Tragedy

Ken Kaneki is a university student in Tokyo with a date with a beautiful girl called Rize. Kaneki seems pretty shy and bookish, particularly in contrast to his wise-cracking and gregarious friend, Hide. He probably can't believe his luck.

It's unfortunate, then, when Rize turns out to be a "ghoul" and almost kills him. You see, "Tokyo Ghoul" is set in a version of the city in which creatures called "ghouls" live among regular folk and can pass themselves off as human. Human, that is, until they get a taste for flesh.

They seem kind of like vampires, but with more opportunities for gore: they don't just drink blood, they eat organs.

Kaneki is almost killed by Rize, but then she herself is killed when a beam crushes her. Kaneki's life is saved when some of her organs are transplanted into his body, but it leaves him as half-a-ghoul, with only one eye that turns red-and-black when he gets peckish.

The rest of the episode is concerned with Kaneki's attempts to preserve his humanity against his growing hunger for human flesh, and foreshadows his soon-to-be immersion in the ghoul subculture... and I wonder if that's the correct word.

Future episodes will tell.

I liked this as an introduction to the series. I liked the main character. There was a brilliant sequence, no doubt taken straight from the manga, where Kaneki is standing motionless amid a throng of people, barely keeping it together, and he looks up and sees that the crowd has parted to give him a wide berth, like they have distanced himself from him without realising it, perhaps realising he is no longer one of them, subconsciously.

I predict this'll be a show about outsiders. Do you see what I mean about the monstrous creatures called ghouls actually being a "subculture"? Maybe they're like goths, punks, emos, whatever.

Such a metaphor makes the show more interesting to continue watching.