Manga / Choujin X

Over 50 years have passed since the establishment of autonomous regions began within the world's nations, an outcome initiated from the resulting chaos brought about by "Choujin," individuals with supernatural powers.

The current year is 1998. A rather unremarkable high school student by the name of Tokio Kurohara plays sidekick to his much more accomplished and popular childhood friend, Azuma Higashi, as the two participate in local heroic endeavors. Unfortunately for Tokio's case, participation generally involves him sitting out on the sidelines as support for Azuma and his talents. Despite this, Tokio still finds fulfillment living vicariously through his bestfriend.

One day, a plane with black smoke billowing out is seen crashing behind the hills. Reports claim the crash to be a terrorist attack possibly caused by a Choujin. However, the plane itself is hardly damaged and 200 passengers managed to survive the ordeal. After volunteering to help with the accident, Tokio and Azuma head back home when they're suddenly attacked by a delinquent whom they've dealt with days prior. The only problem—this person happens to be a Choujn now and is out for blood. In a desperate decision, the two resolve themselves to becoming Choujin; their only chance at survival. Armed with new found powers, Tokio is now brought to the forefront of action as he attempts to navigate the world of Choujin.

Choujin X is an ongoing manga series written and illustrated by Sui Ishida of Tokyo Ghoul fame. It was published in Shueisha's Tonari no Young Jump website on May 10, 2021, and then later in Shueisha's Weekly Young Jump magazine on October 14, 2021. The series has also been simultaneously released by Viz Media and Manga Plus.

This work contains examples of:

• The Ace: Azuma is shown to have excellent physical and mental abilities, and to be popular at school.
• Affably Evil: Ricardo might be an infamous criminal, but that doesn't mean he can't polite. When a kidnapped Tokio is hungry, Ricardo buys a pizza and offer him to eat.
• Anachronism Stew:
  • Tokio's and Ely's Choujin registration card shows they were issued on Showa 73 (1998). In real life however, the showa era ended in 1989 due to the emperor's passing.
  • Handheld technology has advanced to the point that smartphones are cards in size and shape, much further than the real world had in 1998, and are combined with credit cards in their usage, at least in big cities.
• Animal Motif:
  • Tokio compares Azuma to a lion, early on, noting his fierceness and nobility.
  • Tokio himself is compared to a vulture for always tagging along with Azuma and picking up his proverbial scraps. He admires his friend enough to have been pleased by the comparison, at least until Azuma yells at him to start thinking for himself.
• Arc Symbol: The six-pointed star is a recurring symbol throughout the story, implicitly as a sign of impending disaster.
• Arch-Nemesis: Chandra Hume quickly becomes one to Ely, with him being the one who murdered the friendly old lady she was talking to on the plane as well as the boy she borrowed the Roller-B from.
• Badass Adorable: Ely is very badass and very adorable. She's a cute, goofy country bumpkin, yet she's also headstrong, competent, confident, and genuinely heroic.
• Blatant Lies: After Ely and Tokio catch Shiozaki illegally using his Choujin powers to wreck and rob a vending machine that wouldn't take his money, he claims that he has a Class-A registration and that he was doing an investigation on soda pop that he can't explain to them. Neither believe him, though it does get Ely interested in getting a Class-A license for the money she'd make on investigations.
• Cain and Abel: Sandek is an heroic member of Yamato Mori. His brother Batista aka the Pharmacist is a villainous member of Tower of Mourning, who are Well-Intentioned Extremist. Naturally, when the two groups clashed, they fought agaisnt each other.
• Chekhov's Gun: During Tokio's "date" with Nari at the abandoned zoo it's shown that the hyena is missing from its cage, though the hyena appears in the story later on.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Sora Siruha is first shown in the flashback at the start of chapter 26.1, seemingly to give a bit of exposition on how Yamato Mori was founded. However, she turns out to be far more important than she first seems, as she later goes on to become Zora, the Mother of the Tower of Mourning.
• Combo Platter Powers: Zora has a lot of unrealted Choujin powers, including Flight, iron manipulation, gravity manipulation, creating a harpe, seeing the future in her dreams and creating smoke.
• Country Mouse: Ely is a farm girl from the country side.
• Create Your Own Hero: By attacking the plane she was riding on and killing multiple people before her eyes, including two who'd been very kind to her, Chandra not only empowers Ely with smoke powers to rival his own, but gives her very good reason to hate his guts. Although interestingly enough, Chandra was activelytrying to awaken people as Choujin in the attack, as he was looking for a suitable heir to Zora's powers.
