Monster - Naoki Urasawa
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Monster is one of the most ambitious and masterfully executed psychological thrillers in manga history. Naoki Urasawa explores the nature of evil with surgical precision, delivering a gripping, dizzying, and deeply human story.
The story begins in Düsseldorf, Germany, in the late 1980s. Kenzo Tenma, a brilliant Japanese neurosurgeon, embodies the ideal of an ethical and devoted doctor. But one moral decision changes everything: by choosing to save the life of a young boy shot in the head instead of the city’s mayor, he triggers his own professional downfall—and sets off a terrifying chain of events. The child he saves—Johan Liebert—turns out to be a cold, calculating serial killer, perhaps even the embodiment of pure evil.
From that moment on, Tenma becomes both hunter and prey. He travels across a reunified Germany—its post–Cold War ruins, Eastern European orphanages, political and psychiatric corridors—in search of Johan, to stop him... or to understand him. The manga becomes a thrilling chase, but also an existential quest about responsibility, guilt, and the central question: what is a monster?
Urasawa crafts a story of remarkable precision. Every chapter is a puzzle piece; every secondary character carries their own memory, depth, and pain. The storytelling, fluid and masterful, evokes Russian novels or Hitchcockian thrillers. You can feel the influence of European cinema and the deepest fears of the 20th century: mind control, eugenics experiments, and the lingering ghosts of war.
What makes Monster so powerful is not just the brilliance of its plot, but its moral dimension. Tenma is not an invincible hero. He stumbles, he questions, he hopes redemption is possible. And Johan is no ordinary villain—he’s a black mirror held up to humanity. A chilling, mesmerizing figure whose presence freezes the blood.
Reading Monster means feeling constant tension, an existential urgency. It prompts reflection on how institutions fail to protect the innocent, how easily society abandons its children. Most of all, it forces us to accept that the line between good and evil is never clear. At any moment, anyone can make a monstrous—or human—choice.
This manga impacted me like few others. Not only because of its masterful storytelling, but because it asks a disturbing, inevitable question: what would I do if I had to kill a monster I once saved? In the end, Monster speaks to us all. It speaks of our fear of choice, our responsibility for what we create, and our often naïve hope of fixing what’s broken.