Tokyo Ghoul #10-14 (part two)

As Ken awaits the completion of his mask, he continues studying the fine art of coffeemaking and practicing the ghoulish techniques of mimicry. Drawing on human memories seems to give him an advantage when it comes to leaning how to fake eating human food. Likewise, he's up on modern human slang, social norms, etc in a way that the insular-by-necessity ghouls can't quite match.

He also is a rare case of being an educated ghoul, by virtue of having completed high school and some college. Many ghouls don't go to school beyond the absolute minimum to avoid investigation, due to the stresses of having to integrate with human social groups that much. Individuals like Touka, who try to get degrees, are exceptional, and their lives are made all the more difficult and stressful for it at least in the short term. Ken becomes valuable to the Anteiku group as a teacher of things like literacy and mathematics on top of him having a more intuitive grasp of contemporary pop culture and social norms.

So, he isn't just a burden to them that Pickman is having the clan shoulder to salve his own conscience. Ken does have something valuable to bring to the table. The subject of how much each individual helps or costs the community is actually going to be explored in much greater depth in the following chapter.

As for Ken's unwillingness to eat any more human, Pickman has been giving him these "sugar cubes" to mix into his own coffee that take the edge off of his hunger, temporarily staving off the time when he'll need to eat flesh again. Granted, I'm pretty sure those sugar cubes are like, sweetened human fat-chips or some weird shit like that, but Ken effortfully doesn't wonder about that. Once again though, we're going to get into this in an interesting way a chapter from now.

There is a bit of a Damocles sword hanging over him and his still-human friend Hide, in the form of that one ghoul who tried to mess with them earlier. He's taken to sending people to say hi to Ken and Hide from him, seemingly as a means of keeping Ken paranoid and uncomfortable. He may or may not be planning to escalate beyond this as revenge for being thwarted and beaten up by Ken and Touka earlier.

Still, for the time being, life is...liveable. Not pleasant. Not relaxing. But liveable.

Ken's situation and my own understanding of the world he inhabits both get more complicated as we move from chapter 12, "Mission," into chapter 13, "White Dove." When it's time for Pickman to send someone out on one of those mystery deliveries, but Touka is too busy with school stuff to go this time, Pickman sends Ken. Promising him that he won't have to hurt or kill anyone, don't worry, just go take a drive with this other young ghoul and help move an object from one location to another location.

So, just be an accessory after the fact to murder, rather than commit a murder himself. Clean conscience town, here comes Ken!

Except, that turns out to not actually be all that ironic. And also that the ghouls who refuse to hunt might not all be moral cowards like it was initially implied.

Pickman's clan and contacts have an information network that tracks suicides. In accordance with the formalized rules of Japan's national sport, there are specific places where people go to jump or hang, and thanks to the work of these ghouls some of them are unknown to the police. The victims' bodies simply vanish before anyone can come looking for them. If they drove a vehicle to the place in question, the vehicle will have vanished too. It's got to be agonizing for the victim's loved ones, never having a body, never getting confirmation on whether they actually did it or not. However, it's still the least unethical food source for the ghouls.

Even in a country with such a rich and storied tradition of autodeletion, however, there aren't enough of these bodies to feed the Anteiku clan by this means alone. They still hunt. They still kill. However, the influx of suicide victims, caught and brought in while the bodies are still fresh, serves to reduce the amount of needed hunting. Which is pragmatic as well as moral; missing suicide bodies bring down a lot less heat from the state than murders.

Which of those two factors is the primary motive varies heavily between the individual ghouls.

There are a handful of them, however, who truly, genuinely refuse to kill for food. These individuals have fraught, precarious lives. Anteiku naturally gives them priority when allocating the meat of these scavenged suicides, but when depression rates go down so does these ghouls' health and body weight. When there are more suicides, conversely, the murder rate in the Anteiku clan's hunting grounds drops off for a while.

It isn't spoken explicitly, but Ken's scavenging companion - a taciturn ghoul by the name of Yomo - is pretty clearly a bit resentful of the bona fide "vegetarians" in their community. Their squeamishness is something that costs everyone in the clan a lot more effort to support. Presumably, there's an expectation for the vegetarians to pitch in extra labor in other areas to make up for this.

...

Anyway, this suicide-scavenging has some interesting ramifications.

On one hand, it somewhat mitigates the moral cost of the Anteiku clan's existence. And it creates a (difficult to put into practice, but still, technically possible) way for a ghoul to live a full life without ever committing or relying on someone else to commit murder. Probably not enough ghouls for a breeding population, but for someone like Ken who just wants to be able to live his own life and isn't invested in the continuation of the ghoul species that's irrelevant.

That said, it's still pretty ethically fraught. At the very least, it creates some perverse incentives as far as the ghoul's attitudes toward the misfortune of others are concerned. That's before we get into the factor of the victims' families being left forever wondering what happened to them, if they really did kill themselves or not, etc.