• Dangerous Forbidden Technique: By injuring themselves badly and then using their willpower to force themselves to live, a Choujin can get a boost in their power and regeneration abilities.
• Depower: Chandra ends up losing his Choujin's powers after being absorbed by Ely.
• Double Meaning: In chapter 27, the audience sees a flashback to the massacre of Simon's family, in which a Nue Chimera held up the severed heads of the Kagomuras and mocked their status as "heroes." Initially the audience is lead to believe he's referring to how the Kagomuras became complacent in their powers and grew weak. Later on in chapter 49, we find out that the Kagomura clan aided Sora in carrying out her genocide in Antoland... and suddenly that line takes on an entirely different meaning.
• Double-Meaning Title: The term "choujin" can be translated to mean two different things. It can be translated to "superhuman," which is to say an individual with superpowers. It can also be translated to "Übermensch," the Nietzschen ideal of an individual who lives by their personal code as opposed to society's values. Given the superhero-esque setting and the direct references to Nietzsche, both meanings seem to be completely intentional.
• Dreaming of Things to Come: Zora can see the future in her dreams. Her first vision was seeing the memorial procession she was part of being killed by Quiem Mc Mann, the Choujin X at the time. Most of her actions in the present have for objective to prevent a calamity that would destroy Yamato as she saw in one of those dreams.
• Extra-ore-dinary:
  • Azuma's Choujin powers allows him to manipulate the iron chains around his wrist to create weapons or an armor.
  • One of the many powers of Zora is manipulating iron. She uses it to create cages to trap people, before crushing them inside.
• Emergency Transformation: With the thug they'd had an altercation with earlier pursuing them with his new Choujin powers and the intent to kill, Tokio and Azuma are forced to use the two syringes the thug had intended for his friends in order to transform into Choujin in order to save themselves.
• Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas: Even before his transformation, Johnny was a prick who was introduced harrasing a woman. Despite this, his first thoughts after getting his arms broken by Azuma is that he won't be able to buy his mom an air mattress for her bad back. His two lackeys even call him a "kinda naughty mama's boy".
• Evil Parents Want Good Kids: Ely's mother was an infamous thief, but her last wish was for Ely to not turn out like her.
• Evil Tower of Ominousness: Throughout the series, a strange smoke-spewing tower can be seen in the middle of Yamato. It turns out to be the headquarters of Mother Zora, the series' main antagonist and the Choujin X of the previous generation.
• Fake-Out Opening: Chapter 1 starts off in a plane with Ely conversing about her dreams for the future with another passenger, when suddenly Chandra sets fire to everyone within the cabin. The scene then cuts away to the main protagonist, Tokio, as he's sitting in class looking up at the plane flying above.
• Flight:
  • Ely's smoke powers let her fly, though she's lacking in control.
  • Tokio in Full Beastification can fly as well, due to being a vulture Choujin. He later leans how to only create wings to fly even in Partial Beastification.
  • One of the many powers of Zora is the abuility to create wings and flies using them.
• Foreshadowing:
  • At one point, Chandra notes that his smoke has gotten weaker recently, which he attributes to old age. In reality, it's the first hint towards Ely's true nature as a Thief Choujin. Ely's ability to use smoke was taken from Chandra, thus weakening his power as a result.
  • While training on Ojima, Tokio is wearing a shirt that depicts three figures standing before a sunset with the words "drop out" written beneath them. In chapter 34.4, Tokio announces his intention to drop out of school to Azuma and Ely while the three of them stand before a sunset in exactly the same position as the figures on Tokio's shirt.
• Fragile Speedster: In Full Beastification form Tokio's body feels incredibly light, to the point where he has some difficulty controlling his speed at first. Unfortunately, he breaks his own arm when he punches snake-form Nari.
• Generation Xerox: A non-genetic example. Tokio, Azuma, and Palma are all indicated to have inherited a weaker version of the power of a choujin X—Tokio inherited Sora's wings and harpes, Azuma inherited Queem's weapon-producing abilities, and Palma inherited Bill Morth's necromancy. Of all the main characters, Ely stands out as an anomaly, possessing powers that baffle even Noh Mask.
• Gravity Master:
  • By hitting things with an object (melee or thrown), Shiozaki can concentrate a massive amount of gravity upon it, making it sink. He's shown to have good control over his targeting as befits a former baseball pitcher. In Chaos mode, he apparently puts a massive gravity field around himself as well.
