Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #57929 in Books
• Published on: 2006-02-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Customer Reviews

A review from someone who's actually read the manga...
Although not different to the anime in content, the manga is the superior to the two.

I feel that the previous reviewer did not do this manga justice. 'Monster' is not just an incredible thriller, but is a compelling moral tale. Tenma is an expert neuro-surgeon with a promising future ahead of him. However, after his director instructs him to abandon his treatment of a Turkish worker (thus leaving this man to die) in order to perform a relatively minor opperation on a well known opera singer, he begins to see that his hospital is corrupt to the core and the people in positions of power do not believe that all men are created equal. Therefore, when Tenma is later ordered to stop operating on a boy with a serious head-wound in order to treat a richer client, he refuses to do so. This choice will set a series of events in motion which finally end several years later with Tenma as a wanted man, accused of several murders, and fleeing the police while trying to prove his innocence by revealing the true identity of a mysterous young man called Johann.

As I said before, Naoki Urasawa is a visionary. 'Monster' is so much more than just a thriller. It focuses on many moral implications such as whether or not one life is as valuable as another, the nature of choice and what it really is that makes a monster. On top of this is the historial aspects of the plot, as it is set mainly in Germany just after the fall of the Berlin Wall and does an incredible job of realistically presenting this time period.

I have been following this series since the first volume was released and have just finished reading volume 13. As this series is 18 volumes long, and so far has never lost its knack for keeping me enticed and excited since the first volume, I can honestly say that it is one of the best series's that I have ever read and could not recommend it more to anyone.

Will probably get better...
I thought this deserved some kind of review even though i've only seen the first few episodes of the anime on YouTube.
It's basically about a young, talented japanese brain surgeon who works in Germany trying to build up his career.
When we first see him, it's all going very well as he up for promotion, friends with the director of the hospital, engaged to the directors beautiful daughter and very popular and successful within the hospital.
However, when he is ordered to work on a famous singer rather than on the poor Turkish man who was brought in first, his conscience starts to act up when the Turkish man dies and his wife and young son accost him, shouting at him to give her her husband back.
When he tell his fiancee, she replies that he did the right thing as life is not equal, and the director implies a similar thing later on, talking about the importance of money over saving patients.
This disconcerts Dr Tenma, and when a similar thing happens some time later and he his ordered to help the mayor rather a dieing young boy who was brought in first, he decides to follow his beliefs and help the boy.
Because of this, however, he loses everything.
The director makes it clear that Dr Tenma has no chance of getting any further in life as he would never promote him and would refuse to write a reference if he quit the hospital. His daughter then cruelly gives him back the engagemant ring and goes to flirt with other men.
Because of all this he gets very angry, and when he visits the young boy he saved (who is still unconscious), he starts shouting about how the director doesn't deserve to be alive if he cares more about money than patients.
He then goes out and gets very drunk, but when he wakes up he finds out that the director and two other bad doctors had been murdered and the young boy and his twin sister had run away from the hospital.
But what happened?
I won't spoil the rest, but it gets better as it goes a long.