Monster (manga)

AUTHOR: Urasawa, Naoki

ARTIST: Naoki Urasawa (illustrator)

PUBLISHER: Shogakukan (Japanese); VIZ Media (English)

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION:Monsuta, 1994-2001

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 1995-2001 (English translation, 2006-2008)

Publication History

Monster was originally published by Shogakukan in Big Comic Original, a semimonthly seinen manga magazine. Shogakukan also reprinted the series in eighteen tankobon, or collected volumes. Beginning in 2006, an English translation of Monster was published in the United States by VIZ Media.

Plot

Monster tells the tale of Dr. Kenzo Tenma, a neurosurgeon working in Eisler Memorial Hospital in Dusseldorf, Germany, during the 1980’s. Brilliant and on the fast track to success, he has just asked Eva Heinemann to marry him. However, Tenma begins to notice that the hospital’s rich patients receive preference over poor ones. He finds himself removed from surgeries deemed less important and assigned only to those that heighten the hospital’s reputation.

Tenma’s dissatisfaction with this corruption comes to a head with the arrival of the Liebert twins, Johan and Anna, at the hospital. Defying the hospital director’s orders to operate on the mayor of Dusseldorf, Tenma chooses to operate on Johan instead. Johan survives, the mayor dies, and the director blackballs Tenma. Soon after, the director and two other associates of the hospital are found dead, having been poisoned. Inspector Heinrich Lunge from the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA), the Federal Criminal Police Office of Germany, is called in to investigate. While he suspects Tenma from the beginning, there is no evidence to support his beliefs.

Nine years later, Tenma is chief of surgery. He operates on Adolf Junkers, a thief who had been hit by a car. Tenma befriends Junkers, and just as the man begins to open up to Tenma, he is shot dead. The killer reveals himself to be Johan. Tenma is appalled he saved the life of such a person. He flees Dusseldorf, intending to find and put an end to this “monster” he has created.

The next three volumes introduce the many mysteries surrounding Johan. Tenma tracks down Johan’s sister, now named Nina, though the two quickly separate. They stumble upon a neo-Nazi organization intent on making Johan the next Adolf Hitler. Tenma begins to investigate Johan’s origins, starting with Kinderheim 511, a facility that carried out experiments on children. He must also constantly evade Lunge, who is obsessed with him. Nina conducts her own search for Johan in order to learn about her forgotten past. Their searches lead them to Prague, where they uncover evidence that the twins were subjects of a eugenics experiment. Nina finds she was subjected to mental conditioning at Red Rose Mansion under the direction of Franz Bonaparta.

Tenma is arrested and extradited to Germany; he manages to escape with Gunther Milch’s assistance. The final conflict occurs in Ruhenheim, where Johan has planned a massacre. Tenma, Lunge, Nina, and Grimmer manage to thwart the plan. A random citizen shoots Johan, and Tenma saves the boy’s life a second time.

The story ends with Tenma joining Doctors Without Borders and Nina graduating from college. The twins’ mother is discovered alive. Johan’s end is ambiguous; he has either escaped the police or died.

Volumes

• Monster, Volume 1: Herr Dr.Tenma (2006). Collects chapters 1-8. Features Tenma’s decision to save the life of a boy, Johan, and the consequences of saving someone who turns out to be a killer.

• Monster, Volume 2: Surprise Party (2006). Collects chapters 9-16. Features the reintroduction of Johan’s sister, now named Nina, and Tenma’s initial search for her and Johan.

• Monster,Volume 3: 511Kinderheim (2006). Collects chapters 17-24. Features the history of Kinderheim 511, where children were subjected to psychological experiments.

• Monster, Volume 4: Ayse’s Friend (2006). Collects chapters 25-32. Features a neo-Nazi organization eager for Johan to become the next Hitler.

• Monster, Volume 5: After the Carnival (2006). Collects chapters 33-41. Features Nina’s investigation and a confrontation between Lunge and Tenma.

• Monster, Volume 6: The Secret Woods (2006). Collects chapters 42-50. Features Eva’s confession that she has seen Johan’s face.

• Monster, Volume 7: Richard (2007). Collects chapters 51-59. Features Richard Braun, his investigation of a suicide, and his discovery that a string of unsolved murders are connected.

