Tokyo Ghoul

Tokyo Ghoul is a dark fantasy and horror anime based on the manga by Sui Ishida. The manga ran in Shueisha's Weekly Young Jump, a magazine for adult readers, from 2011 to 2014. It was one of the best-selling manga in Japan in 2014. The studio Pierrot made this first anime season, and Shuhei Morita directed it. Its 12 episodes aired on Tokyo MX from July 4 to September 19, 2014. The opening song, Unravel by TK from Ling tosite Sigure, became one of the most famous anime songs of its time.

The show takes place in a version of modern Tokyo with a hidden danger. Living among the people are ghouls. They look exactly like normal humans, but they can only survive by eating human flesh. Regular food tastes awful to them and cannot keep them alive. Ghouls hide their true nature, and many live quiet lives in the city. A government group called the CCG, short for Commission of Counter Ghoul, hunts them. Its investigators carry special weapons and treat ghouls as monsters to be wiped out.

Ken Kaneki is a shy 18-year-old university student who loves books. He becomes interested in Rize Kamishiro, a pretty young woman who shares his taste in novels. Their date ends in disaster when Rize turns out to be a ghoul who wants to eat him. Kaneki barely survives. While he is in the hospital, doctors place some of her organs into his body to save his life. When he wakes up, he is no longer fully human. He is now a half-ghoul, and he feels a terrible hunger for the very thing he finds most horrible.

With nowhere else to go, Kaneki is taken in by the people who run Anteiku, a small coffee shop. The staff are ghouls who try to live peacefully and help others like them. Here he meets Touka Kirishima, a sharp, moody girl who works at the shop and has her own tough past. Kaneki must learn the rules of ghoul society while hiding his change from his best human friend, Hideyoshi Nagachika, who is often called Hide. Caught between two worlds, he belongs fully to neither.

The story asks hard questions. Are the ghouls evil, or are they just trying to survive like anyone else? Are the human hunters heroes, or do they also do cruel things? Kaneki's struggle to keep his kindness and his sense of self in a violent world is the heart of the show. The series is bloody and sometimes very disturbing, with scenes of body horror, so it is not for young viewers. Its mood is sad, tense, and moody, with much of the story told in the rain and in the dark corners of the city. It was followed by a second season, Tokyo Ghoul Root A, in 2015.