Ken Kaneki's mother

She had a slim build, cropped black hair, and a pair of glasses.

Bright and outwardly warm, she lived by the conviction that a good person should absorb pain rather than inflict it, and that love and self-sacrifice were all one needed to be happy. She turned no one away and offered everyone the same generosity. Her son professed to love her, yet buried resentment simmered beneath that devotion. His recollections are tangled: alongside the kindness sit memories of her striking him and of her placing strangers' needs and her own workload above his emotional wellbeing.

She surfaces repeatedly in the hallucinations Rize uses to torment Kaneki. Remembered as tirelessly hardworking, she juggled two jobs on top of running the home, which left her constantly drained. Her refusal to compromise extended to handing money to her demanding older sister even while raising a child alone. With so little time to spare, she rarely spent it with Kaneki, who passed lonely hours in his late father's study.

Long after her death he clung to her worldview, until Rize's phantom mocked how weak that outlook had made her. The taunt broke something in him, and he lashed out at her memory for never living for his sake before finally setting her ideals aside to choose his own path. In a separate descent into his fractured mind as Sasaki, he recalled being beaten by her and apologizing for his own wants, blaming himself for the mistreatment.