Eto Yoshimura

Eto is small and slight, a woman in her mid-twenties whose face usually wears a drowsy or inquisitive look. Her long green hair tends to sit in a careless bun or hang in a tangle, matching an unkempt, easygoing style of dress. Despite the sloppiness, she is regarded as a remarkable beauty who closely favors her mother Ukina, a likeness that only sharpens once she later crops her hair into a short bob. Operating within Aogiri, she swaddles her whole body in bandages that double as a disguise, over which she wears a maroon hood with drooping ears and a flowered scarf. Her right eye is a kakugan while the left keeps a pale green tone.

A streak of sadism runs through Eto, who takes open delight in the pain of others and kills humans and ghouls alike without a shred of guilt. Inherited from her mother is a keen read on what people feel and want, an instinct she turns ruthlessly on her victims and on those she bends to her will, a cruelty likely forged by the fight to survive her childhood in the 24th Ward. She slips between her ghoul and human selves with ease, and as Sen Takatsuki she comes across as flighty and playful, oversleeping through her own signing events. Underneath the games lies real conviction: she dreams of a world where ghouls are no longer hunted for existing, and she will sacrifice anything to reach it.

Eto was born of Ukina and Yoshimura as a rare hybrid. Because Ukina had been secretly probing the organization V, its members forced Yoshimura to kill her as punishment, and to keep his infant daughter safe he left her with a ghoul named Noroi in the 24th Ward along with her mother's diary. She emerged from that ward years later as a kakuja and began a killing spree, tearing apart Kasuka Mado and scattering her remains, an act that set Kureo Mado on his path of vengeance. Rising from an S-rating to the nickname Owl, then One-Eyed Owl, and finally an SSS classification, she crossed blades with Kishou Arima and struck a secret pact with him to raise a ghoul capable of one day killing him and becoming a beacon of hope, a role Kaneki would eventually fill. In parallel she reinvented herself as the novelist Sen Takatsuki, whose debut Dear Kafka became a runaway hit and whose later book, The Black Goat's Egg, drew Kaneki toward Rize.

During the Aogiri and Kanou's lab arcs she moved among the tree's leadership, taunting the twins Kurona and Nashiro and ripping ribs from Kazuichi Banjou with impossible speed. She surfaced publicly as Takatsuki at a signing, befriended Hinami Fueguchi, and fed Amon a conspiracy linking the CCG to a company trading in ghoul-derived fluid. When the CCG came to kill her father in the 20th Ward, she ambushed them in full kakuja form, fatally wounding Yukinori Shinohara and battering Juuzou Suzuya until Arima drove her off, after which she swallowed Yoshimura, fled, and revealed to him that Takatsuki, Eto, and the One-Eyed Owl were one and the same.

In the events of Tokyo Ghoul:re she manipulated Kanae von Rosewald and clashed with the reawakening Haise Sasaki, who sliced her kakuja apart only for her to regenerate and profess a twisted love for him. She gathered Aogiri to announce that she, the One-Eyed Owl, was not the King they sought, then allowed her arrest and used a final press conference to confess her ghoul nature to all of Tokyo, dedicating her last novel King Bileygr to her kind. Confined and later transported to Cochlea, she destroyed the disposal compactor and hunted Furuta, who revealed a kagune grown from Rize's kakuhou and left her gravely wounded. Meeting Kaneki near the end, she first charged him with killing the One-Eyed King and then withdrew the request as she closed her eyes. In the Dragon crisis she proved to be the corpse at the heart of the Taxidermied Owl, regrew her head in a last moment of clarity to strike at V's leader Kaiko, and was last glimpsed lying still with a smile.

As a half-ghoul she wielded an ukaku kagune of unusual mastery, one that after the timeskip sprouted grotesque appendages shaped into eyes, mouths, and limbs, while her kakuja let her keep her mind and reshape her body at will. She could detach and even implant pieces of her kagune into others to rewrite their physiology, as she did to Kanae, and she boasted extreme durability, rapid regeneration, and blinding speed.