Tokyo Ghoul

• 1. Introduction

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  Tokyo Ghoul is a Japanese dark fantasy manga by Sui Ishida, and by January 2021 more than 47 million copies of it were in circulation worldwide. That makes it one of the best-selling manga series of all time. Its premise is a hard one to sit comfortably with. In an alternate Tokyo, predators who look exactly like ordinary people live among humans, and they can survive only by eating human flesh.

  How does a society hide creatures like that? What becomes of a young man who ends up belonging fully to neither side? And how does a magazine serial from the early 2010s spread into so many other forms, across novels, games, screens and gallery walls, and even draw the attention of government censors?

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• 2. Anatomy of a Ghoul

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  A regular ghoul produces four to seven times more kinetic energy in its muscles than a normal human does. That is only the start of the difference. Ghouls also carry several times the usual amount of RC cells, a substance that flows like blood but can turn solid in an instant. Their strength, speed, endurance and ability to regenerate all exceed human limits, and their skin resists ordinary piercing weapons.

  Every ghoul has at least one special predatory organ called a Kagune. A ghoul can manifest it at will and use it as a weapon in combat. The eyes give a ghoul away when it is excited or hungry. The sclera of both eyes turns black and the irises turn red, a mutation called kakugan.

  Then there are the hybrids. A half-ghoul may be born naturally to a ghoul and a human, or made artificially by transplanting ghoul organs into a human body. Either way, a half-ghoul is usually much stronger than a pure-blood ghoul, and only one eye undergoes the red transformation. A separate category, the half-human, feeds like a normal person and has no Kagune. Half-humans gain quick reactions and other enhanced abilities, but they live shorter lives.

  Natural half-ghouls are very rare. Creating them artificially had a low success rate at first, which makes the survival of one particular university student all the more unusual.

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• 3. Kaneki's Second Life

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  Ken Kaneki is eighteen years old and a university student when his date turns out to be a ghoul. Her name is Rize Kamishiro, and she reveals her nature and tries to eat him. Kaneki survives only because construction girders fall and hit her. He is taken to the hospital in critical condition.

  When he recovers, he learns that surgeons transformed him into a half-ghoul. They did it by transferring some of Rize's organs into his body. Like any ghoul, he now has to consume human flesh to stay alive.

  He does not face this alone. Ghouls who run a coffee shop called Anteiku take him in and teach him how to cope. The shop's name appears in Japanese as あんていく. Among them he must learn to fit into ghoul society, which has its own complex social and political dynamics, while struggling to hold on to his humanity.

  The other half of his double life is the human one. Hiding his new nature from his best friend, Hideyoshi Nagachika, becomes one of his most persistent daily struggles.

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• 4. Pages and Sequels

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  On the 8th of September 2011, Tokyo Ghoul began its run in Weekly Young Jump, a seinen magazine published by Shueisha. Ishida wrote and drew it alone. The serialization ended on the 18th of September 2014. Shueisha collected the chapters in fourteen tankōbon volumes under its Young Jump Comics imprint, from the 17th of February 2012 to the 17th of October 2014.

  The final volume shipped alongside Tokyo Ghoul Zakki, a full-color illustration book. It gathers every promotional image and volume cover, plus unreleased concept art with commentary by Ishida. In North America, Viz Media licensed the English edition and released the volumes between the 16th of June 2015 and the 15th of August 2017.

  In 2013, a seven-chapter prequel called Tokyo Ghoul Jack appeared on the digital service Jump Live. It is set twelve years before the main story and follows two characters from it, Kishō Arima and Taishi Fura. They join forces to investigate the death of Taishi's friend, who was killed by a ghoul. Taishi eventually follows Arima into the CCG, the Commission of Counter Ghoul, the federal agency that deals with ghoul-related crimes. Shueisha published the chapters digitally as a single volume on the 18th of October 2013.

  Within a month of the original's final chapter, on the 16th of October 2014, the sequel Tokyo Ghoul:re began in the same magazine. It takes place two years after the first series and introduces a new cast. Kaneki returns as an amnesiac living under the name Haise Sasaki, the result of horrific brain damage inflicted by Kishō Arima.

  Sasaki mentors a special team of CCG investigators called the Quinx Squad. Its members underwent a procedure similar to his own, which gave them ghoul abilities for fighting ghouls while still letting them live as normal humans. The sequel ended on the 5th of July 2018 and filled sixteen volumes. Viz Media's English release of those volumes concluded on the 21st of April 2020.

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• 5. Beyond the Page

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  On the 19th of June 2013, a novel titled Tokyo Ghoul: Days became the first of four light novels set in the series. All four were written by Shin Towada, with illustrations by Ishida. Days is a side story about the daily lives of characters from the series.

  A year later, on the 19th of June 2014, Tokyo Ghoul: Void arrived. It fills in a six-month gap between volumes 8 and 9 of the original manga. Tokyo Ghoul: Past followed on the 19th of December 2014, looking back at the origins of Touka Kirishima, Ayato Kirishima and Kaneki. The fourth novel, Tokyo Ghoul:re: quest, came out on the 19th of December 2016 and takes place during the sequel, centering on the Quinx, the CCG and other characters.

