Ishida’s afterword part 5

Please feel to correct me if there are any mistakes. Ishida’s handwriting is hard to read at times so I may have gotten some words wrong. (source of the afterword)

Edit 1: Proofread for grammar and wording.

Lastly

I’m truly glad that I was able to finish Tokyo Ghoul.

Once I let go of it, I was able to think a lot about what I had done by drawing this work. I thought a lot about myself, being creative, and the creative industry. I was also able to meet lots of great people.

During the last half year, I really enjoyed drawing Tokyo Ghoul. I discovered and learned to appreciate many things.

“Why am I drawing manga?”

If I ask myself that now, my answer would be: “Because it was necessary.”

Tokyo Ghoul is a crude, unpolished work, but I love it nonetheless.

Those who have been involved with the series, those who have been reading the series. I have nothing but gratitude to whoever is reading this sentence right now.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

While I’m At It

This is a diary entry I wrote 9 years ago. I discovered it recently.

I want to bring this immature young man out here and bring shame upon him.

Amen to myself of 9 years past.

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Ishida’s afterword part 4

Please feel to correct me if there are any mistakes. (source of the afterword)

Edit 1: Proofread for grammar and wording.

Heading to Tokyo

After studying manga and heading to Tokyo, I received an assistant position and a referral from Matsuo-san, who was in charge.

For some time I gratefully worked under Hara Yasuhisa-sensei of Kingdom.

I really was a useless assistant and I only caused trouble, but I learned many things under his tutelage.

I remember receiving a huge shock and being impacted by his flaming passion the first time I saw a manuscript drawn by a pro like him.

Hara-sensei has always been standing at the top of the magazine since then, and he is still a huge feature who supports it to this day. He is truly amazing, and I absolutely respect him.

Things That Made Me Happy

I’ve only listed hardships, but there were plenty of good things that happened as well.

I was able to request songs from my favourite artists for the anime:

And for :re,

It brings back memories when I listen to them even now. They are very precious songs to me.

Through the Hisoka spinoff project for HUNTER X HUNTER, I was able to meet and talk with Togashi Yoshihiro-sensei. I have wonderful memories of the experience.

Togashi really is a cool and wonderful person.

“I’m always coming up with storyboards,” he’d say, demonstrating it while sprawled on the bare floor, which I would watch while kneeling.

During those times I couldn’t tell whether this was reality or just a dream.

Before we met he gave me a letter that had a HUNTER X HUNTER storyboard written on one side, and it was the storyboard for chapter 351 featuring Hisoka vs. Chrollo. I can’t believe he did something so considerate for me, I thought, deeply touched.

To this day I still look back on it whenever I need courage. It’s an heirloom to me.

...it gives me pure happiness that I could get readers to enjoy themselves. Even though drawing for me was tough, if there’s someone out there who can take pleasure in it I can do my best.

It may seem like lip service, but that is the best reward and means just about everything to me.

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Ishida’s afterword part 3

Please feel to correct me if there are any mistakes. (source of the afterword)

Edit 1: Proofread for grammar and wording.

My Dream Back in Elementary School

I remember writing “gymnast” for this prompt in the school anthology.

From when I was born up until the first year of junior high, I was very thick and so overweight that I looked like a pig, but I had fairly good motor skills.

Mat competition and horizontal bar were my forte, and I also did backflips.

Though in reality I had no desire to become a gymnast. For some reason I thought that I’d feel guilty if I wrote that my dream was to be a mangaka.

My Junior High School Days

These were at most memories from my junior high school days, but I found it easier to study back then. My parents kept nagging at me to study and study, so I was studious so I wouldn’t have to hear the nagging.

I liked English, so when I was in my second year of junior high I took the grade 2 English proficiency exam, which was the highlight of those days. (Apart from that I don’t really understand English that well.)

My parents scolded me as my grades dropped. I didn’t want to be reprimanded again and so I kept studying.

When I got the highest grade in the school, I happily announced it to my father and he said, “Keep it up for next time.”

