A readable and creepy manga novel built on themes of guilt, agency and how to grapple with genuine evil. Over the course of nine volumes, Monster has a lot of plot threads, many left hanging, and there are many, many minor character extras drifting in and out of the story. Thus it reads less like a cohesive story and more like the middle third of David Copperfield.
This is considered a highly-regarded work (it sold more than 20 million copies), but I don't recommend it unless you're a serious manga aficionado. And if you're a serious manga aficionado, you've already read it.
A few thoughts on Monster's central themes, which are more notable than the story itself. It is increasingly obvious today that quite a lot of evil exists in the world--certainly more today than during the 1990s when Monster was published. And so we have to figure out how to navigate that evil somehow: perhaps confront it, perhaps avoid it, and of course sometimes it's simply not clear what to do about it beyond realizing that it's there. Most of us--and I include myself in this group--simply aren't prepared and don't have the tools to deal with powerful evil forces. And sometimes there are evil forces that are too powerful for us to do anything about them no matter what we do, no matter how well-prepared we are.
And yet at the same time, sometimes when we do battle against evil we discover we have much more agency than we thought we did. Or we come into contact with genuinely good people who will stand by us, and it's often surprising, even shocking, who those people are and how much they can do to help. We see in Monster several minor characters who help Dr. Tenma, our main character: some literally give their lives to help him, some offer a meal or kind word at precisely the right time. I think the point here is to realize that there are inspiring people all around us who are forces for good, and maybe understanding this deeply is what life is about, realizing that you will encounter good people on your journey as you perform what's likely to be a failed effort against forces arrayed against, forces that may very well be too strong and too much for you.
[For a striking perspective on understanding and grappling with evil and evil people, take a look at M. Scott Peck's unusual book People of the Lie.]
One final thought on the author's artistry. I don't know anything about art, but even I can see and respect how this artist produces surprisingly mournful, emotional, even revolting scenes, sometimes with just a few spare lines.
I'll share reactions and comments on each of Monster's nine volumes below. Read only if interested!
Volume 1:
The series begins with Dr. Tenma, a brilliant Japanese neurosurgeon training in a German hospital. He's about to begin work on an emergency brain trauma patient, but then gets called off by hospital admins to work on a more "important" patient, and while he saves the second patient, his original patient dies. When the same thing happens again (this time Tenma is ordered to stop saving a young boy with a bullet in his brain in order to save the city's mayor), Tenma refuses, goes back, and saves the boy's life. This catastrophically damages his career and also leads to all sorts of strange events at the hospital, including the sudden poisoning deaths of the hospital senior management.
The story, already complicated, gradually reels out over the course of this volume, and it lures the reader in. The "Monster" turns out to be the young boy Tenma saved, Johan. We also learn that Johan, somehow, was the one who poisoned the senior staffers at the hospital.
So now Dr. Tenma gets pulled into an extended mystery, as well as an ethical dilemma: although he did a "good" thing by saving the young boy (and defying orders, appropriately, to do so), his actions nevertheless sustained a source of evil in the world. It's also notably ironic that Tenma did this via a type of reactance, as he reacted automatically against what he considered to be incorrect priorities at his hospital. Tenma is left with the guilt of having saved someone who later commits terrible crimes, and the reader of course is left with a certain ambiguity: is Tenma in any way culpable, or not?
Next we meet Nina Fortner while acing a case question in a law school class. She doesn't remember anything of her childhood before the age of 10, but yet she's triggered by a law school case report about a family with two small children murdered in cold blood. The volume then closes with several vignettes with mostly secondary characters.
Volume 2:
This book is sort of episodic, like a miniseries, or like a multi-season TV series; the author weaves in a group of totally new characters and a few plot twists right away. It's an interesting way to structure a story.
The reader watches the doctor grow from worrying about his career to the point of being fearful of even a few harsh words from his director at the hospital to becoming somebody completely fearless when someone points a gun right at his face. The stakes have gotten a lot higher, things have gotten a lot more serious, and there's something somehow liberating about that.
The reader also starts to learn some of the foundational plot elements of the story: Johan was an orphan used in a project to create supersoldiers engineered by the East German government. We also see a rather unrealistic plot twist with Eva (Dr. Tenma's ex-fiance) and her gardener, but it suffices to show that she's genuinely psycho.
Volume 3:
Good example here of the artistry of some of these panels. Sad and mournful:
This scene occurs after Tenma's ex-wife (she is a real psycho of an ex, holy cow) does something heroic: she helps protect Tenma from an assassin, and for the first time, while recovering from a gunshot wound, she experiences a (brief) period of quiet humility and gratitude.
A few other plot points: Dr. Tenma asks an old med school rival to help him profile and analyze Johan. This old rival cheated on a test to become top in his class, and he later betrays Dr. Tenma to the police. We also learn that Johan finds murderers, somehow gets control of them, and manipulates them into murdering Johan's intended victims for him.
