Naoki Urasawa · 1994 · thriller
Urasawa's eighteen-volume thriller, set in a Germany and Czech Republic just out from behind the Iron Curtain. A Japanese surgeon in Dusseldorf chooses to operate on a shot child instead of the mayor, and spends the next decade pursuing the man that child becomes - across a continent, into an East German orphanage and a Prague mansion.
- 1Dusseldorf
1986, and Kenzo Tenma, a Japanese neurosurgeon at Eisler Memorial Hospital, defies his director to operate on a shot child rather than the mayor - and saves a boy who will spend the next decade proving it was the wrong choice.
- 2Frankfurt
Nine years on, and a fugitive doctor tracking his own patient across a Germany that has just absorbed the East - with Inspector Lunge of the BKA convinced Tenma invented Johan to explain his own murders.
- 3Munich
Bavaria and the neo-Nazi thread: an organisation that has decided the beautiful, blank young man in front of them would make an excellent Fuhrer, and cannot see that he is using them for something else entirely.
- 4511 Kinderheim
The East German orphanage where children were stripped of names and identity to make useful adults - and where Johan arrived as a boy and left it a burnt-out building with two survivors.
- 5Prague
The Red Rose Mansion, Franz Bonaparta, and the picture books written to hollow children out - and a mother made to choose which of her twins to hand over, which is the answer the whole series has been circling.
- 6Ruhenheim
A quiet German town near the Czech border where Johan has arranged a massacre by simply telling the residents about each other - and where Tenma has to decide whether the doctor who saved him is going to shoot him.
- 7Dusseldorf
Back to the hospital and the profession, with the question the series exists to ask left open - whether Johan was made in an orphanage and a mansion, or was, as one witness insists, simply born like that.