Looking back on that, that might’ve been his way of telling me that I did a good job, but back then I thought, “There’s no point even if I do my best,” and so I lost all meaning in studying.

Secondary Education Moratorium Period

I wanted to get away from my parents, so I applied for schools that had dormitories.

I enjoyed the dorm life and I mainly spent my time just playing games.

My grades were beyond horrible, and I was at the bottom of my class. The content I studied in school just didn’t hold my interest.

I also began drawing via the Internet. Although I started out by drawing with a mouse, I bought a pen tablet and began drawing colour illustrations on my PC.

Finding a Job

I began going around looking for jobs, but I ended up not doing anything because there wasn’t any job that I wanted to do.

The only jobs I could apply for required expertise that you could only learn in school, but because I hadn’t been interested in the content in school back then, it was impossible for me to apply.

Left all alone, I fretted over what I should do.

I fought a lot with my parents.

In the end, after being screamed at by my father, I gave up and agreed to go job hunting. My memory is a bit hazy, but on that occasion I seem to have told him, “I’m dead.”

I wonder if it was those words that broke me, because it eventually allowed me to choose a path other than finding employment.

The path that came to mind at the time was becoming a mangaka.

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Ishida’s afterword part 2

Please feel to correct me if there are any mistakes. (source of the afterword)

Edit 1: Proofread for grammar and fluidity.

My Childhood

My family moved a lot due to my father’s work.

By sixth grade of elementary school I’d lived in Tokushima, Tokyo, Kanagawa, Saga and Fukuoka. I even lived in Taiwan when I was in kindergarten.

It was an endless cycle of making friends and parting ways from them, so I never developed any childhood or close friendships.

My relationship with my family grew stronger as a result, but because my father was so strict my home felt incredibly cramped to me.

I liked playing games when my father wasn’t around. Drawing wasn’t so bad either.

Drawing

It was sometime around first grade of elementary school that I’d play with my older sister by drawing pictures.

We’d assemble bundles of paper, and draw fantastical manga about going on adventures and involving dragons and swords.

Eventually I wanted the real professional tools. If you studied with Shinken Seminar* at the time, you could receive achievement points and save them up for a free gift. Knowing that I could exchange those points for a become-a-mangaka set, I worked hard to save up those points.

I think it took several months to save up because the set was expensive point-wise and of good quality.

I finally saved up the points, and once I obtained the mangaka set I grasped the G pen for the first time in my life.

When I dipped the pen in ink and drew a line on the stiff Kent paper, I got the feeling that I had opened a forbidden door.

For a little while I spent time feeling like I was a mangaka, when one day my hand slipped and spilled ink on the tatami mat.

I watched the scene despondently, wondering why my exasperated mother was wiping the spilled ink off the mat with steaming hot rice (is it that good at absorbing things?).

I couldn’t endure it, and so I sealed the mangaka set. I wouldn’t hold a pen again for more than ten years after that incident.

Who knows, if I hadn’t spilled ink at that time, I might have become a super genius mangaka...

Note: Shinken Seminar (進研ゼミ) is an educational correspondence program run by Benesse.

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Ishida’s afterword part 1

Please feel to correct me if there are any mistakes. (source of the afterword)

Edit 1: Correction made about volume 7. Ishida was referring to how starting from OG vol. 7, he began pushing himself more and more. Apologies for the confusion.

Edit 2: Missed a couple lines, so I’ve added them in. Also corrected for grammar and fluidity.

I’ve already handed in the final manuscript, and I’m now writing this letter.

I would’ve written 4-komas at the end of the volume as usual, but I had a hard time writing “what comes afterwards” in such a format, so I thought that I would write an afterword instead.

Preface

Tokyo Ghoul began its serialization in September of 2011.

7 years have passed since then. My life has revolved around chasing the deadline, week after week.

I felt that if I took a break I wouldn’t be able to bring myself to draw again, so I refused to give myself a break.

Now that the series has ended, I’m finally living a life where I haven’t had a deadline looming over me for the first time in 7 years.

I wonder how I used to spend my time in the past.

