Chapter 3: Worst

Touka picks up on the fact that only a single one of Kaneki's eyes has turned red, and his refusal to touch the severed hand tells her the rest. She reasons that he was never devoured, which links him back to Rize Kamishiro. A ringtone jolts Kaneki out of his daze, and he heads home to turn in, playing back a voice message in which Hideyoshi Nagachika offers the class notes he skipped and reminds him of Sen Takatsuki's signing at a bookshop.

When Kaneki reaches the store, the event has already wrapped up, so he starts back. His craving for human flesh returns on the way, and he catches himself sizing up the strangers passing by. He ducks into a public restroom, stares at his altered eye, then smashes the mirror in a fury; the cut on his hand seals itself almost at once.

At home he draws a parallel between his plight and The Black Goat's Egg, a story whose protagonist is the son of a serial murderer. Convinced that Rize's organs were placed inside him, he tries to cut them out, but the kitchen knife only bends. Overwhelmed by hunger and the temptation to feed, he goes to Anteiku and asks Touka for help, calling his existence unbearable.

Touka refuses and taunts him, telling him he is now something between human and ghoul, and demanding he describe how human food tastes. She spells out the misery of ghoul life, the constant hunt by investigators and rival ghouls, notes she was born to it, and tells him to end things himself. Yoshimura interrupts, overruling her objection by citing Anteiku's duty to aid its own kind, then leads Kaneki to an underground room and hands him a small parcel of meat.

Touka deduces Kaneki's connection to Rize from his half-red gaze and his revulsion at eating. Kaneki tests and fails to reverse his condition, bending a knife while trying to remove the transplanted organs. His hunger becomes unbearable enough that he seeks out Anteiku for the first time as a desperate ghoul.

Yoshimura formally extends help under the cafe's policy of protecting other ghouls, giving Kaneki his first supply of human meat in the shop's hidden storeroom.

The chapter marks the start of Kaneki's ties to Anteiku and establishes Yoshimura as a guiding figure willing to shelter him. Touka's speech lays out the harsh rules of ghoul survival that shape the rest of the story. Hide's voicemail also plants the recurring thread of Sen Takatsuki, Kaneki's favorite author.