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.
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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