I have already seen some brief posts about this, and maybe someone has even written a longer post on this topic by now. (I can’t say for sure since I’ve mostly avoided Tumblr after the chapter came out.) Anyway, this post might be redundant, but I feel like talking about Arima and the short story by Kafka that he favored the most because it has been on my mind all day.
When Arima mentioned in chapter 8 that he was pleased with “A Crossbreed” by Franz Kafka, we didn’t know much about his backstory yet, so the person who fit the role of the crossbreed best was Haise. As far as I can remember, people generally thought that it would just be Ishida’s way to give us insight into the relationship between Haise and Arima, but the mistake we made is that we didn’t take Arima’s feelings into account, even though he is the one who appreciated this short story so much.
Arima has been a mystery all this time. It was so hard to guess what he was feeling, some even questioned if he felt anything at all, but now he finally shared his feelings with someone dear to him. And it turns out that cold, stoic Arima, who seemingly took the lives of ghouls without mercy, has been feeling intensively all this time. He has been suffering his whole life, being born as a half-human, nothing but a failed experiment. He was exploited as a child soldier, forced to kill again and again, and he couldn’t take it. When Arima read “A Crossbreed”, he didn’t see Haise as the crossbreed and himself as its owner. Instead, the character he related to was the crossbreed itself.
And just the same way, he related to Kaneki. They are both crossbreeds, both thrown into a life that they never chose, both waiting for death as salvation. Arima helped Kaneki survive while he was on the brink of death in Cochlea, he brought him books and blankets, he helped him find a new name, and he was always happy to spend time with him. Arima truly loved Kaneki, and he wanted him to live. With Kaneki, he finally managed to save a life instead of taking it.
Arima wasn’t given a choice in his life. He was forced to take lives, and he hated it. He hated it so much that he wanted to die, because Arima wasn’t cold at all. No, Arima was gentle.
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