5
巻【まき】の七十二 is just a traditional way to say "Volume 72". Were it not a ninja manga, we would normally say （第）七十二[巻]【かん】.
の is the only way to connect a noun to another in Japanese. Unlike English, you cannot directly attach "with", "from", "by" and such to a noun unless via の. The の alone is thus the most ambiguous and ...
4
According to the official 常用漢字表, the difference between components 飠 and 𩙿 is that of handwriting and printing standard. It is reiterated in the document that such two shapes are equivalent, along with the list of many other ignorable stroke-level and component-level variants.
The printing standard glyphs in Japanese are basically following the style of ...
4
初{はつ} is actually used in a completely different way from 乙{おつ}, 丙{へい}, etc:
初
初 means first, but only first in the temporal sense of a first occurence. Therefore, it isn't used as an ordinal to number/rank items in a list.
Instead, it's used as a part of various compound words, where it signifies the 1st occurence of that thing; often as a prefix, such as ...
3
Those are the bonji. They are sound vibrations used in meditation. In Japanese, they typically are germ characters, which are characters that germinate other words, like a seed. In this context, it is likely to germinate names of deities, and one or more of their various aspects are being invoked by these sounds, that is to say, "whatever the requester ...
3
I'm not sure if I understand that native speaker's explanation, but a very simple summary is this:
働: work to make money; job
努: effort; endeavor; striving
労: labor; workload; burden
努 is a relatively positive word that is associated with something you actively do/make. 労 is a relatively negative word that is associated with something you are burdened with....
2
As others have noted, this appears to be part of the Unicode Han-character unification, where minor differences between character forms were ignored when assigning code points to individual glyphs during the process of setting up the Unicode specification for the Han characters. Since a single code point was assigned for multiple character forms, they ...
2
卷ノ(の)七十二 can be read in two ways. The first 二十七ノ卷, this is an old way reading Japanese letters from right to left. The second 卷ノ七十二, this is a new modern way reading them from left to right. Even as a native speaker of Japanese, I am a little perplexed, and have done a little search about his Manga. The answer is: 卷ノ七十二, meaning Vol. 72.
2
The character for "black" is 黒, and its antonym is 白 ("white"). The character for "dark(ness)" is 闇, and its antonym is 光 ("light"). The connotations of 黒 and 闇 largely overlap both in English and Japanese. For example, in fantasy works, we see both 黒魔法 "black magic" and 闇魔法 "dark magic" very often, ...
1
That large character next to オッガイ is a fictional "kanji" invented by the author of Tokyo Ghoul to write オッガイ in one character. It makes absolutely no sense outside the work. You cannot type this character using your PC or smartphone. Technically, it's a gaiji.
Obviously it was made by "mirroring" the left part of 死 ("death"), ...
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