Most Tokyo Ghoul artwork comes down to three things: a red eye on a black ground, a mask with a zipper for a mouth, and a tangle of red limbs that are not arms. Each has a precise meaning in the story, and the meaning is mostly biological. Ghouls here are a species with an organ humans lack, and almost everything printed on a garment is that organ doing something.
Here is what the kagune types, the mask, the one-eyed ghoul and the centipede are, and where each turns up across our Tokyo Ghoul collection.
Ghouls, RC cells and the red eye
A ghoul looks human, ages like a human and passes through a crowd unnoticed. The differences are internal. Ghoul bodies carry a far higher concentration of RC cells, a fluid-like cell humans also have in small amounts, and those cells account for everything else: skin ordinary blades cannot cut, several times a human's strength, and a diet limited to human flesh. Ordinary food tastes foul and cannot be digested. The one thing the two species can share is coffee, which is why the story's ghoul refuge is a café.
The red eye is the kakugan. When a ghoul's RC cells activate, the white of the eye turns black and the iris red, with veins spreading toward the temple. It happens involuntarily under hunger or stress. The humans hunting them are the CCG, investigators the ghouls call doves, whose weapons are made from the organs of dead ghouls.
The four kagune types
The organ that stores RC cells is the kakuhou, and when a ghoul releases those cells through the skin they harden into a kagune. There are four types, named for where the kakuhou sits, each with a built-in weakness.
Ukaku grows from the shoulders as wing-like sheets that fire hardened shards: fast and long-ranged, but it burns through RC cells quickly. Koukaku grows from below the shoulder blade, the hardest and slowest of the four, a shield or a blade. Rinkaku grows from the lower back as tentacle-like limbs, the strongest raw attack and the fastest to regenerate, but brittle. Bikaku grows from the tailbone as a tail, balanced in everything and specialized in nothing.
The series arranges them in a loop: ukaku beats bikaku, bikaku beats rinkaku, rinkaku beats koukaku, koukaku beats ukaku. Kaneki's is rinkaku, which is why the red limbs erupting from his back in the artwork are tentacles rather than wings or a tail.
Ours are on the Red Bloom tee, spreading out behind him, and as sharper shards under his name in kanji on the Kagune King two-sided tee and the Kagune Shards knitted sweater. The Underworld tee and the Shard zip-up wrap the kagune around the series title instead.
Kagune pieces
The mask
Ghouls wear masks for one reason: the CCG works from faces. An investigator who sees a ghoul feed can identify them later on the street, so a ghoul who hunts covers their face, and the CCG ends up naming ghouls after their masks.
Kaneki's is made by Uta, a ghoul who runs a mask studio: black leather, a zipper across the mouth that opens to bare a row of teeth, and an eyepatch on the opposite side to the medical patch Kaneki wears by day. In daylight the patch hides the ghoul eye. In the mask, the ghoul eye is the one that shows. The CCG files him as Eyepatch.
The mask is the most-printed image in the collection because it is the most legible: a black shape, a red eye, a line of teeth. It is on the One-Eyed Ghoul tee with the series title in kanji, the back of the Ken One-Eyed Ghoul hoodie, the Ken One-Eyed Ghoul tee, and in gray on the Haunting Rebirth tee.
Mask pieces
The one-eyed ghoul
A one-eyed ghoul is half human and half ghoul, and the name is literal: the kakugan appears in one eye only. Natural one-eyed ghouls, born to a ghoul and a human, are so rare most ghouls treat them as a rumor. Kaneki is not one. He was a human student until a steel beam fell on him and the ghoul he was with, and the surgeon who treated him, Dr. Kanou, transplanted her kakuhou into his body. He woke up with her rinkaku, her hunger and one red eye.
The story treats the hybrid as stronger than either parent species, which is why the title of One-Eyed King carries the weight it does: the name for the ghoul who could unite the rest. The title is on the One-Eyed King tee; the single red eye is the detail every other Kaneki piece turns on.
One-eyed pieces
The centipede and a thousand minus seven
The white hair is not a stylistic choice. Kaneki starts the series with black hair, and it turns white over the ten days he spends as a prisoner of Yamori, a ghoul the CCG calls Jason. Yamori has a habit learned from his own torturer: counting down from a thousand in sevens to stay lucid. He makes Kaneki do the same, until it is Kaneki who is counting.
The centipede comes from the same room, and it becomes the name the CCG gives Kaneki afterward: a ghoul who eats other ghouls develops a kakuja, an armored second stage of the kagune, and Kaneki's incomplete kakuja takes the segmented shape of the thing that was put in his ear.
The countdown is on the Is What Torture tee, which prints the scene in the chair. The centipede is worked into the artwork on the Silent Ghoul tee and the Crimson Bloom tee, crawling out from behind the figure among the butterflies.
The red spider lily
The red flower that keeps appearing around Kaneki is the red spider lily, higanbana in Japanese. It blooms around the autumn equinox, is planted at graves, and has long been read as a flower of death and separation. Tokyo Ghoul uses it exactly that way: the field where Kaneki confronts the ghoul whose organ he carries is a field of red spider lilies, and it is where he stops being the person he was.
It prints well for the same reason the mask does: a red shape that reads as itself at any size. It carries the Flower of Separation tee, growing between two thorned wings, and runs across the Spider Lily phone case.
Spider lily pieces
How this translates onto cloth
Tokyo Ghoul is a two-color story on the page, black and red, which is why it survives the move to a garment better than most series: a red eye, flower or kagune on a black ground reads from across a room. The kanji on several pieces are real names: Kaneki's own on the Kagune King tee and the knitted sweater, and the series title on the One-Eyed Ghoul tee.
Most of the collection is garment-washed cotton with a bonded matte print, so the reds sit flat rather than shining. The knitted sweater is a jacquard knit, the artwork worked into the cloth rather than printed on it. Where a design sits varies and is stated on each product page.
Measurements for every size are on the sizing page, and the whole set is in the Tokyo Ghoul collection.
Read next: Chainsaw Man's devils and contracts, or Bleach's bankai and hollows.
Torazen designs are independent fan-inspired work — not affiliated with or endorsed by the rights holders. Character and series names are used to describe what the artwork refers to.