On a different subject, the Anteiku ghouls having a cooperative society with the manpower and willpower to run this suicide-scavenging network has a feedback effect on the nature of that society.

Ghouls the grow up in tiny family units (or however it works for most of ghoulkind) couldn't even dream of having a stockpile of non-murdered human flesh in the freezer. The possibility of this kind of harm reduction doesn't exist for them. If one of these ghouls was unwilling to kill people for food, it would starve. By dying, it would then remove its own, more ethical, voice from the ghoul population. The most successful ghouls would be the ones that either lack empathy, or that drive themselves into philosophical pretzels in order to act as if they lacked empathy.

And...that right there is probably WHY most ghouls are so antisocial even among their own kind. Ghouls aren't like most obligate carnivores. They specifically need to eat creatures that look, think, speak, and (mostly) act like themselves. They need to do this while blending into the society of those creatures, interacting with those creatures while pretending to be one of them. Empathy and selflessness are not going to be favored by natural selection in these conditions. And, a ghoul who lacks empathy toward humans is ALSO going to lack empathy for other ghouls, because at the end of the day the two species are just too goddamned similar.

By even having the *possibility space* for life without murder within their social reality, groups like Anteiku end up with a culture that allows for much more empathy. Pickman and Co don't try to reduce their body count becaue they're kinder and more prosocial in general. They are kinder and more prosocial in general because they reduce their body count. The fact that effectively detecting and reacting to suicides requires a lot of intraghoul cooperation in the first place is just another source of positive feedback.

Unless I'm totally misinterpreting all of this, "Tokyo Ghoul" is putting serious thought and effort into doing fantasy historical materialism. This is something that's frustrated me a lot in my own worldbuilding. So, this comic is getting my interest in a whole different way now by being an instructive example.

...

It isn't clear if the meat Pickman gave Ken when he first took him in was taken from one of these suicides or not. Likewise, the source of those "brown sugar cubes" may derive from them. Pickman would probably say "yes" if asked, but given his preexisting vegetarian community members, the relative scarcity of semi-ethical meat, and Ken's obvious inability to gauge the truth of anything he's being told at this point, I'm not sure if he'd be telling the truth. Depends on how genuinely honest the guy is, I suppose.

Also, this scavenging scene with Ken and Yomo - which takes place under a raised highway running over a forest valley - gives the author a natural opportunity to remind us that Ken is still figuring out how to use his ghoul powers. He might have advantages over a born ghoul when it comes to human-facing stuff, but he also needs to learn control of the bodily functions that most ghouls presumably master during childhood.

Just like in the fight scene against that rogue ghoul, Ken can reflexively extend his claws and tentacles when his life is in danger, but he hasn't yet figured out how to do so voluntarily. I'm sure that this will be plot-relevant in the next chapter or two, if the comic is making a point of bringing it up again now.

I like the detail of how nonchalant Yomo is about Ken's fall, also. At first it seems like callousness, but then you realize that it probably just never occurred to him that such a fall could be dangerous for a ghoul. Heh.

After Ken reluctantly helps recover the body and the two start driving back into the city, they get waved over by a woman Ken recognizes. It's Fueguchi, the mother of that vegetarian mother-daughter duo that first introduced us to the concept. Apparently, she's out on this road not to help scavenge bodies, but to visit her husband's grave. Seemingly for the last time, at least for a long while.

Yomo mentions that it's dangerous for her to visit that site, now that the ghoul-hunters (nicknamed "white doves" by the ghouls, for some reason) are investigating their neighborhood. Implying that the ghoul-hunters know that that site is ghoul-related. Implying in turn that they're the ones who killed her husband. I'm guessing the grave is a memorial rather than an actual burial site, in this case. Anyway, her daughter is still depending on her, so she should really try to not let the hunters take both of her parents due to carelessness.

The woman Fueguchi is someone Ken has an easier time being around, since she's one of the few truly non-murderous ghouls around and she's raising her daughter, Hinami, to be likewise. Once again, the existence of people like them is only possible within a ghoulish society like this clan's, and even then only as a minority within that clan. Also, the aforementioned daughter Hinami is the girl who Ken was tutoring back in the first screencap of this post. This pair are able to act as a bridge between Ken and the other ghouls, on account of his reduced moral discomfort with them and the possible future they imply for himself.

Chapter 14, "Rain Shower," switches POVs to that pair of government ghoul-hunters we get a brief look at earlier. We see them for much longer this time, and, uh, I have questions. Both about their characters, and how the story wants me to feel about their characters.

They're drawn like villains. They're written like villains. I'm pretty sure I'm expected to hate them, rather than see them as just more victims of the unfortunate biological reality of the ghouls like I'd have expected from the story up until this point.

