by Shin Towada
“You’ve been mortally wounded, but if you eat it might do something for you. I should go procure some food for you, properly speaking, but ironically, I’m busy preparing for tomorrow. When you’re better I’d love to hear your songs. Now, I must beg your pardon.”
With that, Tsukiyama and the girl disappeared into the darkness. Ikuma stood up, holding the wound on his shoulder.
“Oh man … This is bad …”
He had lost a ton of blood, his body had sustained massive injuries, and a ferocious hunger was welling up within him. His eyes gleamed a fiery red, and in this state he wouldn’t be able to resist attacking a living person to kill and eat them.
But that’s the one thing I won’t do!
“What do I do …”
All logic disappeared from his mind, and as he racked his brain he finally came up with something.
“Ante … iku …”
How ironic is it that I’ve avoided Ghouls all this time, only to be attacked by a Ghoul, and my last resort means relying on Ghouls?
Ikuma put his guitar case on his back and headed for Anteiku.
An intense pain shot through him with every step, and as he walked his Ghoul instincts coursed through his body. Reason and instinct became entwined in his mind, and he felt like he was losing his mind.
“God is … there …”
Ikuma began singing his own song, his voice thick and hoarse. His voice barely made a sound, and it kept breaking, but he sang with all his might.
“Don’t … lose sight …”
Ikuma turned the corner and finally saw the café ahead of him. It was late, but luckily the lights were still on.
They’ll help me somehow, he thought.
Just then, he collapsed on the spot, the relief perhaps having taken the energy right out of him. And he lay there, unable to move.
“No … way …”
Ikuma put both of his hands against the ground and tried to push himself up somehow. But his elbow was broken, and his energy left him. It wasn’t memories or regrets that ran through his mind as he faced death.
I want … I want … I want to eat someone!
It was a greedy cry for food.
“Wh … why?”
Ikuma balled his hands up into fists and groaned mournfully.
“Why? Why do we …”
Hot tears ran down his cheeks.
“Why do we have to eat humans?”
All of his energy had been used up now. He couldn’t take one step.
“Hey there, are you okay?”
Oh God, I’ve been found by a woman on her way home from the office.
And she smells delicious.
She approached him cautiously.
Ikuma’s heart leapt. As his pulse pounded, blood coursed through his body. Ghoul blood.
Do it, man, eat her. You’re hungry, right? What are you waiting for?
His instinct, now surpassing his reason, called to him. He could not fight the Ghoul blood he was drenched in.
Oh, this is it. This is why they want to take their own lives, he thought to himself, probably in the same instant.
“Hey, what happened?”
Suddenly, he heard loud banging noises nearby. The woman stood up, surprised, and looked in the direction they’d been heard from.
“It’s rockets … fireworks?”
The sound brought Ikuma back to his senses. He felt the heaviness of the guitar on his back, and he gritted his teeth.
Then, in the direction of the noise, he saw something enormously frightening. It sent chills down his spine so cold that it was hard to breathe. Something Ghouls must avoid at any cost was there.
“What’s all this commotion?”
Just then, a girl with black hair came dashing out of Anteiku. She looked in the same direction as Ikuma before turning her attention to him in surprise.
“Touka, do you know what just …”
Next, a boy with dark hair appeared from inside the shop. His eyes followed the girl’s over to Ikuma in astonishment. Ikuma could see his own bright-red eyes reflected clearly in the boy’s eyes.
“Are you all right?”
He rushed over to Ikuma and covered his red eyes with his own hand to hide them.
I’m saved.
Ikuma closed his eyes before letting go of consciousness.
IV
The smell of coffee hit him.
It was that smell that reeled him in and made him open his eyes. Slowly the ceiling came into view.
“Has he come to?” he heard someone near him say. The room was tinged by soft sunlight.
“I …”
With his head in his hands he tried to sit up, but the boy who seemed to be taking care of him said, “You should try to sleep a little longer,” and forced him to lie back down.
“You’re at a café called Anteiku. My name is Ken Kaneki.”
“Ken …”
That’s the name the guy told me when I had a run-in with him at the suicide spot. Was he talking about this boy?
“How are your injuries?”
Ikuma closed his hands into fists and let them go again. He could move his hands perfectly fine. That ferocious hunger had already disappeared, and both his body and mind felt calmer.
I’ve been saved, Ikuma again realized. But he was horrified at the same time.
I had no idea starvation would be so intense.
If it hadn’t have been for those fireworks and these guys showing up, I would’ve killed and eaten that kind woman who asked if I was okay.
“Yomo told me a little about you. He said you’ve been trying to avoid other Ghouls and blend in with human society.”
Is that the guy from the suicide hot spot?
Ikuma took another look at the boy who’d introduced himself as Kaneki. He had a distinctive smell to him, a mix of the smell of a female Ghoul and a human.