We meet the android-like Inspector Lunge again (he originally showed up in Vols 1 and 2), he's on Tenma's trail and is convinced he is guilty of the murders Johan is committing and/or directing, in fact he believes Tenma and Johan are the same person. This character is interesting: he has incredible intelligence but near-zero social skills and frankly, he's reading the entire situation all wrong. Through a complicated series of events Tenma actually saves Inspector Lunge's life.
We also get a side-story of an orphan who reads in Latin to a wealthy old billionaire (Herr Schuwald), and it turns out that he's his abandoned son, he finds this out with the help of an enterprising and investigating classmate. This billionare has a different young man read to him in Latin every day, but then the "Thursday" boy commits suicide, apparently, and the "Friday" boy turns out to be Johan. The story ends with the three of them taking a billionaire out to a forest, which has been cut down but because the billionaire is blind, they tell him a story about what it actually looks like. This plot is so complicated and there's so many characters in it that the story is unfollowable--I don't mean this necessarily in a bad way! The reader just has to let the story wash over him and not sweat the details too much.
Volume 4:
The story returns to one of the minor protagonists from Volume 3, Herr Richard, a police officer kicked off the force for alcoholism, who frequently struggles with the temptation to drink. The author again conveys this mournfully:
Herr Richard discovers a connection between a group of unrelated murders, they all link back to Johan, and he discovers that Johan is currently looking after the billionaire Herr Shuwald. But Johan intercepts Herr Richard and manipulates him into committing suicide as well, using Richard's guilt over various past traumas against him. Herr Richard's therapist Dr. Julius Reichwein now gets involved in the story as he figures out that Johan must have managed to kill Richard somehow. Then a group of mean attempt to kill Reichwein, sent likely by Johan to seal off this loose thread of the story.
Several other complicated plot events happen here involving characters related to the billionaire Herr Schuwald. And then Dr. Tenma decides he must kill Johan no matter what: Volume 4 ends with Tenma set up in a library to assassinate Johan during an appearance the next day with Herr Schuwald, while at the same time Dr. Reichwein attempts to find Tenma and stop him from committing this act.
Volume 5:
This volume features a mini-fairy tale; also everything is coalescing around Johan's appearance at Schuwald's donation ceremony, where Tenma waits with his rifle; now Nina Fortner is heading that way too, as is the therapist Dr. Reichwein.
We meet yet another new character, Herr Grimmer, formerly a news reporter under the East German regime but now freelancing; he seems to know a lot about Dr. Tenma; he also arrives to Prague and identifies the former leader of 511 Kinderheim, Reinhart Biermann, who is now living under the name Petrov; Biermann was the former director of the child brainwashing program in East Germany and appears to be conducting continued experiments in Prague with new children.
Volume 6:Another notable panel here with notably neotenous faces of a couple of young characters: it's anime-like and creepy at the same time:
The fire in the library scene is well done, and it reunites a large number of characters in one scene and climaxes a major plot event.
Biermann gives Grimmer a key to a safe deposit box as well as information about this program; Grimmer is then caught and tortured by a group of corrupt policeman and henchmen, and then Nina Fortner suddently appears and shoots and tortures the torturers, then she frees Grimmer. Then the reader meets detective Suk, a rookie on the Prague police force, who gets involved in an investigation on Czech secret police who have been covertly placed on the police force. Later Suk meets Grimmer, who gives him the safe deposit box key from Biermann/Petrov. Complicated.
This volume starts in Prague with Grimmer (the freelance reporter) and detective Suk (who stumbled onto corruption in the Czech Police department), as well as Johan, who has disguised himself as his twin sister Anna to extract information from Suk through flirting; Grimmer and Suk listen to part of the tape from Petrov that proves the existence of the 511 Kinderheim ("Monster") project.
Finally, once again, it is fascinating how this author can create such nuanced expressions with just a few bare lines. In the image below, what, precisely, is the expression of the man in the upper panel? A difficult-to-describe combination of friendly, leering and deeply creepy.
It's interesting to see certain characters who are simply unable to grapple with the dire situation they've been put in: police officer Suk just can't handle that all the stuff has happened to him, to the point where Grimmer has to give him a bit of a talking to: he tells him to stay positive, calm down, get a grip on himself, do what he has to do, etc. Tenma likewise had to go through the same personal evolution; also Anna/Nina. Only Johan seems to naturally deal with adversity with no problem--in fact he strikes the reader as sort of a Superman, a sort of evil Mary-Sue character.
The reader learns here that Grimmer was also product of the 511 Kinderheim program, yet he's sort of a smiling happy-go-lucky guy but with an evil aspect of his character that permits him to defend himself, kill when necessary, etc. We also learn exactly how he was able to survive the torture that happened to him in the last volume.