  Games came next. Bandai Namco Games released Tokyo Ghoul: Carnaval Color in Japan on the 6th of February 2015 for Android, and on the 9th for iOS. Players build a team of ghoul and investigator characters and explore a 3D map. On the 1st of October 2015, the same company released Tokyo Ghoul: Jail for the PlayStation Vita. It is an adventure RPG with a new protagonist named Rio, and players explore Tokyo's 23 wards.

  The mobile game Tokyo Ghoul: Dark War, released in 2018, centers on the conflict between ghouls and the CCG. Tokyo Ghoul: re Call to Exist reached the PlayStation 4 and Windows, through Steam, in November 2019. In March 2025, Behaviour Interactive announced a crossover with Dead by Daylight, adding Ken Kaneki as a playable Killer on the 2nd of April.

  The franchise also reached gallery walls. To mark the anime's tenth anniversary, an exhibition titled Tokyo Ghoul EX. ran at the Warehouse Terrada G1 Building in Tokyo from the 21st of October to the 1st of December 2024. It then moved to VS. Grand Green in Osaka, open from the 14th to the 29th of December.

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• 6. On Screen

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  Between the 4th of July and the 19th of September 2014, the studio Pierrot's twelve-episode anime adaptation aired on Tokyo MX. Other stations carried it too, including TV Aichi, TVQ, TVO, AT-X and Dlife. The opening theme was "Unravel" by TK from Ling tosite Sigure, and the ending theme was "The Saints" by People in the Box.

  The second season, Tokyo Ghoul the square root of A, read aloud as Root A, aired from the 9th of January to the 27th of March 2015. It follows an original story rather than the manga's plot. Its opening was "Munou" by Österreich, and its ending was "Kisetsu wa Tsugitsugi Shinde Iku" by Amazarashi.

  Overseas, Funimation licensed the series in North America. On the 10th of March 2017 it was announced that the show would air on Toonami, Adult Swim's late-night Saturday block, starting on the 25th of March. Madman Entertainment licensed it for Australia and New Zealand and simulcast it on AnimeLab. Anime Limited took the United Kingdom and Ireland, and announced a Viceland UK broadcast at MCM London Comic-Con.

  On the 5th of October 2017, an anime of the sequel, Tokyo Ghoul:re, was announced. Toshinori Watanabe took over as director from Shuhei Morita, while Chūji Mikasano returned to write the scripts. Atsuko Nakajima replaced Kazuhiro Miwa as character designer. Two twelve-episode seasons aired in 2018, from the 3rd of April to the 19th of June and from the 9th of October to the 25th of December.

  Live action arrived on the 29th of July 2017, when Kentarō Hagiwara's film opened in Japan. Masataka Kubota played Kaneki and Fumika Shimizu played Touka Kirishima. Yū Aoi was cast as Rize Kamishiro, Nobuyuki Suzuki as Kotaro Amon and Yo Oizumi as Kureo Mado. A sequel, Tokyo Ghoul S, followed on the 19th of July 2019. Maika Yamamoto replaced Shimizu as Touka, and Shota Matsuda joined as Shuu Tsukiyama.

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• 7. Counting the Copies

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  In 2013, Tokyo Ghoul was the 27th best-selling manga series in Japan, with an estimated 1.6 million sales. By January 2014 the manga had sold around 2.6 million copies. The next year it climbed to fourth place for Japan, with 6.9 million copies sold. Over its whole run the original series sold more than 12 million copies.

  The sequel did well too. Tokyo Ghoul:re sold over 3.7 million copies in Japan in its debut year, 2015, and 4.3 million in 2016. In 2017 it ranked fifth among Japan's best-selling manga, with over 5.3 million copies. In 2018 it ranked tenth, with 3.2 million.

  By June 2017 the two series together had over 24 million copies in circulation. That grew to 34 million by January 2018-37 million by July 2018, and 44 million by March 2019. Across the twelve months from December 2017 to December 2018, the franchise brought in 2.3 billion yen. That placed it sixteenth among the top-selling media franchises in Japan.

  Critics and institutions took notice as well. The series was nominated for the 38th Kodansha Manga Award in 2014. In 2016 it was named one of the Best Manga at the Comic-Con International Best & Worst Manga list. In 2017 the Young Adult Library Services Association in the United States listed it among its "Great Graphic Novels for Teens" and "Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults." A nomination for the 30th Harvey Award for Best Manga followed in 2018.

  The most recent measure came from TV Asahi's Manga Sōsenkyo 2021 poll, in which 150,000 people voted for their top 100 manga. Tokyo Ghoul ranked 41st.

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• 8. Banned Abroad

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  On the 12th of June 2015, China's Ministry of Culture listed Tokyo Ghoul the square root of A among 38 anime and manga titles it banned. An academic article from the School of Marxism at Southwest Jiaotong University offered an argument along the same lines. It held that the series represents Japanese animation in which characters turn evil, and that such stories interfere with the moral values of adolescents.

  Russia followed years later. In February 2021 it was reported that the series, together with Death Note and Inuyashiki, had been banned from distribution on two unspecified websites there.

  By March 2022 the series had vanished for Russian audiences for a different reason altogether. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Sony, which distributes the series through Crunchyroll, closed its Wakanim and Crunchyroll EMEA services in the country, in line with global sanctions and boycotts.

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