• Monster, Volume 8: My Nameless Hero (2007). Collects chapters 60-68. Features Tenma’s arrival in Munich and Reichwein’s investigations of Johan.

• Monster, Volume 9: A Nameless Monster (2007). Collects chapters 69-77. Features a confrontation between Tenma and Roberto and also tells the children’s story “The Nameless Monster.”

• Monster, Volume 10: Picnic (2007). Collects chapters 78-86. Features Grimmer and the “Magnificent Steiner” as well as Jan Suk’s investigation of corruption in the Prague Police Department.

• Monster, Volume 11: Blind Spot (2007). Collects chapters 87-95. Features a murder accusation and reveals Grimmer’s origins.

• Monster, Volume 12: The Rose Mansion (2007). Collects chapters 96-104. Features Lunge’s arrival in Prague and Tenma’s arrest.

• Monster, Volume 13: The Escape (2008). Collects chapters 105-113. Features Tenma’s escape from police custody to protect Eva from Roberto.

• Monster, Volume 14: That Night (2008). Collects chapters 114-122. Features the mystery of the Red Rose Mansion.

• Monster, Volume 15: The Door to Memories (2008). Collects chapters 123-131. Features the full recovery of Nina’s memories.

• Monster, Volume 16: Welcome Home (2008). Collects chapters 132-141. Features Dr. Gillen’s discovery of Johan’s ties with numerous serial killers.

• Monster, Volume 17: I’m Back (2008). Collects chapters 142-151. Features Nina’s reunion with Johan and introduces the mysterious Franz Bonaparta.

• Monster, Volume 18: Scenery for a Doomsday (2008). Collects chapters 152-162. Features the massacre at Ruhenheim and the aftermath of Johan’s plans.

Characters

• Kenzo Tenma, the protagonist, is a middle-aged Japanese man. Noble and kind, he considers all lives to be equal and never hesitates to help others. Throughout the series, he feels responsible for Johan’s actions and decides to atone by stopping the monster he feels he created.

• Johan Liebert, the primary antagonist, is young, blond, and handsome. Extremely charismatic and intelligent, he is manipulative and deceitful and a remorseless killer. However, he harbors a deep love for his sister, is shown to be kind to children, and considers Tenma his “father.”

• Nina Fortner, a.k.a. Anna Liebert, is Johan’s twin sister. While she is as good-looking as Johan, the similarities between the siblings end there. She is sweet, caring, hardworking, and intelligent. As her memories return, they provide clues about the mental experiments and conditioning to which she and Johan were subjected as children.

• Eva Heinemann is Tenma’s former fiancé. Her father was the director of Eisler Memorial Hospital. She is blond, curvaceous, and stylish but is also spoiled, shallow, demeaning, and haughty. After her father’s murder and three failed marriages, she becomes an embittered alcoholic. Despite her wealth, she lives a lonely life.

• Heinrich Lunge is an inspector for the BKA assigned to the murders that occur at Eisler Memorial Hospital. A tall and looming man with severe features and a receding hairline, he appears devoid of emotion. His pursuit of Tenma resembles Inspector Javert’s search for Jean Valjean in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862; English translation, 1862). He sacrifices everything in his pursuit of Tenma, letting his relationships with his wife and daughter erode to the point that his own grandson does not know him.

• Dieter is a young boy Tenma rescues from an abusive home. He has great fortitude, is supportive of his makeshift family, and is brave.

• Director Heinemann is the former director of Eisler Memorial Hospital and Tenma’s boss at the start of the series. He is an older man, has a thick neck, and wears glasses. He is strict, egotistical, and demanding.

• Dr. Oppenheim is the chief of surgery at the hospital. He has a receding hairline, a slightly overweight figure, and a neatly trimmed mustache. He reports Tenma for defying the director’s wishes.

• Dr. Boyer is a neurosurgeon with a protruding, hawklike nose and dark hair. He blames Tenma for the mayor’s death and later becomes head of neurosurgery.

• Otto Heckel is a short, bucktoothed thief who teams with Tenma early in his search for Johan. Selfish and cowardly, Heckel never shows interest in anything beyond ways to make money.

