Yoshimura

Most days he stands behind the counter in a crisp waiter's uniform, a tall and broad figure whose lids stay lowered as though half asleep. His hair has gone a swept-back white, though in his youth it ran black. A calm, almost unreadable warmth follows him everywhere, his hands often clasped behind his spine and his chin lifted in a faint smile. For travel he trades the uniform for a dark cloak and a matching hat.

His fighting mask shields one half of his features and ends in a curved, owl-like beak. When he pushes into his kakuja state, the kagune itself hardens into a covering that echoes the true One-Eyed Owl's mask, parting only in small ways along the mouth and the shape of the eye openings.

As Anteiku's head he is patient and even-handed, a settling presence in a district full of predators. Some of his staff, Nishiki Nishio among them, cannot fathom why so powerful a ghoul chooses the role of peacemaker, yet they trust him all the same. He can be firm when the moment calls for it, though his instructions rarely meet resistance. What sets him apart from most of his kind is that he weighs human and ghoul lives on the same scale.

That serenity was hard won. The young Kuzen was a recluse whose sheer strength walled him off from everyone, and he despised his own nature, convinced he was a curse that survived only by ending others. Meeting Ukina cracked that shell open. Loving her reshaped him and planted the idea of Anteiku, a place to shelter the lost the way no one had ever sheltered him.

For his daughter he holds a fierce, protective devotion, hiding her in the 24th ward and later standing in as the Owl to keep V's eyes off her. He refuses to take a life and turns away from those who do, sparing even the investigators he battles. Believing his past sins mark him as evil, he is ready to accept death from his enemies, yet he will still strike to kill when the people he treasures are in danger.

Long before the cafe, he was known only as Kuzen, a ghoul who fed on humans and even his own kind while loathing every moment of it. His growing reputation drew the notice of the organization called V, which employed him as a cleaner to wipe out rival factions. The work fed him but left him hollow, until a waitress named Ukina drew him out of his solitude at a cafe he frequented. She uncovered what he was and embraced him anyway, and the two became lovers.

Ukina eventually carried his child, a fragile human-ghoul hybrid who survived only because she ate human flesh throughout the pregnancy. They named the girl Eto. When Kuzen later found Ukina's diary, he realized she was a journalist tracking V's secrets. The order came down to silence her, and unable to defy the group, he killed the woman he loved. He then abandoned V and placed Eto with an acquaintance, Noroi, deep in the 24th ward where V could not reach.

Years on, now living as the manager Yoshimura, he heard of a rampaging One-Eyed Owl and understood it was his daughter. To draw danger away from her, he impersonated the Owl in an assault on a CCG office, where the investigator Kishou Arima cut him down. He surfaced again at Anteiku, taking in Ken Kaneki, feeding the half-ghoul and teaching him that he belonged to two worlds rather than none.

When the CCG stormed Anteiku, Yoshimura entered his kakuja form and held off wave after wave of investigators before Yukinori Shinohara, Juuzou Suzuya, Kousuke Houji, and Koori Ui finally brought him down. As they celebrated, the genuine One-Eyed Owl, Eto herself, tore through the squad, swallowed her wounded father, and carried him off. Captured afterward, he was suspended in a tank so his kakuhou could be harvested for the Owl-series experiments that turned Seidou Takizawa and Koutarou Amon into one-eyed ghouls. So much of him was drained over the years that nothing remained to regenerate, and he is understood to have died.