The Hardest Lessons Learned

We’re actually given, several hints not only this chapter but beforehand. Including the chin touch as he says he’ll catch up, that Kaneki did not really believe he would make it out alive from this fight.

That Kaneki, while deciding he wanted to live and find a purpose for living, had resigned himself to his death once again.

In this chapter we finally witness what has been put off since basically 100, and that is true tragic consequence. Not from the cruelty of the world, but rather for it’s lack of forgiveness towards Kaneki’s wrongdoings. It’s Karma. Remember, everything that happened so far Kaneki has been warned of far in advance.

When Kaneki takes no steps himself despite being warned several times ahead of time, how can tragedy be averted? When Hamlet fails to avenge his father and spends the entire play in indecision. When Romeo and Juliet fail to think on their situation and their families and decide to get married instead. When Othello fails to trust or believe in his wife the smallest amount.

When Oedipus pursues the truth, but is at the same time terrified by that truth then how can he possibly avert tragedy?

Kaneki’s greatest fear, that he’ll be locked into his decisions and forced to bear witness, powerless to change the results.

Kaneki’s greatest oversight, that there is a reason behind all of the suffering in his life. That he is special in some way, that his motivation is stronger, the unfounded assumption that he is important, he matters, he stands above all others.

That he is the main character of a tragedy.

As assumption that makes him forget that just like himself, there are also people fighting for things that are important to him, to protect them, and therefore his own urge to fight or protect is not somehow more special, more stronger, or guaranteed to win him the fight.

We were warned as explicitly as one chapter ago, that we cannot fight our loss. That doing so is really an attempt to spare yourself from the loss, or substitute yourself into the loss and therefore the price for fighting your loss is always yourself.

We see Furuta lecture Kaneki, on other basic things he was warned about.

Kaneki is told, not to base his decisions on his feelings, to learn to trust anothers and not to base everything on himself, and most of all to make and stand with his decisions and we see him do none of these things. He renegs on the one decision he did make, he fails to trust both Tsukiyama and Nishiki with him to come with and provide support and instead goes entirely alone back home, he makes his entire decision based off of a bad feeling he had in the first place.

Furuta tells him as much, one small difference in the fight and he could have won. What that means is that Kaneki really has learned absolutely nothing since the last time he fought Arima and ended up in a similiar situation.

Unlike Arima though, Juuzou is not secretly fighting with the intent of bettering Kaneki. Kaneki’s unlimited supply of mentors who are willing to take the blame for him, and take the consequences for him, set up all things in his favor on the assumption that this time, he might move, seems to have finally run dry.

From the Anteiku arc forward, Kaneki has only ever moved as a result of another pushing him. Hinami begs him to save her mother, Itori pushes him to investigate the Gourmet, Ayato kidnaps him and bodily drags him, Yamori tortures him until he’s finally ready to defend himself. Aogiri moves on Kanou before he does. Uta tells him point blank where Rize is hiding. Touka tells him to go back to Anteiku. The Anteiku raid happens before he returns. Arima drags him out of V14 by the hair, but only after Hide told him to go down that route to fight.

Eto returns his memories for him. Kanae saves Tsukiyama, not him. Arima slits his own throat. Eto tells him to become one eyed king. Furuta stages an attack on the CCG for him. Furuta resolves the clown raids himself, by operating both sides of the conflict.

Kaneki puts off making any kind of decision himself for as long as humanly possible, and when he finally does make that decision he goes back on it. He decided to return to Anteiku, he decided to return to the 24th ward all alone.

We see countless parallels to the Anteiku raid. With Yomo saying that you have to live while losing once more, Touka choosing to run away from the conflict eventually rather than stay and fight, but I think most importantly of all Kaneki is once again stopped from achieving his want of protecting someone just short, by an equally obstinate force in Arata armor who just like him, refuses to change and instead chooses to protect what little they have remaining at the CCG.

Not only that, but also Juuzou and Kaneki much like Amon and Kaneki had no reason to kill each other, and yet still fought because each considered their reason far more important than backing down.

The translation for Jaiminis box is especially relevant here, for two reasons. One that Darum’s are supposed to carry each other’s wishes, and two that paradise is exactly what Kaneki was aiming for. A world where Humans and Ghouls could get along is certainly a utopia by the series standards.

Kaneki is a Daruma, an eyeless doll that was meant to carry Arima’s wishes. Yet, this chapter brutally tells us what the result of that ambition was. To break him, Furuta shows us where Arima’s hope, the hope of the garden children led them.

Yet, when Kaneki never once truly tried to follow Arima’s will, how could he expect a different result. He continued to use the garden children as child soldiers, even knowing that child soldiers could die, and as a result they did.

