Tragedy

A report of trespassers at the 20th Ward's Aqua Building sends the CCG rushing in on the assumption that ghouls are involved. Inside, a nude female ghoul is gorging on a heap of bodies when a masked man arrives with orders to bring her in. Their standoff ends with her snatching his pliers and hurling them from a rooftop, leaving him seething.

The following day, Kaneki relaxes at the café Anteiku with his lifelong friend Hide as coverage of the incident plays nearby. Hide needles him over his shyness and flags down a waitress, Touka Kirishima, but Kaneki's attention locks onto Rize Kamishiro the moment she walks in. The two turn out to be reading the same novel, and a bookstore date is soon arranged. Over dinner Rize barely touches her food, claiming she is dieting, and afterward she confides that the nearby ghoul killings frighten her, prompting Kaneki to walk her home.

The stroll turns lethal. Rize embraces him, bites into his shoulder, and unleashes her kagune, driving him into a construction site and running him through. Before she can eat, a collapse of steel beams crushes her instead. Kaneki survives only because Rize's organs are transplanted into him at the hospital, an operation that leaves one eye shifting to the black-and-red kakugan without his knowledge.

Discharged and unsettled, Kaneki finds that food has become revolting; everything he forces down comes straight back up. Hunger eventually overrides him on the street, filling his head with cravings for human flesh. He stumbles onto a ghoul named Kazuo Yoshida feeding on a corpse, only for Nishiki Nishio to kill Yoshida and turn on him for intruding. Touka steps in, drives Nishiki off, and, exasperated by Kaneki's frantic denials that he is now a ghoul, shoves meat into his mouth.

Rize Kamishiro is fatally pinned by falling steel beams after she attacks Kaneki, and her organs are grafted into him during surgery. Kaneki's transformation begins as his appetite and one eye change. Nishiki Nishio kills Kazuo Yoshida and attacks Kaneki before Touka Kirishima intervenes and reveals the reality of ghouls to him.

The episode draws its material from the first five chapters of the manga. Tokyo Ghoul made its Japanese broadcast debut on July 4, 2014, and its North American premiere followed on Adult Swim's Toonami block on March 25, 2017.