Kaneki looked at Ikuma, who was silent. “Oh, sorry! It’s all right if you don’t want to talk. You must be very tired still …” he apologized as if he had been out of line.
He was not so much curious as he had a desire to understand things deeply, by experiencing them directly. He was a kind of Ghoul that Ikuma had rarely seen before. I think he’s a little bit like me.
“My mother … was a human,” Ikuma said, laying it right out there, as if he had been invited to by the uniqueness of the situation.
“What?” Kaneki said, confused. “What do you mean? Do you mean that you … used to be a human too?”
He could sense Kaneki’s unease as he said the word “too” but Ikuma shook his head.
“I’ve been a Ghoul since the day I was born. But I was raised by humans.”
Ikuma began to tell Kaneki a little of his story.
My mother is a top surgeon. And her husband was a doctor too.
But they found it difficult to conceive a child together, and finally, after undergoing fertility treatments, they had a child after seven years of marriage.
They were delighted, and they took their roles as parents seriously.
But six months after the birth, her husband collapsed from overworking and died.
My mother was grief-stricken. She could not forgive herself for not noticing her husband’s grave state even though she was a doctor.
But my mother still had a child to take care of.
She knew she had to be both mother and father, and do it well. That thought was enough to make her go on living.
But a few days before the child’s first birthday, it happened.
The child died.
The child always got cranky at night, but that night and that night only, he fell fast asleep.
My mother woke up in the middle of the night. “Sound asleep, aren’t you?” But when she caressed the child’
s cheek, he was incredibly cold.
My mother frantically tried to resuscitate him. The child did not come back to life.
She had now lost everything. The only thing she had left to lose was her sanity. She wandered through the town in the pouring rain, clutching her dead child in her arms.
Let me die too, she thought. But as she wandered, she saw a woman lying down, hiding in the shadow of a building.
Perhaps it was her instincts as a doctor that made her do what she did next.
Just as she asked the woman if she was all right, the woman looked at her.
With pure red eyes.
My mother went weak in the knees at this grotesque sight, and she was paralyzed with fear. But just then she heard a baby begin to wail.
She stared at the woman unthinkingly. The woman had a baby no more than a year old clutched to her chest.
My mother saw that the woman had wounds all over her, but there was not a scratch on the child.
She had been defending the child from harm.
Now it was the woman’s turn to look at the child cradled against my mother’s chest. The woman’s eyes grew wider with surprise.
My mother turned away in a hurry to hide, but the woman apparently had noticed that the baby was dead.
“Please …”
The woman held out the child with trembling hands toward my mother.
“Save this child …”
My mother heard men shouting in the distance.
“She must’ve run this way!”
“I’m gonna find you!”
My mother understood then. That the woman was a Ghoul, and that the child was as well.
The baby started crying weakly.
“I hear the baby!”
At the same time, my mother understood something else.
That the woman was also a mother, the same as her. And that the woman loved this child just as much as she loved her own child.
My mother took the Ghoul child in her arms and handed her own child to the woman.
“Thank you …”
My mother ran off. As she did, the Ghoul woman whispered, “I’m so sorry, just a little bit …” and started nibbling on my mother’s child.
Having eaten a little flesh, the woman was able to push herself to the limits of her strength. She stood up and went running in the opposite direction from my mother.
“She was just here!”
Aware that there were multiple men chasing after the woman, my mother ran through the rain like a woman possessed.
The next morning in the newspaper she saw a story about a Ghoul mother and child.
A Ghoul mother, cornered by investigators, had apparently jumped into the sea, still clutching a child. The mother’s body had been found but the child’s had not.
My mother read the article with the child in her arms. That child was me.
It was a secret too large to deal with on her own. She confided in her parents. When she told them, they nearly fainted from shock, but eventually they accepted it after seeing how determined my mother was.
My mother returned to work at the hospital early. During the day, she dropped me off with my grandparents, and in the evening she would give me “food” she had procured from the hospital.
She taught me from a relatively early age that I was a Ghoul. And she was very open with me about what kind of standing Ghouls have in the human world.
And she raised me as a human.
When I was a small child and unable to control my feelings I stayed at home, but when I got older I went to primary school, like any other child my age. My mother told the school that I had food allergies, and she always packed a lunch for me.
So I was raised with human values. Of course I’ve never killed anyone.
“I think my mother wishes I would’ve become a doctor, but I don’t have the head for it. Plus I have my own dreams,” Ikuma said. His broken guitar sat next to his cot.
“They say songs can cross borders. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Ghoul or if you’re human. I just think, like, it would be great if I could write a song that really reached people. But maybe it’s stupid for a kid from the country to have that dream …”
“Of course it isn’t!” Kaneki said immediately, rejecting Ikuma’s self-deprecation. He paused. “It makes me happy to hear that a Ghoul like you feels so close to humans.” Kaneki spoke as if he were representing all humans. “I’ve got your back.”