• The Baby is a short, elderly man who leads a neo-Nazi organization. Racist, cruel, manipulative, cunning, and violent, he is one of four men who want Johan to lead them as a successor to Hitler.

• Helmut Wolfe is an elderly soldier who found the Liebert twins wandering the Czech border. Johan murdered all of his friends and family. He is terrified of Johan and desperate for any kind of social contact.

• Rudy Gillen is a short, square-faced man and a criminal psychologist who attended medical school with Tenma. He is calm, clever, and secretly jealous of Tenma’s brilliance.

• Roberto is an orphan who was at Kinderheim 511 as a child. A big, burly man with shoulder-length hair, he is calculating, smug, and cold. It is implied that he was once a child named Adolf Reinhart.

• Hans Georg Schuwald is a blind, elderly man and one of the richest people in Europe. He once had an affair with a prostitute named Margot Langer, which resulted in a son, Karl.

• Karl Neumann is a student at the University of Munich and an employee of Schuwald. Tall, awkward, and soft-spoken with curly black hair, he is actually Schuwald’s son.

• Lotte Frank is an anthropology student at the University of Munich. She has short brown hair and wears glasses. She is nosy and pushy but also imaginative and caring.

• Julius Reichwein is a psychologist. He is short and balding and wears glasses. He is perceptive, strict, and forthright in his opinions but also fair and kind. As a counselor, he is experienced when it comes to reading people.

• Richard Braun is a private investigator who was fired from his previous position as a police officer due to his alcoholism. A tall man with curly dark hair and a square jaw, he is intelligent and determined. He is haunted by his mistakes but strives to move on with his life.

• Wolfgang Grimmer is a journalist researching Kinderheim 511. Grimmer has blond, stringy hair and is so tall he towers over many of the other characters. He appears to be pleasant and polite and gets along well with children. There is a darker side to his personality, which he calls “The Magnificent Steiner,” that emerges when he is angry or in danger.

• Martin is a bodyguard hired by Petr Capek to protect Eva Heinemann. Of average height with short hair, he is perpetually unshaven and sloppily dressed. Gruff and weary, he shows disdain for Eva; like her, his mother was an alcoholic. He is an ex-convict who served an eight-year term for murdering his former girlfriend.

• Jan Suk is a young detective with the Prague police. He has boyish good looks and wears his hair slicked back. Idealistic and naïve, Suk dreamed since childhood of being a police officer. His professional career has been stalled by corruption.

• Petr Capek, the fourth member of the neo-Nazi organization, has white hair and wears glasses. An egotistical control freak, he worked as an apprentice to Franz Bonaparta in his youth.

• Franz Bonaparta is the man responsible for the eugenics experiment that created the Liebert twins. He authored several children’s books with the purpose of brainwashing children.

Artistic Style

While his early work in the manga industry had more cartoonlike proportions and action, Urasawa’s Monster is steeped in realism. As the series takes place throughout Germany and the Czech Republic, the backgrounds vary from crowded city streets to quaint hamlets, all with detailed architecture. They give the series a grounded quality; what might have felt more fantastical if it had been drawn in a cartoonlike style feels closer to reality.

In addition to the drawn backgrounds, Urasawa uses actual photographs of different locations, superimposing them with his drawings to blend the fictional story tightly with real-world locations. Such a firm grounding in actual locations lends a sense of realism to the plot, even when it seems outlandish or improbable. Later in the series, Urasawa distorts the photographs to give them a fuzzy, dreamlike quality.

Like his backgrounds, Urasawa’s characters are portrayed in a realistic style, with a wide variety of facial features, body types, and ages. Their appearances communicate economic standing as well as ethnic heritage through culture-specific styles of dress or hairstyle. While this helps the reader remember the vast array of characters, Urasawa uses all of these tools to communicate different facets of his characters visually; Tenma’s increasingly haggard appearance, for example, shows the strain he feels while trying to stop Johan. In contrast, Johan’s utter perfection makes him look otherworldly and frightening.

Urasawa also incorporates many panels without dialogue and uses these “silent” pages to build tension in the reader, a technique similar to that used in horror films. Another filmlike quality of the work is the frequent use of close-ups of characters’ faces; these panels indicate key moments of discovery, tension, or internal struggle. Despite the many murders that occur, Monster’s action begins and ends quickly; the murderers waste no time toying with victims when they have grander goals to achieve, and the bulk of the murders occur offscreen. However, characters’ reactions to the violence allow the reader’s imagination to fill in the blanks vividly.

