Akihiro Kanou

Kanou reads as a man well into his later years, his hair gone grey and a couple of stray locks always slipping over his brow. His everyday look is the uniform of his profession: a white coat over a white shirt, finished with a dark tie. By the events of :re, he trades that formality for a loud Hawaiian print and takes to carrying a folding fan.

On the surface Kanou plays the part of a kind, devoted doctor, one willing to break the rules if it keeps a patient alive. That warmth is only a shell around the mind of a cold experimenter. He treats ghouls, and one-eyed ghouls in particular, as humanity's escape route from what he calls the birdcage confining the world, and he holds his own species in contempt as weak creatures with no future worth saving. His research subjects mean nothing to him beyond their usefulness, and he preys on the isolation of lonely, trusting people to secure more of them. For all his scorn, he grants respect to a rare few whose talent he admires, praising Dr. Kouitsu Chigyou for reworking the transplant procedure into the basis of the Quinx.

As a boy Kanou is remembered as a good-natured jokester who doted on his ailing mother, visiting her hospital bed day after day. Her death, just before he starts university, hardens something in him. He finishes at the top of his class at Teihou University's medical school, then crosses to Germany to research under the GFG. A stint with the CCG follows, where his work grafting ghoul traits onto human bodies draws heavy ethical criticism, gets shut down, and ends with him forced out.

His defining crime comes when Ken Kaneki is left dying after Rize Kamishiro attacks him. Kanou implants Rize's kakuhou into the young man, converting him into an artificial one-eyed ghoul and igniting a transplant scandal, since no permission is ever sought from Rize's family. He keeps up Kaneki's routine checkups afterward while pretending nothing is unusual about him. The truth surfaces through Aogiri Tree: Tatara exposes Kanou's role, and the doctor slips away from the organization's grasp.

When Kaneki and his allies hunt Kanou down at his laboratory, they find him at its heart. He greets Kaneki as his ultimate creation and lays out his vision of shattering the world's cage through manufactured one-eyed ghouls, nearly talking him into joining Aogiri before Yomo arrives to pull Rize free. Kanou flees with Shachi, loosing his failed subjects to buy time. From there he becomes a fixture within Aogiri, working beside Eto and Tatara and turning captured investigators into weapons. Of sixty-three doves subjected to his ghoulification process, only Seidou Takizawa emerges a success, dubbed T-OWL, while Koutarou Amon's conversion sends his Rc levels soaring past ten thousand. Kanou tortures Takizawa relentlessly to force open new Rc pathways, breaking the man's mind in the process.

His schemes carry through the Auction, the Rose Extermination, and the operation on Rushima, where he keeps a concealed lab and coldly refuses a desperate Kurona's plea to save her absorbed sister. After the Clown siege he returns to the CCG alongside Nimura Furuta, another of his one-eyed creations, and begins producing the child soldiers known as the Oggai. His story ends during the Dragon crisis: standing at his mother's grave, he tells Kurona that his life's work of breaking the birdcage is his one redemption, admits he chose Rize out of hunger for the Washuu bloodline's power, then turns a gun on himself rather than let her take his life.

Kanou's genius drives everything he does. A gifted and persuasive surgeon, he masters ghoul and human anatomy alike, engineering the operations that create one-eyed ghouls and Quinx and manipulating loyal CCG recruits such as Kurona and Nashiro into offering themselves for his work. He claims to have experimented on roughly twelve hundred people using Rize as his foundation, yielding only three genuine artificial one-eyed ghouls.