Ikuma didn’t know what to make of this mysterious boy who smelled like both a human and a Ghoul. But for some reason, what he’d said had made Ikuma feel like he could realize his crazy dream.
V
A few weeks after he was rescued by the people at Anteiku, Ikuma was busking in front of the station. The guitar in his arms was the well-loved one he’d brought all the way from home.
After what happened, Ikuma had actually gone to the music store that Tsukiyama had recommended. He had been afraid, but he’d also felt that he had a legitimate right to compensation from the person who broke his guitar.
The owner of the store had heard about what happened from Tsukiyama, and he offered to provide Ikuma with any used guitar, free of charge.
But Ikuma told him that he wanted his own guitar fixed. No guitar but the one he’d brought from his hometown would do.
The strings had snapped, the body and neck had broken and split into two pieces, and everywhere he looked he could see damage. It looked like it would be impossible to repair.
But the owner said, without hesitation, “Well, Tsukiyama said to do what I could,” and Ikuma had no idea how he’d done it, but a few days later the owner returned the guitar to him, restored.
As for the problem of how to obtain food that had been plaguing him, through an arrangement made by the manager at Anteiku, the famous suicide spot where he had originally been getting food was handed over to him as his “territory.”
They had also told him that Anteiku could provide him with meat they had procured, but he thought he would forget the gravity of a life if he got used to just being given meat.
By facing people’s deaths and getting his own food by himself, he could not forget that he was a Ghoul, which was something he thought was important in order for him to continue living in human society.
Fortunately, his territory was in the middle of nowhere, so there were no other Ghouls around there, either.
During a small break in songs, something took him by surprise. He was taking a drink from a can of coffee when a boy ran over waving, saying, “Hello-o!
“Remember me? I heard you here before. My name’s Hideyoshi Nagachika! But everyone calls me Hide!”
“Of course I remember you, man. Okay, Hide it is. I’ll be sure to call you that from now on.”
Hide smiled broadly at hearing Ikuma say his name.
“Oh, and I brought my friend, too! Kaneki—hey, Kaneki!” Hide yelled, turning around.
Kaneki?
He looked in surprise to see another boy come rushing up.
“Man, Hide, I said you were too excited.”
He had black hair and wore an eye patch over his left eye. And he had the smell of a human mixed with a Ghoul.
When he realized Ikuma was standing there, his eye popped in surprise.
“Uh, so, Hide, who’s this artist you’ve been talking about?”
“This guy! Sorry, can I, uh, ask your name?”
Ikuma thought about the pain that Hide had showed him after listening to his song. And he thought about the unique smell that Kaneki had, making it hard to tell which side he was on.
“Did you used to be a human, too?”
What Kaneki had said at Anteiku came back to Ikuma. He felt that he’d seen a glimpse of their anguish and its cause. But Ikuma introduced himself, sounding cheerful.
“I’m Ikuma Momochi. And you are … ?” he asked Kaneki, pretending it was the first time they’d met. Kaneki stood up straight and introduced himself.
“I’m Kaneki, Ken Kaneki,” he said.
Ikuma began plucking at the guitar strings.
“Well, since you guys came all this way, you might as well listen to a song!”
This town is so much more terrifying than I imagined, and so much kinder, too.
He started singing a song he’d written since moving to Tokyo.
Ikuma Momochi, a Ghoul living in Tokyo.
How can I reach out to the world I’m aiming for?
“Who were those ‘suspicious characters’ after all?” Kaneki said to Touka, who was cleaning up in the café as Kaneki dried the freshly washed coffee cups.
She picked up another piece of trash. “Probably investigators,” she said blankly.
It was a few weeks after Yoshimoto had told them to be careful because suspicious characters had been spotted in the area.
Kaneki had told his friend Hide not to come around the café, and the staff themselves had felt on edge and tense on a daily basis since then, but that day their manager had reported to them that nobody had been spotted for a while.
As Touka said, it hadn’t been that long since a Ghoul was killed by investigators close to the café. He wasn’t a Ghoul from the 20th Ward, but he had come in for a coffee once.
On one hand, he’d also heard about a Ghoul named Ikuma who had moved to Tokyo from the countryside and had passed by the café a few times. Ikuma apparently wanted nothing to do with other Ghouls, and he acted in secret, so it wasn’t impossible that Yoshimura had picked up on him and decided he was suspicious.
And it wasn’t just that. He’d also heard rumors about a gawky college-age boy with glasses hanging around the area. Kaneki didn’t know which was the true story.
What was for certain, though, was that there definitely had been suspicious people around, that something had happened, and that Yoshimura had made a judgment call.
“Maybe things will be a little quieter now …”
