Warning! Spoilers ahead for Choujin X chapter 17!
After teasing a new rendition of Rize who torments another version of Ken Kaneki, mangaka Sui Ishida is bringing another twisted character from Tokyo Ghoul to his new manga Choujin X – the Aogiri Tree executive who tortured Ken Kaneki to madness, Yakumo Oomori aka Yamori.
Momentarily debuting in an earlier installment, a supposed “good guy” named Ichiro Sato just utilized his terrifying Choujin powers known as Psycho Stare in chapter 17 to torture his world’s version of Rize known as Nari Tsumiji, the White Snake Choujin. Ichiro explains to his victim that Psycho Stare enables him to make anyone see images in his head, from an abstract thought that’s hard to describe to something he actually saw. Ichiro utilizes the latter aspect of his power by forcing her to see “countless fly eggs hatching in every orifice of [her] body while hordes of larvae crawl about and slowly devour [her].” This experience is augmented by the fact that Ichiro exposed himself to such images at an excessive rate to ensure that the detail of her experience would be 100% accurate. The scene is ostensibly so explicit that Sui Ishida even blurs out the image.
Yamori, one of the most hated characters in Tokyo Ghoul, is infamously renowned for how he broke Ken Kaneki by brutally torturing the human/ghoul for 10 days. Throughout the horrific ordeal, Yamori injects a serum into his eye, cuts off his fingers and toes before forcing him to eat so that they will regrow, enabling him to repeat the painful procedure all over again. After inserting a Chinese red-headed centipede into his ear, Yamoto finally breaks Ken by killing two of his friends in front of him when Ken fails to choose which one should die. This is what causes Ken to fully embrace his ghoul side after trying for so long to suppress it, murdering Yamoto in cold blood while adopting his torturer’s mannerisms and sadistic tendencies.
For fans who particularly enjoyed this sick dynamic, it was relatively short-lived, as Sui Ishida didn’t introduce Yamato until much later in the manga before killing him off almost immediately. Like Rize whose actual presence was brief besides her manifestations as hallucinations, Yamato represents a major turning point in Ken Kaneki’s life and fans still regard the ordeals he inflicted on Kaneki as one of the best moments in the series even though his time was relatively short. Sui Ishida appears to be remedying this shortcoming by not only introducing Choujin X‘s Ichiro Sato earlier on but making him a keeper at Yamato Mori – which is essentially Tokyo Ghoul‘s Anteiku. It’s unclear whether Ichiro will eventually defect and join some of the fringe Choujin groups just based on his aggressive and rather unprecedented methods. But hopefully, he won’t as this questionable behavior makes him a much more compelling character since he’s an ostensibly good Choujin with a great deal of influence. Just imagine what Yamoto would have been like if he were actually somehow a part of Anteiku!
Regardless, it’s reassuring that mangaka Sui Ishida is not only introducing a character like Yamoto but revisiting some of the darker aspects of Tokyo Ghoul, especially since Choujin X is, at least on the surface, much more lighthearted. Now fans just need to see if Ichiro will eventually get his claws in Ken Kaneki’s equivalent, Tokio Kurohara.