Ghouls were being slaughtered in the streets and yet Kaneki never once showed up directly to fight for the sake of ghouls. He let the situation get this bad, for the annihilation rate to reach 88% and still acted as if he had a chance at winning. The only thing that moved him to maybe finally directly confront Furuta was the risk of a human life once again. Kaneki only ever showed up to protect CCG officers, he wasted resources to restore Akira a human, he considered risking everything to save Yoriko a human. All while claiming that he was fighting solely for the sake of ghouls.

Kaneki blatantly and brazenly did not care at all for the masses he was claiming to be protecting, so why should he have been able to protect them at all?

What we are witnessing right now is an eclipse. The moon has moved entirely in front of the sun, and we see the shadows at their longest points. All of the characters involved in this chapter, are born raw to us at their deepest and darkest.

Suzuya Juuzou was willing to slaughter the entire goat base, and even his good friend Haise for the sake of continuing to prop up a corpse. Even knowing that Shinohara himself might never come back.

Touka Kirishima sacrifices basically everyone and everything in order to try to make it out safely, only to realize that Hinami, Yomo, Take, all of those sacrifices were in vain. Not only that, but even if she did manage to make it out alive, Kaneki has already been cornered minutes before she even realized her own hopeless situation.

Miza simply clings to Naki’s dead body, and stays behind even after everybody has left as if that’s the only thing to live for. Naki looks to be truly dead, with perhaps Miza to follow soon after him.

Take seems to have failed utterly in his last purpose, the last thing Arima entrusted him with. Two out of three of the children in his care have died, perhaps four out of five if we’re going to flashback to the Tanakamaru and Aura fight soon.

Ui remains nowhere to be seen, Mutsuki is fried, Yomo is lifeless and marching towards his own certain death now. Nobody has achieved what they want. A true darkest point.

Yet.. why does Furuta leave Kaneki alive?

Furuta has only bothered to leave someone alive on purpose once in the past, and it created the greatest threat to his power as the Washuu King.

Furuta is not tactically stupid enough to leave loose ends. After all, the only time he’s ever surprised is when the audience is equally as surprised as him, such as Marude and Matsuri both coming back from the dead to challenge him. In those cases, with Marude’s disappearance, and Matsuri’s having several V squads sent after him he had every logical reason to assume they were dead. Furuta’s usual MO though, has always been to kill all the witnesses present, whether Matsumae, the V members with Eto, and even his attempt on Urie and Kuroiwa.

So why would Furuta suddenly change his strategy now and leave it to Hajime to simply torture and toy with Kaneki until he died. It can look like sadism, but if you remember Donato similiarly toyed with Urie, and yet at the same time both left him alive and gave him the exact same words he needed to grow later on in the story.

It was in despair and loss, what Kaneki has been avoiding from the absolute beginning where Urie finally learned.

So we have Furuta, our cruel and relentless teacher. There are also several hints left behind in the narrative still that this is not Kaneki’s final moments.

1) The parallels between the Arima Kishou fight and Kaneki’s moment of realization when absolutely all looked loss [x].

2) The implication that Kaneki could reverse his problem with a massive amount of cannibalism.

3) The fact that Dragon has yet to make an appearance despite being the so called final boss, and also that Uta suggested Dragon itself could be a weapon against the CCG rather than Goat.

4) Furuta’s suggestion that first he would win, and then dragon would appear. Well, in this chapter we witness Furuta claiming his absolute victory without the appearance of dragon afterwards.

5) The numerous amounts of foreshadowing that Furuta was orchestrating his own death, and actually did not care at all for V and the Washuu’s wars.

(Furuta even makes a promise here that he’ll mess up the one eyed king for Eto. Earlier he suggests in gest that the two of them should work and cooperate together. )

6) The Nagaraaj. If the manga ends here then Ayato’s journey to the 24th ward was incredibly pointless. As well as the explanation about the old one eyed king. Ayato wouldn’t be strong enough to counter Juuzou so was the explanation simply to get him out of the way.

Or was it forehshadowing to establish that if pushed to this point, this is a power that Kaneki himself could summon. That the same way the Original One Eyed King sunk the 24th ward an entire city in order to retreat from the newly formed black investigators and V, that when it seems all hope is lost, Kaneki might summon this power from himself. That this could be dragon, especially since Furuta deliberately says Dragon is named in honor of his Washuu roots. The legendary Nagaraaj are also dragon kings in the japanese version of the myth, according to @randomthoughtpatterns.

Not only that but the presence of Oggai all around him leave Kaneki with a framed out source of RC Cells to buffet on, if he truly decided to keep fighting.

7) 143 Parallels

Chapter 143 of Original Tokyo Ghoul, was called Ken [x].

Chapter 62, where Kaneki reached a similiar realization was called Kaneki.

Chapter 143, is completely without a title. In otherwords it’s nameless.

Perhaps then this is the chapter, where finally Kaneki accepts his role. Where he finally decides to truly become the nameless king.

Only after having learned from the loss he experienced right in front of his eyes, what exactly it was that needed to be changed.