If I want to be frank about how I currently feel, should I say it feels...liberating?

Tokyo Ghoul has been something that was intimately intertwined with my life, something that dominated my time and emotions, and something that changed my relationships with other people.

There was good that came with it, but oftentimes there was more bad than good.

Because of this, I felt like I was finally being released from a cage after being trapped in it for so long.

“But it’s just manga. There’s no reason for you to be pressured so much by it,” people may say with a laugh, but to me manga has always been by my side as a huge obstacle.

From the original volume 7 onwards, my stance regarding the manga changed.

I took on impossible amounts of work to try to push myself.

I cast away all sorts of things from my life, and poured all of my time into work.

I think it was because I was trying to get closer to Kaneki who’s been subjected to torture.

I’ve developed complications in my body.

I was scared at first. But after seeing all sorts of symptoms show up every few months, I resigned myself to the fact that this was the kind of body I had.

The most striking part to me was that I lost my sense of taste.

No matter what I ate, everything would taste the same. Even though the symptoms were different, I felt like I’d turned into a ghoul.

I was surprised by to what extent the human spirit is tied to the body.

There may be some readers who are disappointed by this, but I haven’t thought of drawing Tokyo Ghoul itself as fun. I hate working.

“Why am I drawing manga?”

These doubts grew ever more in my mind.

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Text accompanying Kaneki’s illustration from vol. 15

When I'm hiding something, I end up touching my chin.

When Hide is thinking about something, he puts his hand on his cheek. Haise imitates that and touches his cheek.

Akira-san braids her hair so that she can remember her parents.

Whenever Urie-kun paused, he was thinking about something. When Mutsuki-kun grabs the hem of his shirt, he shuts away his own feelings.

Saiko-chan often cried when she thought about her mother. Shirazu-kun said that he wanted to go on a motorcycle trip with his sister.

When I saw Touka-chan's true feelings, she looked straight at me with her right eye.

(source)

Tokyo Ghoul:re volume 15 omakes part 2 (courtesy to TG_Hub for the scans). I’m not 100% confident about Kimi’s lines, so if you find anything wrong, please let me know! I’ve also compiled the omakes here for easier accessibility.

Enjoy!

Edit: Sorry! Forgot to include a line in the “Girlfriend” omake. Sorry for the trouble!

Tokyo Ghoul:re volume 15 omake part 1 (courtesy to TG_Hub for the scans).

Title: Life is beautiful

Title: Perfectly great service/Openly great service

Title: Girlfriend

Title: Kinda awkward

Title: You do the housework

Title: It’s fun.

Volume 14 bio

Akihiro Kanou

Born into a family of medical professionals, Kanou’s father was the third generation of practicing physicians. Aiming to become a doctor just like his father, he enrolled in the Faculty of Medicine at Teihou University, and graduated with excellent grades.

In his university days, Kanou was a member of the Ghoul Research Society.

After Kanou graduated he went to Germany, and joined the GFG (Ghoul Forschung Gesellschaft) (Ghoul Research Association). He worked for three years under the Adam Mann* Laboratory, and his research was focused on RC cell differentation, and the creation of complex structures by RC cells.

He then returned to Japan, and went to work for the CCG. As a doctor, Kanou was involved in the extraction of kakuhou and the practical application of these extracted kakuhou into quinques.

During his time there, Kanou was invited to the Sunlit Society, a research group that was under the secret jurisdiction of the Washuus. He conducted certain research involving ghouls. After, he left the bureau at the same time he resigned from that research group.

After leaving the bureau, he took over Kanou General Hospital. He continued his independent research until the day he met Furuta Nimura.

* I don’t know if Adamman (Adammahn, Adam Mahn?) is the correct spelling, but the kana is アダムマン.

Please let me know if there are any corrections I need to make.

EDIT: SORRY I MEANT KAKUHOU NOT KAGUNE.

EDIT 2: A German speaker has told me that it’s most likely Adam Mann.

Last part of the Tokyo Ghoul:re volume 14 omakes (scans from TG_Hub). You can read parts 1 and 2 here!