Tokyo Ghoul:re Chapter 57: Regretting Smile

Being Tsukiyama is suffering.

Impression

Are we killing off a character per chapter now, Ishida? It was Kanae this week, but if we look back at the chapters we see Eto, Shirazu and Haise all experience some sort of ‘death’ in reverse order. I wonder what Kaneki was thinking when he threw Tsukiyama off the roof? Is this tendency to chuck his enemies off the top of buildings an acquired trait from what Kanae did to him in his last moments as Haise? For one, I can definitely see Kaneki not caring about Tsukiyama at all – in the end, they were acquaintances and Kaneki never reciprocated the emotions Tsukiyama felt for him. But at the same time, Tsukiyama was still his trusted comrade (to an extent) and I can’t imagine Kaneki just leaving him to die. If he’s going to conduct a Cochlea jailbreak at some point, wouldn’t it be safer to capture Tsukiyama and claim ownership of him? Or did he think that the CCG would want him dead – making it a better option to throw him off and hope he survives? Would Ui have killed him on the spot? I think he glanced at Kanae slightly before doing it, so he might have been baiting Kanae to catch Tsukiyama and sacrifice herself for his sake – and he doesn’t give a fuck about Kanae, I’m sure of that.

It’s also a little bit funny that Kanae was the one who warned Haise he would die if she dropped him from this height, and in the end it was Kaneki who baited her into jumping off herself to save a falling Tsukiyama. It was a sad scene, but I also laughed. Sorry.

What will Tsukiyama do now? In retrospect, his entire character has been suffering. He’s not worse off than Kaneki, but given what this arc has taught us about him it’s been pretty bad. He grew up all alone, and if we don’t count his servants he has a single friend, Hori Chie. He almost dies after trying to eat Kaneki, and despite managing to get into his group of ghouls he’s trusted by nobody. Kaneki turns suicidal and tries to kill himself, and Tsukiyama falls into a deep depression. Even when he learns Kaneki is alive, Haise gives no fucks about him and none of his former friends want to help him recover his memories as Kaneki. Then his servants start getting tortured and killed one by one. As the Tsukiyama heir he becomes the key target of the largest CCG operation since the Anteiku raid. His dad drugs him. He loses all his family and friends as they’re all slaughtered mercilessly as he runs away. Matsumae dies. His helicopter blows up. He’s forced to fight Haise, who fucks him over before fucking up his most devoted servant who was tortured, had their eyes and mouth sewn shut and was secretly in love with him. Haise fucks him over again, before throwing him off a skyscraper. That servant cushions his fall and dies instead of him. Tsukiyama is now on the run, wanted by the CCG, homeless and penniless. His family is dead. He has no friends. He lost all his money and influence. The only ones who will help him now are maybe :re and Hori Chie, who will laugh at him and take pictures of him before offering to buy him a coffee.

As for Urie, I’m a little disappointed to learn that he hasn’t changed as much as I thought he did. It’s not that his edginess is gone, but rather that it’s just been transferred elsewhere as the Qs are now within his category of ‘things he cares about’, which previously only included ‘promotions’ and ‘himself’. How was it Kaneki’s fault that Shirazu died? He wasn’t climbing the stairs or watching the operation from a safe location, he was in deep shit himself. What was he supposed to do? What did Urie want him to say? “Oh I’m sorry Promotion-kun, I should have defeated the three S-rank, SS-rank and SSS-rank ghouls I was fighting on the roof faster so I could come downstairs and help you beat that animated corpse controlled by my favourite author.”

At any rate, creating an awkward atmosphere between him and the squad he used to mentor is the least of what he’ll do to the CCG from now on, because it looks like that Cochlea arc really is about to occur. At long last, my darling Hinami will finally be broken out of jail, and Kaneki will leave the CCG after wrecking havoc and triggering an obligatory full-page watercolour of Saiko: “I believe he will return to CCG”. That might be a little too predictable actually, but I do hope best girl is rescued. A lot will depend on what the CCG do with Haise now that he’s an Associate Special-Class. I suspect Akira won’t be able to override him for rights against Hinami now that they’re the same rank, but in general ‘Haise’s’ movements will depend very much on who he gets partnered with. If it’s Ui – forget it, any action will have to be taken over his dead body. It might be someone fun like Juuzou or a little daunting like Arima, but I suspect it’ll be someone who is slightly lower in rank than him, but who is still good enough to keep up with him. Someone who is, say, Rank 1, and has recently lost his own Associate Special-Class partner in a recent operation. Someone like… Furuta.

Oh shit.

-E. T. O. (Exterminate Tsukiyama Operation) arc end-