  • Zora can use gravity to makes people and object levitate, or to create a gravity field around herself.
• Hand Blast: Smoke Choujin can do this. Chandra is shown to be able to shoot blasts of smoke hot enough to fry people.
• Hair-Contrast Duo: All over the place. There's Tokio and Azuma, Azuma and Ely, Simon and Momoma, Batista and Sandek, Ricardo and Umezawa, and Batista and Hartley.
• Having a Blast: By clacking his teeth, Mori can create explosions.
• Hero Stole My Bike: While she's running from Chandra, Ely grabs a kid's Roller-B (a sort of electrical scooter) and wrecks it while fleeing. She buys one to make it up to him later—or tries to as it turns out that Chandra killed the boy, apparently out of spite.
• Hidden Depths: Azuma. While on the surface he's someone who has life entirely figured out and excels in everything he puts his mind to, deep down he has a massive inferiority complex and a crippling fear of screwing up.
• History Repeats: The events immediately following the timeskip play out suspiciously similarly to the first few chapters of the story, with some very deliberate differences. Chapter 36 has choujin from the Tower of Mourning attempting to crash an airplane, just as Chandra did in chapter 1, though this time around Ely and Azuma are easily able to subdue the attackers. Afterward, a chase between Ely and Chandra plays out, just like in chapter 2. This time, however, Ely's the one chasing Chandra and not the other way around.
• I Know What You Fear: As a Dread Choujin, Ricardo can takes the appearence of what his targets fear the most. The more powerful the fear, the powerful he becomes. In extreme case, the target can die from the shock.
• Lean and Mean: Chandra Hume, one of the major antagonists, is quite lanky and is very mean to boot.
• Lighter and Softer: While not a walk in the park, Choujin X is vastly more light-hearted and optimistic compared to the often brutal Body Horror and sheer cruelty present in Tokyo Ghoul.
• Masking the Deformity:
  • Ririka wears a mask covering the lower part of her face to hide her Glasglow Grin. She has a very short temper when it is removed.
  • The pharmacist always wears a Noh Mask to hide his monstruous face, that looks patched together with Too Many Eyes.
• Mind Rape: Sato has the power to transmit mental images to other people. While a seemingly harmless power, it has some... interesting potential uses. When interrogating Nari as to why she attacked Tokio, Sato tries to force her to talk by transmitting the mental image of fly eggs hatching inside each of her orifices while hordes of larvae crawl across her skin and devour her body. Yeah...
• My God, What Have I Done?:
  • Johnny Takeyama briefly goes insane with the rush of power after turning into a Choujin, and in his instability, kills his two best friends. After coming to his senses, he's horrified. In order to make up for what he's done he refuses to give out Azuma and Tokio's names when the mysterious man who gave him the Coujin-making drug demands to know what happened to the other two syringes he received. It helps that he knew he was going to be killed anyway.
  • Ely's Hero Stole My Bike moment above causes the villain chasing her to kill the boy she snatched it from, which she only finds out after the fact. When she's about to head back home to the country from Yamato, she sees a wanted poster for Chandra and decides to stay instead and get her Class-A license so she can hunt him down.
• My Significance Sense Is Tingling: Choujin send out a signal other Choujin can sense when they're using their powers.
• Necromancer: Mori Hiroto, as a Death Growl Choujin, can animate the deads with his screams.
• Nightmare Face: Ricardo has four eyes and has tentacles on faces. He uses his appearence to scares a civilian for fun and Tokio notes that he looks teryfying.
• No Name Given: The man with a Noh Mask is only called "the pharmacist", something in relation to his mask or the Nue Choujin. Eventually subverted when he is revealed to be Batista Hoshi, Sandek's brother.
• Older Than They Look: Ely is rather short, which can lead one to think that she's still a child. However, she's the same age as Tokio and Azuma.
• Only in It for the Money:
  • Ely's a good person, but her primary interests lie in getting a ton of money (via farming at first) so she can use it to help her family out with their farm...and to buy a mansion and a big dog and snag a hot husband. After she accidentally gets a kid killed by an evil Choujin user, her motivations shift toward getting a lot of money by collecting the bounty on bad guys.
  • Money also motivates Shiozaki, who wants to get himself and his siblings out of the bad side of town. He wanted to do that with baseball, but his Choujin powers awakened during a match and (besides apparently killing the batter he was pitching to) Choujin aren't allowed to play sports against regular people, so he had to resort to crime.
