'Monster' by Urasawa ; Monstrously good

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MANGA

Dr Temna is a young brilliant neurosurgeon practising in a hospital of Düsseldorf who is engaged to the director’s daughter Eva Heinemann. Yet one day he decides to operate first on a ten-year child shot in the head rather than the mayor of the city who dies. Eva breaks with him and he loses all hopes of being promoted until the director is found murdered. Ten years later, Tenma, who has become head of the surgeons in the same hospital, comes across a patient who reveals to him the existence of a dangerous man he calls Monster… This is the beginning of a long series of murders… but had it all not begun ten years before, with the arrival of this nameless child? Or fourteen years before, at the infamous 511 Kinderheim ? Or twenty years before, with the birth of twins in Czech Republic? Or fifty years before, with the beginning of the mysterious reading courses at the Red-Rose Mansion? Or… ?

To the endless pursuit of the elusive Monster throughout Germanycorresponds a difficult trip in the past to find the origin of the monster. The motivations of the characters are explained by the actions of other characters whose motivations are themselves explained in an almost vertiginous way, which makes a nice change from the basic assumptions of black-and white stories with baddies who are bad coz they’re bad. The chilling Peter Capek for example is himself partly responsible for the existence of the terrifying Monster; but a glimpse in his childhood shows a rather scary-looking father. And every character, except Monster maybe, is shown in a more humane way at one point of the story.

A distinctive feature of this manga  is the importance given to what we’re used to call ‘secondary characters’, who are given a wide background so that you become sometimes closer to them than to the assumed hero, Dr Tenma. My personal favourite, Grimmer and his disconnected smile, appears only from the 10th volume on. Relentless Inspector runge is a haunting figure very much like the Javert in les Misérables. Who is the actual hero? This is doubtful in Monster. At first I assumed it was Temna, but a whole volume can be focused on another character: you almost forget him, without wandering away from the thread: Johann, who is the story missing centre _ he is linked all those individual stories and yet, at least in the beginning, you only catches glimpses of him.

The story manages a striking balance between a humanistic conception of life _ among other things, the statement that nothing is worth a good meal with friends _ and very harsh elements. Some passages in the book are crude (Grimmer’s torture ) or incredibly cruel, such as what Johann inflicts on young Miloch.

Monster is THE manga for people who are suspicious of mangas. The European reader will feel at home in this story taking place between Germany and Czech Republic.  To say that Urasawa was well documented to recreate the peculiar atmosphere of the various cities explored (Düsseldorf, Munich,Prague…) is an understatement. The image of Europegiven here is very far from the dreamed image conveyed, for example, in some Miyazaki’s films (Kiki’s Delivery Service) depicting ideal villages with neat half-timbering houses.

Graphically, Monster can also appeal to the readers of more ‘traditional’ European comic books, thanks to the detailed, realistic drawings of urban landscapes often strikingly beautiful. The general impression is one of clarity and accurateness. I also particularly like the Sleeping-Beauty look of the Red Rose Mansion; all the pages where the reader discovers the interior of it through the eyes of Inspector Runge are brilliant. It is a pity though that the pocket size of the books and the poor quality of the paper and the printing that are common to mangas do not do justice to the drawings.

The character’s faces are not so good but there is a real effort to individualize each of them, contrary to what happens in many mangas where all the characters look the same, with their smooth, feminine features and big eyes. Here characters have big or hooked noses, broad mouths, and balding foreheads, well they are human. The only ones for whom this rule does not apply are Tenma _ but he progressively looks more and more off-colour_, and the twins.  For Johann this is motivated: his kind of inhuman, angelic beauty acts as a foil for the darkness of his behaviour; his uncharacteristic features matches his namelessness and makes real Johann’s serene statement that he doesn’t exit.

The definite strong point of the series is its masterly story-telling.  The suspense is hardly bearable at times, even if the cliff-hangers are maybe a bit too systematic, and what is more important, the interest of the reader rarely slacken throughout the 18 volumes. What is amazing is the number of climaxes the series manages. Sometimes you wonder if Urasawa is not himself a kind of Johann who devilishly manipulates the reader so that he finds it impossible not to read the 18 volumes in a row… More perverse even, some questions you have been asking yourself ever since the first volume are not answered in the end… So frustrating… and so enjoyable!

This series hasn’t changed radically my way of reading, in that it did not turned me into a huge manga fan. I still don’t like big-eyed teenager-looking fantasy heroes with bleeding wings and shining armour. I haven’t even tried to read another series by the same author _ 20th century Boys, for example, has an excellent reputation, but unfortunately, this series runs for even longer than Monster and I’m afraid I cannot really afford 19 volumes right now, knowing that the series is not even finished yet… But Monster definitively proved that another kind of manga exists, as Miyazaki and Takahata from the Ghibli studio made me discover another kind of anime which bettered anything I had seen from the USA or Europe.

I’ll add just a few words about the TV adaptation of the manga. I came across one episode of it when changing channels and it is thanks to it that I discovered Monster in the first place. It is very faithful to the plot and quite well-done most of the time, but it remains a TV series: the music is really poor and above all, the animation is often too static. You’d better read the books, as always.