his favorite colors and landscapes.

The mask-maker also, we learn, services many, many ghouls throughout the greater Tokyo region, even ones who are otherwise solitary and hostile to other ghouls.

He reminds me of a totem-carver. Or even something like a shaman. A near-ecclesiastical figure who lives apart from and (at least in some ways) above the politics of ghoul society or what passes for it. I'm guessing he very rarely, if ever, has to hunt for food himself.

Also, I'd bet money on this guy having been someone's "Vampire: the Masquerade" character before Sui Ishida adapted him for the ghoulverse.

Anyway, Ken's eye (which he simply chalks up to a birth defect, rather than admitting that he's a one-of-a-kind human/ghoul hybrid and raising unwanted questions) is something that the mask-maker will have to work around. He seems to take it as a personal challenge.

Anyway, this whole scene suggests that even the "lone hunter" ghouls aren't as asocial as they were earlier made to sound. The fact that we heard most of what we've heard about them from a particularly self-hating ghoul like Touka might have something to do with this. They recognize the personal and spiritual significance of the masks. They respect the mask-maker, and come to him as patrons. That's something that has to be learned and taught.

For that matter, while we don't yet know how the ghoul life cycle works (again, Ken's situation is unique, at least as far as any of the characters know), we were told that they do have children, and in this pair of chapter's we're shown that they spend at least *part* of their development looking and acting a lot like human children.

So, even "solitary" ghouls must mate. And, if their children are even half as demanding and slow-growing as human children, they must have some kind of social technology to help with childrearing.

...or, maybe not? In my first couple of Tokyo Ghoul reviews, I wondered how long the ghouls are supposed to have existed for. The way they get talked about in the newscasts etc doesn't make it seem like they've always been around. So, depending on how long they've existed, the ghouls may or may not have had time to develop intergenerational traditions, and it may not have been long enough for them to suffer the consequences of not doing so.

The degree to which ghouls associate on genuinely(?) friendly terms with unknowing humans also gets murkier than the picture previous issues painted. Ghouls having human friends who they care about (even if they necessarily have to value their lives less than those of other ghouls) seems to be a fairly common, almost expected, way of getting through life. More social ghouls who have more visible presences in human society, like the Anteiku staff, have the hardest balances to strike. This is likely a contributing factor to Touka having the barely-suppressed inner demons that she does. And, possibly, a contributing factor to Rize having lost her shit.

The Anteiku clan might be friendlier and more kind to each other than most ghouls, but there's also an emotional masochism in the way they do things that might, ultimately, make them the worse option. Both for the ghouls themselves, and for the surrounding humans. Remember the uncommon sadism with which Rize went in for the kill, once she snapped.

Maybe monsters really should only be monsters? Maybe lying to themselves about trying to create some kind of good for *someone* as they murder their way through life is making things worse rather than better?

...

To keep things in perspective: if you or I were humans living in this world, we'd want Pickman, Touka, and even Ken himself to die. If any or all of them were in front of you and you were holding a flamethrower, you wouldn't just be in the right for torching them; you'd actually be in the wrong for not torching them. Every living ghoul means dozens or hundreds of dead humans, most of them killed while young and before the prime of their lives. It might be sad that they need to die just for being ghouls. It might be horrible. But if you were to hesitate before pulling that trigger, then that would be a moral flaw on your part.

Maybe, if they didn't have moral illusions to cling onto, more ghouls would end up opting out of existence the way that Ken himself probably would have by now without Pickman's intervention? It isn't reasonable to expect a ghoul to kill itself because of how it was born. However, it also isn't right for one to not do that.

In this case, maybe ruthlessness really is mercy upon ourselves.

Of course, given the metaphors that are going into this story's titular creatures...well, what it's saying really depends. DO ghouls actually need to kill healthy young humans in order to nourish themselves, or would the bodies of the elderly dead sate them at the cost of some flavor and texture? Is there a less cruel way that all can be fed and cared for, while still submitting to the tyranny of biology and physics? Do the ghouls only think that they need to live this way to get by? Is there a possible world where it *isn't* wrong for a human to not flamethrower a ghoul to death without blinking?

Maybe. Maybe not. I guess we'll see eventually.

...

Ken is taught other tricks and skills that aid a ghoul in blending in. For instance, how to "eat" human food the way that we saw the one rogue doing earlier.

They still have to purge their stomachs afterward, before they start getting sick from having anything besides coffee and human in there. But, while it isn't pleasant, not being able to do this would make ghouls far too easily identified.

Where the matter of Anteiku's secret meat-freezer is concerned, Ken mostly just keeps himself willfully ignorant and distracted. He convinces himself that he doesn't know what the people who occasionally bring large, opaque boxes and bags into the establishment's back room are all about, and also that he doesn't know what the people who come to take away some smaller parcels are doing. That is, until Touka tells him some details about the latter that intrigue him out of his pretend-ignorance.

It isn't stated why these ghouls (the aforementioned mother and daughter pair) can't hunt on their own. If it's down to a physical handicap, or to the moral cowardice of being willing to eat human as long as you don't have to see where it comes from like Ken's (a moral cowardice that Pickman is pretty much all about enabling, in both himself and others). In any case, Ken ends the "Masks" chapter wanting to learn more.

Finally, we get a look at some of the state's ghoul-hunters in action as they take out a starving rogue. Not plot-relevant yet, but foreshadowing for what's presumably soon to be a major crisis for the main characters.

Seems like they've got some supernatural power of their own to work with. Or, possibly, they've just turned a handful of ghouls and are using them to hunt down their kin in exchange for death row prisoners or something. If the latter, that might be another bit of inspiration that Chainsaw Man would eventually take from Tokyo Ghoul to go with all the rest.


Next time, the next couple of chapters.