• Personality Powers: A Choujin's power depends of their personality and greatest desire.
  • Chandra has a really short fuse, so his power is to create superheated smoke.
  • Tokio views himself as a vulture, so he becomes a Vulture Choujin.
• Power-Upgrading Deformation: After being injected with the Choujin drug, Tokio takes on the form of a vulture-person, and has to hide his true face and form until learning how to shift out of it. Implicitly, this sort of thing is common to Choujin.
• Promotion to Parent: After their mom disappeared and their dad died, Shiozaki had to take care of his siblings on his own.
• Rubber Man: After being injected with a Choujin-making substance, Johnny Kiyoshi Takeyama can extend his neck and arms as much as he wants.
• Scenery Gorn: The backdrop of the series is abundant with dilapidated buildings and crumbling structures.
• Shout-Out: Choujin X contains multiple allusions to Friedrich Nietzsche, though one of the most notable examples occurs with the scene of Azuma and the hyena on the beach. Azuma comes cross the corpse of a hyena (which he had earlier conversed with) which causes him to break down sobbing and craddle the hyena's dead body in his arms. This was based on an experience Nietzsche had supposedly had in real life, with him coming across a worse being whipped in Turin which caused him to undergo a mental breakdown.
• Snakes Are Sexy: Nari is a Snake Choujin and is a rather clear-cut Ms. Fanservice.
• Snakes Are Sinister: Nari is a Snake Choujin who can turn herself into a serpent and she is hired by the pharmacist to capture or kill Tokio.
• Speaks Fluent Animal:
  • Tokio is able to understand what birds say after becoming a Vulture Choujin.
  • Nari the Snake Choujin can talk to, you guessed it, snakes.
• Stylistic Suck: The art at some points is deliberately left half-finished◊, seemingly to give certain scenes a more lighthearted tone.
• Super-Scream: Mori Hiroto, as a Death Growl Choujin, can shout loud enough to blast people away. His screams are also loud enough to wake Ely and Monoma, despite being quite far away.
• Super-Senses: Tokio develops superhuman vision after becoming a Choujin, allowing him to see things from a distance and track the movement of fast objects.
• Super Smoke: Chandra, Ely and Zora can create super-heated smoke, used either to burn people, fly or hide in it.
• Super-Strength: As a Strength Choujin, Monoma has 100 times the strength of a normal person and can lift a tree with ease. She's a little shy about using her powers in front of people when not on a case, though.
• Tattooed Crook: Yubiko, one of the Choujin send against the heroes on Beast Island, has a large tattoo on her back.
• Traumatic Superpower Awakening: People with the natural aptitude for becoming Choujin may go into a rampage when exposed to great stress, which awakens their powers. If they come out of that state, they're Choujin. Some people either revert back to ordinary humans or lose their sense of self and stay rampaged.
• Two Guys and a Girl: The story's main trio consists of Tokio, Ely, and Azuma, all of whom are seemingly fated to play a pivotal role in determining Yamato's future. After the timeskip, Palma more or less emerges as the fourth main character.
• Unstoppable Rage: Making Chandra angry is a bad idea, since he get 5 times stronger when he is pissed off. Of course, since it is Chandra we are talking about, it is easier said than done.
• Vibration Manipulation: In top his Super-Scream, Mori can uses vibrations to feel the space around himself. This allows him to know everything that is happening on Beast Island.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: The mother of the Tower of Mourning, Zora, is willing to kill hundreds of people for a small chance to save Yamato. This also extends to people working directly for her like Chandra.
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Only mentally unstable people are able to become choujin, as the powers of any individual choujin reflect whatever complex they have. Furthermore, a choujin overusing their powers will gradually cause their humanity and mental stability to degrade. Perhaps the best examples would be Queem and Zora, two individuals who received the titular moniker of 'Choujin X.' While Queem was always an extremely paranoid dictator, in the later years of the Great Choujin War, his sanity had completely degraded to the point that he'd slaughter random civilians on a whim, particularly those who were openly religious. Zora, on the other hand, was originally a powerful hero who protected the land of Yamato from Queem's onslaught. However as she continued to overextend her powers in service of Yamato, her mind gradually became subsumed by her savior complex, to the point where she's developed an obsessive paranoia with her own prophetic visions. It also doesn't help that, due to the increasing amount of pain one experiences after using too many raises, both Queem and Zora have become completely dependent on opiods to even function in day-to-day life.
• World of Symbolism: It is a Sui Ishida manga, after all.