Themes

Monster’s overarching themes concern the nature of good and evil; the text asks, quite simply, “What makes a monster?” The plot explores how a person such as Johan could have come into existence. When Bonaparta admits to experimenting on the twins, he seems to provide the final explanation for Johan’s twisted mind: Bonaparta and his companions cultivated this monster.

However, Urasawa soon introduces new story threads that counter this explanation. The director of Kinderheim 511 blames Johan for ruining the orphanage by introducing evil into it. Nina’s memories reveal that she, not Johan, was the twin exposed to the brainwashing of the Red Rose Mansion, and Wolfe comments that even as a child, Johan was remorseless and cruel. Perhaps he was born a monster. The twins’ mother admits to hoping her offspring would seek revenge against Bonaparta; however, in Nina’s memories, their mother was gentle, protective, and loving. Nina herself foils any concrete explanation for Johan. By all accounts, she should be equally manipulative and disassociated, yet she strives to be a better person and is something of a pacifist. While Kinderheim 511 did create monsters such as Roberto, it also produced Grimmer, a man who struggles to express emotions but still makes the correct moral choices.

Ultimately, the key theme of Monster is that of choice. While outside stimuli are influential, the choices people make are what truly define them. Tenma could have chosen a more politically acceptable career in the hospital, but he chooses instead to take a more moral path. Rather than succumb to her personal demons, Nina chooses to move on and become a lawyer. Characters with shady pasts decide to atone—alcoholics give up drinking, for example—and presumed paragons of virtue lie, cheat, steal, or blackmail innocent people. Monster makes the argument that horrible people can exist and even be created; in the end, though, every individual must choose whether to defy the conditions of his or her upbringing or give in.

Impact

Monster marked a period of growth for Urasawa; his art style improved so drastically that he requested the publication of English-language editions of his series Twentieth Century Boys be delayed until after Monster was finished. The series also features several references to works by the “god of manga,” famed artist and writer Osamu Tezuka. Tezuka was known for being critical of the medical establishment and its unfair treatment of people from lower socioeconomic classes. He, like Tenma in Monster, believed that all lives were equal and all people deserved equal medical care. Reichwein was modeled after Shunsaku Ban from Astro Boy, while Johan resembles Michio Yuki from MW. Readers of Monster find the series to be evidence of a blossoming talent, with strong inspiration from one of the most popular manga artists.

Television Series

Monster. Directed by Masayuki Kojima. Madhouse, 2004-2005. This animated adaptation stars Hidenobu Kiuchi as Tenma, Nozomu Sasaki as Johan, and Mamiko Noto as Nina.

Further Reading

Ohba, Tsugumi, and Takeshi Obata. Death Note (2003-2006).

Tezuka, Osamu. Black Jack (1973-1983)

Urasawa, Naoki. Twentieth Century Boys (2009-2010).

Bibliography

Cornog, Martha. “Monster.” Library Journal 134, no. 12 (July, 2009): 78.

Diaz, Junot. “The Psychotic Japanese Monster.” Time 172, no. 4 (July, 2008): 50.

Fleming, Michael. “VIZ Media Enters Movie Biz.” Daily Variety, July 20, 2008, p. 8.

Ishii, Anne. “Medical Manga Comes to America.” CMAJ: Canadian Medical Association Journal 180, no. 5 (March, 2009): 542-543.

Mautner, Chris. “Chris Mautner Reviews Pluto, Volumes 1-3 by Naoki Urasawa.” The Comics Journal, December 29, 2009. http://classic.tcj.com/manga/chris-mautner-reviews-pluto-vols-1-3-by-naoki-urasawa.

O’Luanaigh, Cian. “Osamu Tezuka: Father of Manga and Scourge of the Medical Establishment.” The Guardian, July 21, 2010. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2010/jul/21/medical-manga-osamu-tezuka.

Taylor, Stephen. “Urasawa’s Mesmerizing Monster.” The Daily Yomiuri, April 13, 2008, p. 13.