N.E.A.R. Review: Monster (No. 1), by Naoki Urasawa

[NEAR = Not Exactly A Romance]

My son has been reading Naruto and Shukan Shonen (Weekly Boy) Jump for a couple of years, but I had never attempted to read manga myself. I knew it read from back to front, right to left, which I am sort of used to (Hebrew reads that way also), but I needed pointers on exactly how to read the boxes in proper order. Luckily, the graphic novel is idiot proof, with the following helpful diagram:

Think of this post not so much as a “review”, but as a noobie’s impressions of an alien narrative form. Not only am I inexperienced with the graphic novel, but also with this style of Japanese drawing, so I am doubly naive. At first, it looked almost childlike to me, not visually interesting.I did not even realize until the end, where I found a glossary, that the exclamation marks and characters scattered among the text were the Japanese equivalent of “bam” “pow” in US comics.  I found this Japan Times Online article helpful in articulating some of the differences. For example,

the established styles of drawing — the use of lines — to express a character’s movements and emotions have become so engrained in Japanese readers that it is not easy for foreigners to “crack the code” when the comics are shipped overseas, he says.

He points to the difference in how movement is rendered in American comics, which, whatever the object, be it fighter jet or bullet, is shown from beginning to end. In contrast, he says, Japanese manga artists stop short of the end to give readers the chance to picture the motion in their minds and thus feel a part of the manga.

By the end of the novel I had forced myself to slow down, and did begin to appreciate the meaning of what was left out.

There are 18 volumes of Monster, which were published in Japan from 1994 to 2001. There is also an anime adaptation which is apparently going to be coming to English audiences. Wikipedia says the genre is “psychological horror”, and I am good with that.

Kenzo Tenma is a brilliant young neurosurgeon, already chief of his service, who practices in Düsseldorf in the mid 1980s. He is dating Eva, daughter of Dr. Heinemann, head director of the hospital, and life is good. He’s very ambitious, though, and we learn that Heinemann is using Tenma’s research and surgical feats to promote himself and the hospital, with Tenma’s tacit consent.  Right away we are presented with a kind of mirror in Dr. Becker, a surgeon whose career is kind of stalled, and who seems more interested in women and wine than doctoring. Becker’s been around long enough to offer useful, if quite cynical, advice on hospital politics to Tenma, who at the start of the novel is too idealistic to listen.

Although I did not find the portrayal of how a modern hospital in the developed world operates very accurate (there is no way a neurosurgeon would be asked to split his time with the riff raff in the ER, for example), it definitely got at some realistic themes. We are set up immediately with conflicting images of the various facets of modern doctoring: ambition v. satisfaction v. complacency, competent v. supreme skill, ego-entered v. patient-centered v. hospital centered care, and selfishness v. altruism.

Much of the book is Tenma’s struggle to define for himself what being a physician means, where his loyalties lie, and what he is willing to sacrifice to achieve his career goals on the one hand, and be able to live with himself on the other.

The catalyst for Tenma’s moral reappraisal is the realization that he was diverted by the director from saving the life of a Turkish immigrant in order to operate on a famous opera singer. Eva (a cardboard scheming superficial bitch — alsa there are few women here, none with central roles, and all are stereoptyped) is blunt, telling him, “After all, people’s lives aren’t created equal.” Her father says, “Our priority is to progress as medical scholars before saving lives, right Tenma?”. It’s clear to Eva and her father that saving the opera singer redounds to the reputation of the hospital, and of health care in Germany. But Tenma anguishes, asking “What was I supposed to do in that situation?” The novel comes close, but skirts, the complications of fragmented modern hospital care, i.e. the fact that in complex bureaucracies, suboptimal care happens, and it’s no one person’s fault, by focusing on characters. And it is not always clear whether Heinemann is sacrificing patients for medical research or for self-aggrandizement, although perhaps the message is that it’s hard to tell what motivates others and even harder to tell what motivates ourselves.

Tenma is comes to a fork in the road, and he chooses to care for a little boy whose twin sister and parents were murdered, rather than follow Dr. Heinemann’s instructions to lavish his talents elsewhere. The repercussions are swift and disastrous for Tenma’s career and love life, a realistic touch I appreciated. However, at this point, the mystery picks up, as several deaths occur in Tenma’s vicinity, casting some suspicion on the young doctor.

The book then traces the mystery, fast forwarding a decade, and reveals the identity of the killer at the very end. I believe subsequent installments follow Tenma’s relationship with the killer.

The medium seems well suited for twists, and there are many in this story. One thing I liked was the theme of responsibility and moral luck. Moral luck is a concept modern moral philosophers have some trouble with. I’ll give you an example. There are two men at a bar. Both are drunk. Both get into their cars and drive home, one heading west, the other east. It just so happens that the eastbound driver hits and kills a young woman. The westbound driver makes it home and sleeps it off.  The paradox here is that it was one driver’s good luck that a pedestrian was not in his way as he drove home, and the other driver’s bad luck that one was. The difference in outcome is due purely to luck. Yet we want to say the driver who hit the pedestrian did a much worse thing, a greater moral wrong. How can we reconcile those two disparate thoughts?

There’s religious and German nationalistic stuff as well. The novel begins with a quotation from the book of Revelation, for example. And, when it comes to the history of medicine and research on human subjects, Germany holds a historically significant place. Emigration of Japanese physicians to Germany (or anywhere) is not that common, and Tenma’s reason was not that convincing. I expect Germany attracted the author because of its well known history of physicians implicated in human evils.

I enjoyed it quite a bit, and plan to read subsequent installments (although at $10 a pop, I won’t be buying them all at once), and will be interested to see how these play out. I hope I gain some facility with the visual language, although I don’t know if that will happen naturally, or if I will have to read some kind of “how to”. Suggestions are welcome!