Itsuki Marude

Marude is a lean man of middle age with short black hair, cropped even closer in his younger days. In keeping with the other ghoul investigators, he wears the standard formal suit and tie.

Marude takes his work with grave seriousness and holds his colleagues to a strict standard, yet he genuinely cares for their welfare, as when he repeatedly reprimanded a young Kishou Arima for carrying out ghoul exterminations without approval. His manner toward subordinates runs rough; Shinohara and Houji note he gives little thought to their feelings, and he once seized Katsuya Mabuchi by the collar when he felt he was being toyed with. That gruffness extends into his private life, where he stays deliberately unmarried with no wish to change it. His time investigating the Washuu clan leaves him disillusioned, convinced the whole institution he served was built on lies, a realization that pushes him to move against Yoshitoki and break with the CCG, grieving that the dead investigators can no longer rest in peace.

In Tokyo Ghoul: Jack, Marude oversaw Kishou Arima during the stretch the young investigator worked undercover as a high school student. He makes his main entrance dismissing Kureo Mado's death as the predictable end of a man too obsessed with amassing quinques to sharpen his own ability, a remark for which Arima scolded him.

Handed command of the 11th Ward Special Countermeasures Unit, he ran CCG forces mostly out of the command vehicle across the 11th Ward Battle, though he personally shot an Aogiri member dead with a rifle and watched Juuzou Suzuya wreck his cherished motorcycle. When the Owl arrived, he ordered Shinohara and Iwao Kuroiwa to engage it with only the expendable elite while sending the rest to safety. His triumph curdled the moment Arima called to report the assault on Cochlea.

Summoned before Chairman Tsuneyoshi Washuu, Marude was pressed over his failure to run down Aogiri Tree, and afterward talked strategy with Yoshitoki Washuu, resolving to dispatch Amon for an interview with Donato Porpora. He confronted Hideyoshi Nagachika once Mabuchi fingered him as the anonymous tipster about the 11th Ward base, judged him no danger, and paired him with Amon and Akira Mado partly to keep watch on him. Yoshitoki soon asked him to take the post of Vice Commander in the Owl Suppression Operation, a role he accepted despite doubting himself, and during it a second motorcycle of his met the same fate as the first.

Placed over the S3 squad, Marude guarded the Quinque Steel Transport against an Aogiri raid led by Tatara before helping close out the Auction operation. The turning point came during the Rushima Landing Operation. Having quietly probed the Washuu family and found them clean except for one glaring anomaly in the Rc scan gate records, he confronted Yoshitoki, presented his proof, and shot him in the head while praying he was wrong. Yoshitoki rose with an active kakugan, confirming everything, and Marude, now certain the whole edifice was false, killed him and slipped away. Officially he was declared dead by suicide, a lie Matsuri spread to shield the Washuu secret, even as Marude trudged, waterlogged, through an unknown forest.

He returned at the climax of Furuta's Integrity Enquiry, joining a revolt of embittered investigators to gun down Kichimura Washuu and firing a rocket launcher loaded with newly developed Rc rounds to shatter the director's kagune. He reached the mortally wounded Iwao Kuroiwa and stayed beside him to the end, then met Hide, revealed as Scarecrow. As the Dragon emerged, Marude took charge of the response, calling for military and police support, evacuations, and a specialized command center, and questioned Hisashi Ogura to trace Akihiro Kanou's whereabouts and purpose. In the aftermath he was raised to the top post of chief at the TSC, having labored for years to unify Division II, and he guided the organization into the new era until Takashi Houji eventually succeeded him. Though known as a strategist who rarely fought directly, Marude proved a formidable marksman, once dropping two ghoul snipers with quick rifle bursts from a distance where his subordinates faltered.