Chapter 1: Remake

The chapter opens on a familiar idea: mankind sits atop the food chain, yet creatures wearing human faces and crimson eyes quietly feed on people. These predators are the ghouls. Over at the coffee house Anteiku, a broadcast reports a string of killings across the 20th Ward, all pinned on one culprit.

Ken Kaneki sits with his friend Hideyoshi Nagachika, who ribs him about being an easy meal for any ghoul given his frail, studious nature. When Kaneki wonders aloud whether such beings are even real, Hide insists they blend seamlessly into ordinary life and hints that one lurks nearby. Kaneki briefly suspects Hide is calling him a ghoul, but his friend just laughs it off.

Hide surprises the waitress Touka Kirishima by bluntly asking whether she is single and what she is called, sending her hurrying away. He then reminds Kaneki that they came so he could meet the girl Kaneki secretly likes. Before Kaneki can name her, Rize Kamishiro strolls in and stops him short. Hide teases that Kaneki stands no chance with her, though Kaneki clings to the fact that Rize once returned his smile. Hide soon leaves for his shift.

Lingering over thoughts of Rize, Kaneki reaches for a copy of Sen Takatsuki's novel The Black Goat's Egg at the very moment she does the same. Later, Kaneki excitedly tells Hide he has landed a date and frets over what to wear. The outing takes them from a bookshop to a meal, where the two swap favorite passages from the stories they love and Rize mentions the author's writing troubles. Kaneki nervously notices she leaves her sandwich untouched, and she claims to be full.

Reluctant to part, Kaneki persuades Rize to keep walking with him so their conversation can continue. He confides that reading became his refuge after his father died young, since the books left behind were his only link to the man, and that his mother's death left him in his aunt's care. Rize says she understands, describing a troubled home she fled and a difficult father. Then she leans in and sinks her teeth into him, her ghoul eye exposed, admitting she had been dying to know his flavor. She binds his legs with her kagune, drives it through his stomach, and hurls him aside. As she closes in for the kill, falling steel beams crush her instead, and passersby summon help.

Surgeons rush to graft Rize's organs into the dying Kaneki, brushing past her family's objections to keep him alive. He wakes with a single ghoul eye, his old life gone.

Kaneki and Rize connect over a shared love of literature and arrange the date that seals his fate. Rize reveals herself as a ghoul mid-meal and attacks, only to be flattened by a collapse of steel beams at a construction site. Doctors transplant her kakuhou into Kaneki without proper consent, and he awakens as an artificial half ghoul, the tragedy that launches the whole story.

This installment is a special anniversary retelling rather than a standard chapter, printed in Men's NON-NO on September 10, 2016, to celebrate the manga reaching its fifth year. It runs 42 pages and carries chapter number 001-2, sitting alongside the original opening.

The remake nods to real authors through mentions of figures such as Osamu Dazai and Mori Ougai, keeps the fictional novelist Sen Takatsuki and her book The Black Goat's Egg in play, and slips in a brief cameo by Souta.