The fact that we're getting this proper introduction to them right after learning about the existence of ghouls who don't kill people definitely makes me feel like a point is being made. I'm not entirely sure what that point is though. Within the framework that the story's built up, it is not wrong for a human to kill ghouls (it might actually be wrong for a human to not kill ghouls when given the opportunity). On one hand, the existence of the "vegetarians" does mitigate that. On the other, the vegetarian ghouls are such a tiny minority that it's probable the hunters don't even know they exist. The fact that these hunters are zeroing in on the vegetarian mother raisin a vegetarian daughter, of all the ghouls they could have gotten in their sites, is a tragic irony. I don't think it's a tragic irony that reflects poorly on them, though.

In a lesser comic, I'd call the decision to make the ghoul-hunters be a bunch of bloodthirsty self-righteous thugs a cowardly, lazy one that succumbs to protagonist-centric morality. This is Tokyo Ghoul, though, so I very much doubt that it's that. I have a few different thoughts on where this might be going.

First, we might just be seeing the flip side of "ghoulish living conditions naturally encourage psychopathy." A ghoul-hunter who hesitates to exterminate men, women, and children who look, think, speak, and (mostly) act just like humans wouldn't be a very good ghoul-hunter. I could definitely see how this might be a profession that selects for assholes, no matter how vital a profession it might be. In this case, the human-ghoul conflict facilitating the political empowerment of these particular humans is just another tragic consequence to toss on top of the pile.

This definitely has me thinking back to what I said in the Owl House "Yesterday's Lie" review, about witches and witch-hunters kind of being cut from the same cloth. There's some imagery accompanying the ghoul-hunters' dialogue that very actively points at witches and the persecution thereof.

Granted, the sadists and narcissists probably wouldn't be the entirety of the ghoul-hunting force. There'd also be people who just really care about protecting their families. But they'd still be overrepresented enough to push the culture of the ghoul-hunting organizations in an unfortunate direction.

The other thought I had ties into the question I've been asking almost from the start. Do the ghouls actually need to live like this? The ghoul-hunter scene comes *right after* the introduction of another feeding method besides murder, in the suicide-scavenging. You couldn't feed a ghoul population entirely on suicides, and society should be trying to discourage suicide as much as possible anyway, but the existence of one alternative forces the reader to wonder about others.

Does it really have to be young adult bodies?

Even if it does have to be those, if there was an accepted cultural practice of giving such bodies to the ghouls when they occurred, and the ghouls kept their population small (as they seem to be doing regardless), would the trophic math not work out?

Ghouls are strong and tough in a way that would let them do work humans can't. There'd be plenty of incentive for cultural norms regarding the treatment of corpses to shift, if it had the benefit of integrating the ghouls into human society. There'd be resistance, certainly. But if so, then, on the philosophical level at least, the moral burden would have shifted onto the resistors.

The question that this all comes down to is, basically: is the conflict between humans and ghouls an inescapable fact of biology, or is it the consequence of a flawed social order?

If the latter, then how aware of this fact are the people making policy decisions? How aware of it, in turn, are the ghoul-hunters who put those policies into practice?

And then, that other old question of mine. How long have the ghouls existed for? How much does humanity know? How much does anyone understand? This also matters a lot when it comes to how the world has been handling the ghouls and whether it should have a better way by now.

So, I'm not sure what the story is doing here, but it's definitely doing something. I have a feeling that it's only going to be clear what that something is after many, many more chapters, but something.

...

The chapter ends with the two "white dove" field agents, fiery Amon and sadistic Mado, digging up the recognizable and obviously recently buried ghoul-mask at the grave they knew Fueguchi just visited. Confirming that she (and by extension her daughter) are in fact targets, and in the wake of Rize's rampage they're determined to eliminate a few targets in this neighborhood. They catch up with Fueguchi and Hinami out in a rainstorm, on their way home from Hinami's latest lesson from Ken at Anteiku.

Whether one or both of them survive the next chapter, I'd have to read the next chapter to say. I kind of hope that they do. Mostly because the last couple of chapters kind of scrambled to introduce them quickly and try to make them as sympathetic as possible ASAP, and it would be pretty cheap if they were one week from retirement and engaged. So, hopefully it's not that.

Also, Mado really is weird-looking. And weird-acting. And...it really seemed like he had some kind of magical superstrength in his previous appearance. Is he actually a ghoul himself? If so, then that raises a hell of a lot more questions about the hows and whys of ghoul-hunting, and definitely tilts the equation in favour of this antagonism being socially rather than biologically mandated.


That's issues 10-14 of "Tokyo Ghoul."

The new nuances and exceptions being shown in ghoul behavior are definitely making the story less bleak than it seemed at first. Maybe the cosmic horror (or "cosmic tragedy" as I think I called it once) was actually just an illusion, and everything being analyzed exists within the human-adjustable realm of the social?

Maybe. It could still easily end up swinging back the other way, but it could also not. Honestly, that - rather than the fate of Ken Kenichi or the vegetarian mother daughter pair - is the dramatic tension that has me wanting to know what happens next.