A junior investigator with an unremarkable file is cheerful, helpful and slightly too enthusiastic. He is also, by the end, the head of the organization, having arrived there through a sequence of deaths he arranged and promotions he engineered. What he does with the position is the interesting part, because it is not what ambition predicts. He does not consolidate, does not build, does not even particularly rule. He dissolves: he blurs the line between the two species his agency exists to separate, manufactures incidents that make the categories unusable, and treats the whole structure as a joke he is telling to himself. Sociology has a word for the condition he is producing, and it is older than the discipline that borrowed it.
// The theoryNot too little wealth. Too little regulation
Durkheim developed anomie across The Division of Labour in Society (1893) and Suicide (1897), and the concept is consistently misremembered as a synonym for chaos or deprivation. His claim is more specific. Human desires, unlike animal needs, have no natural ceiling; what limits them is a moral order that tells people what it is reasonable to want given where they stand. When that order loosens, desire becomes unbounded and therefore permanently unsatisfiable, and the result is a distinctive kind of misery. The finding that made the argument famous is counter-intuitive: anomie rises in booms as well as in slumps. A sudden economic expansion destabilizes the scale of expectations exactly as a crash does, because in both cases the relationship between what people can want and what they can get has been thrown out without a replacement. Durkheim measured this through suicide rates, and the same mechanism was later imported into criminology — by Merton, who kept the word and changed its meaning, and much later by Messner and Rosenfeld, who returned it to the institutional level.
Crime is a normal social fact
Durkheim's other contribution to this field is the one students find hardest to accept, and it is stated in The Rules of Sociological Method (1895): crime is normal. Not desirable, not tolerable — normal, in the technical sense of being present in every society at every stage, which means it cannot be explained as a pathology or an accident. He went further with the famous thought experiment: imagine a society of saints, and it will still generate deviance, because the same acts that pass unremarked among ordinary people will there be judged as scandalous. The threshold moves; the category persists. And crime performs functions: it marks the boundary of the permissible in a way nothing else does, it provokes the collective reaction that renews solidarity, and it is the necessary condition of moral change, since every reform begins as a violation. Furuta understands this better than anyone in his organization, and he inverts it. If the reaction to crime is what makes the boundary real, then an official who controls the reaction controls the boundary — and can erase it. He does not abolish the law. He makes it impossible to tell who is on which side of it, which achieves the same thing with the apparatus still running.
// The subjectA nihilist is not the same as an egoist
The reason Furuta needs Durkheim rather than a personality label is that his conduct fails the ordinary tests. He is not accumulating — he gives away positions and advantages. He is not avenging — the injuries in his past explain his indifference and not his program. He is not even sadistic in the sense Yakumo Oomori is, since he takes no evident interest in the suffering itself. What he is doing is removing the scale: making the words that organize his world — human, ghoul, investigator, suspect — stop discriminating. Durkheim's vocabulary is the one that fits, because anomie is precisely a condition of the norms rather than of the person, and Furuta is the rare case of somebody who has decided to produce it deliberately rather than suffer it.
That places him in a specific relation to the other files in this hub. Eto attacks the category from outside and wants a different one. Arima serves the category absolutely and is consumed by it. Furuta occupies it and hollows it. The three together are the reason this franchise is worth an archive entry at all: it stages the same institution from three incompatible positions and does not tell you which is right.
Nimura Furuta
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// The crackA concept that has meant four things
Anomie is among the most cited and least disciplined concepts in the social sciences, and its problems are worth stating plainly. The first is definitional drift: Durkheim's anomie is a property of a society's regulation of desire; Merton's (1938) is a gap between cultural goals and legitimate means; Srole's (1956) is a psychological state measured on an individual scale; and Messner and Rosenfeld's is an institutional imbalance. These are four different objects sharing one word, and arguments routinely slide between them. The second is measurement: nobody has a satisfactory indicator of “insufficient regulation of desire”, and studies that claim to test Durkheim usually test one of the successors instead. The third is empirical, and it strikes at the founding evidence: Durkheim's suicide data has been reanalysed repeatedly, Halbwachs raised the problem early, and the classic Protestant-Catholic comparison is now the standard textbook example of the ecological fallacy — inferring individual behavior from aggregate rates — with later work suggesting the association may be confounded by how different jurisdictions recorded deaths. Durkheim also worked from official statistics whose construction he did not interrogate, which is exactly the criticism his intellectual descendants would later make of everyone else. What survives is the mechanism rather than the measurements: sudden change in the structure of expectations is destabilizing independently of whether the change is for the better, and a society's reaction to deviance is constitutive of the boundary rather than merely a response to it. Both are alive in current work, and neither needs the 1897 numbers to stand.
Whoever controls the reaction
Furuta kills a great many people and the framework here explains the shape of his project, not its permissibility. What the file is for is the observation underneath it, which is not comfortable: the boundary between permitted and forbidden is maintained by a reaction, and whoever controls the reaction has more power over the boundary than whoever writes the statute. That is not a fictional vulnerability. It is the reason independent oversight of the agencies that classify people exists at all, and the reason its absence is the first thing worth checking in any institution that both defines a category and enforces it.
Three key ideas
- Durkheim's anomie is insufficient regulation of desire, not poverty or chaos — and it rises in booms as well as slumps, because both destroy the scale of expectations without replacing it.
- Crime is a normal social fact, present in every society, and it performs functions: marking the boundary, renewing solidarity through the reaction, and making moral change possible. Furuta inverts this — controlling the reaction lets him erase the boundary without touching the law.
- The concept has meant four different things (Durkheim, Merton, Srole, Messner-Rosenfeld), resists measurement, and its founding suicide data is the textbook case of the ecological fallacy. The mechanism survives; the 1897 numbers do not have to.
Sources · to keep reading
- Durkheim, É. (1897). Suicide: A Study in Sociology. Free Press.
- Durkheim, É. (1895). The Rules of Sociological Method. Free Press.
- Merton, R. K. (1938). “Social Structure and Anomie”, American Sociological Review, 3(5).
- Messner, S. F. y Rosenfeld, R. (1994). Crime and the American Dream. Wadsworth.
- Besnard, P. (1987). L'anomie. Presses Universitaires de France.
- Robinson, W. S. (1950). “Ecological Correlations and the Behavior of Individuals”, American Sociological Review, 15(3).
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is Nimura Furuta?
Nimura Furuta (“Kichimura Washuu”) is a villain from Tokyo Ghoul, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. He does not want to win.
Why does Nimura Furuta (Kichimura Washuu) become a villain?
Nimura Furuta and Durkheim's anomie: the official who climbs to the summit of the apparatus and spends it deregulating the world. The file on the normless state — and on the claim that crime is normal.
Which criminological theory explains Nimura Furuta?
Nimura Furuta's case is analysed through Anomie (Durkheim). Émile Durkheim introduced anomie to name something that was neither poverty nor wickedness: the state of a society whose norms have stopped regulating its members' desires. His uncomfortable finding was that anomie appears not only in crises but also in sudden expansions, when what changes is the ceiling of the possible and nobody has yet written the limit. And he added a second claim that still scandalizes: crime is a normal social fact, present in every society, and it performs a function. Nimura Furuta is that pair of ideas rendered as fiction. He climbs inside the CCG until he commands it, and once at the top he spends the entire apparatus on making sure no category means anything any more.
