Souta

Souta is an enigmatic ghoul who hides his face behind a clown mask and belongs to the group known as the Clowns (Pierrot). To conceal his identity completely, he wore a brown wig and a heavily padded business suit that made him look fat and bulky, though his voice stayed the same. Beneath the playful, jester-like manner lay a cold, calculating nature.

It is Souta who sets the entire story in motion: he orchestrated the so-called Steel Beam Incident that gravely injured the ghoul Rize Kamishiro and, with her, the college student Ken Kaneki. The two were rushed to a hospital, where Rize's organs were transplanted into Kaneki, turning him into a half-ghoul — the event that triggers everything that follows.

Souta kept ties with other ghouls in Tokyo: he approached the mask-maker Uta to express his wish to join the Clowns, and even flashed a CCG investigator's badge as a joke, much to Uta's amusement.