Term · Tokyo Ghoul
Ghoul
They look human, live in your building, and can keep down nothing except coffee and water.
In Otakana the clue reads: Coffee is the only human thing they can drink
- Type
- Term
- Series
- Tokyo Ghoul
- Letters
- 5 · Normal
A ghoul in Sui Ishida's Tokyo is a person-shaped predator that cannot digest ordinary food. Everything tastes rotten except human flesh, with coffee and water the two exceptions their bodies tolerate, which is why so much of the series happens in a cafe. They are stronger than humans, heal fast, and have an organ called a kakuhou that produces a weapon of hardened blood.
The setting hangs on the fact that they are indistinguishable. Ghouls hold jobs, run businesses, raise children and worry about rent, and a government agency called the CCG hunts them with weapons built from ghoul corpses. Some ghouls kill carefully and scavenge from suicides. Others treat the city as a menu. The manga spends most of its length refusing to let either side be the monster on its own.
Ishida serialized Tokyo Ghoul in Weekly Young Jump from 2011, and the horror works because the rules are domestic. A ghoul character's biggest problem in a given chapter might be disposing of evidence or sitting through a meal with colleagues. Pierrot animated the first season in 2014, and the coffee shop, Anteiku, became the image most readers keep.
Spelling GHOUL
GHOUL is an English word borrowed from the Arabic ghul, a grave-robbing desert demon, and it reached this series as a translation. The Japanese title writes 喰種, eating species, and reads it as guuru. Five letters with a silent H and an OU that sounds like a long OO. GHOUL is spelled from memory rather than by ear.