Chapter 1

A narrator frames the world's food chain, noting that below humanity sit predators who feed on people: ghouls. Ken Kaneki and his friend Hideyoshi Nagachika trade jokes about the creatures at the coffee shop Anteiku, where a broadcast reports human remains discovered alongside traces of an eater species. Hide teases his scrawny, book-loving friend, then needles him over the shop's pretty waitress, Touka Kirishima, before heading off to work. Kaneki's real fixation is Rize Kamishiro, an elegant regular who happens to be reading the same Sen Takatsuki novel he adores. When she stumbles and drops her book, the two fall into conversation.

Kaneki and Rize agree to a bookshop date, and afterward she coaxes him into a longer walk by claiming the recent killings frighten her. On a quiet street she drops the act, admitting she has been watching him just as he watched her, then sinks her kagune into him and reveals herself as the very predator the news described. She toys with her prey and tears open his abdomen, but as she closes in for the kill a load of steel beams crashes down from above, crushing her and gravely wounding him. Passersby summon an ambulance. At the hospital, surgeons transplant Rize's organs into the dying Kaneki to save him. When he wakes, one eye has darkened into the black-and-red stare of a ghoul.

Titled Tragedy, this is the first chapter of the Tokyo Ghoul manga and sets up the transplant that turns Kaneki into a one-eyed ghoul. The falling girders that kill Rize come to be known as the steel beam incident, and the operation that reshapes Kaneki takes place at Kanou General Hospital.