Tragedy strikes when Kaneki and Rize are involved in a traffic accident. Rize is killed, but not before she reveals to Kaneki that she is a ghoul. In a desperate attempt to save Kaneki, she injects her ghoul blood into his body.
The episode opens with a prologue that explains the existence of ghouls in Tokyo. We see a glimpse of their secret world, hidden from humans. tokyo ghoul season 1 ep 1
The episode opens by establishing the dark, gritty atmosphere of modern Tokyo, a city plagued by "Ghouls"—creatures that look exactly like humans but survive by eating human flesh. We are introduced to , a shy, bookish college student who prefers the world of literature to social interaction. While dining at a café called Anteiku with his confident best friend, Hideyoshi Nagachika (Hide) , Kaneki’s attention is captured by a beautiful woman reading the same novel by his favorite author, Takatsuki. Tragedy strikes when Kaneki and Rize are involved
Episode 1 is primarily about the destruction of the self. Kaneki identifies as a human, a reader, and a quiet student. In the span of a night, his biology is violated, and his dietary needs are inverted. The episode asks the question: If you can no longer eat human food, are you still human? The episode opens with a prologue that explains
The coffee shop, Anteiku, smelled of roasted beans and old wood. To Ken Kaneki, a gentle-eyed freshman at Kamii University, it smelled like salvation. It was the scent of normalcy, a brief reprieve from the nagging loneliness that had followed him like a second shadow since his mother died. He lived in a world of books, of the tragic poetry of Takatsuki Sen, whose protagonist’s alienation mirrored his own. The world, he believed, was a stage for quiet, unremarkable tragedies. He was about to learn how spectacularly wrong he was.
Uta smiled, a knowing, sad smile. “Don’t worry. There are other ways. Come with us. There’s a coffee shop in the 20th Ward called Anteiku. The owner… he likes strays.”
Kaneki lay in a pool of cooling blood—Rize’s blood. It soaked through his clothes, matted his hair, filled his mouth and nose with its metallic, nauseating sweetness. He tried to crawl, but his body wouldn’t move. He was drowning in her. And as the ambulance lights painted the scene in strobes of red and white, he lost consciousness, his last thought a strange, detached one: The room… I think I just walked into a much darker room.