There's an extremely disturbing scene here, where Johan psychologically shatters a young boy, persuading him that his mother abandoned him and that his life is pointless; the boy then sees some very dark scenes in the Prague's red light district and nearly commits suicide in the face of all this nihilism. Disturbing.
Grimmer has multiple breakthroughs on superseding his programming from the 511 Kinderheim project; he starts having normal emotions, and then basically smiles, waves and disappears from the story. And then Tenma is seized by the police and jailed. The final part of the book focuses on various people who have come into contact with Tenma over the course of the story, even his psycho ex-fiance Eva, all them are talking about ways to support him, prove his innocence, etc.
You can touch a lot of people, and make a lot of loyal friends, but unfortunately all of that loyalty and friendship may still not get you out of prison or get you out from under false charges.
Volume 7:
The story begins with Dr. Tenma, imprisoned alongside another Macguffin character: a famous escape artist (in prison for the 18th time, no less). The story needs this character to make it even passably plausible for Tenma to escape from prison himself. The two agree to try to escape together. We also see a well-regarded attorney agree to take Tenma's case, but also we see Tenma's ex-fiance Eva (the one person who can exonerate hime) extremely unwilling to testify, out of rage and hatred toward him.
One of most striking images of the entire work, this is a vision Nina Fortner (Johan's twin sister) sees in her mind:
And later in the story, once again the author uses his gift for working new bit-part characters into the story: here we meet a mournful puppeteer, Herr Lipsky, who, inspired by Nina, designs a puppet and an entire puppet show based on her.
This character also serves as a MacGuffin, appearing at just right time to rescue Nina.
We learn history about Nina and Johan's background, as well as learn about a "reading group" at a specific home "The Rose Mansion" where children were brainwashed.
And then a major flashback, which solidifies much of the backstory: the reader sees a young Nina and Johan arriving in West Germany with their dissident parents; their parents are murdered, and Nina walks in to see her parents dead. It turns out that Johan killed them. He then hands the gun to Nina and asks her to kill him too. When Johan sees The Red Rose Mansion, all his memories come back; he burns it down. Later, the authorities find all kinds of bodies in the wreckage.
Note also that at the end of each volume there is always a "sound effects glossary" describing various Japanese language sound effects/onomatopoeia used in the panels. See for example 401.4 in the photo below for the sound that conveys "elegant atmosphere"...
Volume 7 ends with yet another cliffhanger, where there's an ex-con working for Eva as her bodyguard. He's dying of a gunshot wound, but he needs to reach Dr. Tenma in time before he dies to give him a piece of important information.
Volume 8:
The story starts with Eva, Dr. Tenma's ex-fiance, in grave danger; we also get the backstory to explain the (rather context-free) cliffhanger at the end of the prior volume.
There's a narrative device that this author uses (here as well as elsewhere) to add ambiguity and suspense to the story and also keep the reader in the dark: the author will tell a backstory about a character but then later, as the reader sees this character navigate through the narrative, we learn that our understanding of that character's backstory is actually wrong. The example here involves the young man who is Eva's bodyguard (escorting her to various high-end parties until she finds and can point out Johan). The reader was told in Volume 7 that he was in jail for a double-murder: killing his girlfriend and her lover in an act of jealous rage. In this volume, however, the reader hears a different retelling of this character's backstory: we learn instead that his girlfriend killed herself, he was innocent, but he still took the blame for her death. It's an interesting device, it's a way to fabricate suspense, and it keeps the reader just a bit off-balance.
Volume 9:
This volume starts off changing and re-narrating aspects of Johan and Nina's backstory: it was Nina who killed all the men in the reception, not Johan, Nina was the one hiding/imprisoned in the dark room, etc.
The story now centers on a small German village where there's about to be a massacre. Johan wants to recreate the massacre at 511 Kinderheim in the village Franz Bonaparta was originally from. All the key protagonists, Tenma, Lunge, Grimmer, Nina, etc., arrive there coincidentally, all discovering enough clues separately to lead them there. Also the entire town is experiencing a sort of group paranoia/mass formation as villagers start randomly killing each other. It's as if the evil of Johan is contagious.
I don't want to ruin things too much here but unfortunately the plot quickly devolves into near-total implausibility. But let's just admit that this is a horror story, and so the reader who can just go along for the ride will enjoy this novel much more than the reader who "poindexters" his way through the novel, noting all the various plot implausibilities!
Once again, a panel that illustrates this work's key theme of how "good" often doesn't stand a chance against "evil"... Tenma, who is at his core a good, decent, man, simply cannot pull the trigger.
Monster's ending is ambiguous: it isn't clear what happens to Johan after Tenma saves him--yet again--after the story's climax. Tenma briefly visits Johan in the hospital, and the novel's final panel shows Johan's hospital bed, empty.
Other works of Naoki Urasawa:
Pineapple Army
Happy
Yawara!
Master Keaton
20th Century Boys
Pluto