Please let me know if there are any mistakes. You can read the article that I translated from here.

Also please note, I’ve only seen pictures of the first page, but I’m 99% sure there’s another page based on the content from the interview excerpt that wasn’t included, and the lack of closing statement from Ishida. So I (and my pounding headache) would appreciate it if people didn’t jump to conclusions like they did for his afterword last time…

I’ll shut up now. Thanks and hope you enjoy~

(btw if anyone has the rest of the interview, please send me a message)

Edit: Looks like it’s just one page, so this is the full interview.

EAT OR BE EATEN - A UNITED FRONT OF HOPE



Tokyo Ghoul is a dark fantasy with many passionate fans, having sold 37 million copies worldwide. With the story’s completion, the author Ishida Sui has decided to accept an interview from Yomiuri Shimbun. This is the first time Ishida has spoken in depth about his work. How was his story about “irreconcilable coexistence” born, and has it strengthened the world?

By Kawadoko Yayoi

The birth of ghouls

Where did you come up with the idea of ghouls, a species that can only survive by eating humans?

I usually like romances and comedies, but I decided to take a different approach and considered drawing villains who were part of a minority. It’d be too simple to have them be just cold-blooded killers, so I thought it’d be interesting if there was a species of them that lived among humans. I set the story in Tokyo because I knew that even if strange incidents took place people would be indifferent to it. “Fear of mass society”, in other words.

In the beginning, the protagonist Kaneki turns into a being that is neither ghoul nor human.

I made Kaneki into a half-ghoul because I thought he’d be able to empathize with both humans and ghouls. From that point on I vaguely thought about how both races could coexist. It was really difficult finding a solution though…

Empathizing with the minority

On the one hand there are ghouls who eat humans without a second thought, and on the other hand peaceful ghouls who don’t hunt down and attack humans. But there also scenes where human investigators seem to be cruel.

Maybe there’s a part of me that sympathizes with the minority. My parents moved around a lot and were Christians, so when I was a child I felt alienated being in a family that was slightly different from everyone else’s. I feel like I’m a part of both the majority and the minority, so there have been many times where I’ve been the listener to my friends regarding topics such as religion, gender, and relationships with your parents. Makes me wonder if that’s come up in my work.

Kaneki is a self-insert

Kaneki is the most tragic of them all. He used to be a human, but he can only eat humans now…

Kaneki was a bit of a self-insert, so he was a difficult character to write until the end. There’s a scene where Yamori, the sadistic ghoul who kidnaps Kaneki, says, “All the drawbacks of this world can be explained by the affected person’s insecurities in their own abilities.” He says this while torturing Kaneki, and those words bind Kaneki. To be honest, there was a time when I thought like that too. Unhappy people don’t put in enough effort, they’re relying on their circumstances, those kind of thoughts.

That’s the idea of “self-responsibility” that’s been mentioned a lot recently.

But those words will drive people into a corner. I’m not drawing the manga by myself. I’m only able to do this because of the staff and the editors, the people near me who can provide advice. I’m very lucky to have that.

When the series was first serialized, I was also struggling to do everything by myself. But I realized that it wasn’t stylish to drown in tragedy alone. Kaneki is an irresponsible person, but in the end he and I were both able to synchronize our thoughts.

Even the enemy is warm

Kaneki always used to think, “This world is wrong,” but at the end he comes to the opposite conclusion that, “This world is not wrong.”

The conflicts in this world happen because everyone is trying to carry out their own sense of justice. But isn’t it that people’s individual likes and dislikes are just being substituted for grandiose words like, “This is right, this is wrong”? The world just is. That is what I wanted Kaneki to say.

Were there any other scenes that you found emotional?

In the issue where Kaneki and the female ghoul Touka got close each other and made love for the first time, I spent two weeks drawing it without any assistants. All the dialogue was handwritten because I didn’t want any typesetting in it. For that chapter alone, I refused to let anyone touch it.

In the scene where the investigator Mado Akira and the female ghoul Hinami hugged, it made me feel hope for the future considering they’re supposed to be enemies.

I also found that scene very emotional. One time I watched a TV documentary about a former American soldier who fought in the Vietnam War. There was a scene where he met the daughter of a Vietnam soldier he had killed himself, and they were hugging each other. What would you feel if you got to feel the warmth of your enemy? I was influenced by this documentary, and I thought I would link it to my work.

You can’t save something by yourself

Part 1 ended in despair, whereas part 2’s bright ending was a surprise.

Part 1 ending like that was meant to shock the readers. I like surprising them. I also wanted to reset the story once in order to bring Kaneki to the human investigators’ side.

In the end, it was Kaneki turning into the giant Dragon that got humans and ghouls to work together.

I was stuck on how to conclude the series until the very end. I thought about having the death of monster Kaneki bridging the two species, but then neither I nor the readers would be left with anything. Then I might as well write a happy ending to the point that it would bother readers with lots of questions. For the last issue, I managed to draw something satisfactory.

So was Kaneki able to save the world in the end?

It’s impossible to save the world by yourself in the first place. But if everyone can protect their loved ones nearby, you can save a good chunk of the world, don’t you think? In that sense, I think that Tokyo Ghoul is a story about deciding for yourself which choice is correct.

No sequel will be drawn

How do you feel after finishing 7 years of serialization?

It feels like I’ve been dispossessed of an evil spirit. During serialization I felt like I’d been taken over by a different person. This happened recently, but one morning I woke up with absolutely no clue what I should do. I want to leave the parts of the story that weren’t drawn up to the reader’s imagination. A sequel most likely will not happen.

END OF THE INTERVIEW.