About Monster
Monster is a manga written and drawn by Naoki Urasawa, serialised in Shogakukan's Big Comic Original from December 1994 to December 2001 and collected in 18 volumes. It was the first of Urasawa's works to find success abroad: it won the Grand Prize of the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize in 1999 and the Shogakukan Manga Award in 2001, and more than 20 million copies are in circulation. Madhouse adapted the whole story as a 74-episode TV series, broadcast on Nippon TV from April 2004 to September 2005. It was directed by Masayuki Kojima and written by Tatsuhiko Urahata, with original character designs by Kitarō Kōsaka and music by Kuniaki Haishima.
The story opens in Düsseldorf in 1986. Kenzo Tenma, a brilliant young Japanese neurosurgeon at Eisler Memorial Hospital, is engaged to the director's daughter and seems set for the top, until he is told to abandon a boy he is about to operate on and treat the city's mayor instead. He follows his conscience and saves the boy, Johan Liebert, and his career collapses. Nine years later, now Chief of Surgery, Tenma meets Johan again and realises that the boy he saved has become a killer. Suspected of the murders himself and pursued by the relentless BKA inspector Heinrich Lunge, he leaves the hospital to find Johan, a hunt that also draws in Johan's twin sister, Nina Fortner.
From there the series becomes a long investigation across Germany and into Prague, as Tenma, Nina, Lunge and a growing cast of allies piece together where Johan came from. Many episodes turn aside to tell the stories of people met along the way: a village doctor, a retired soldier, a lawyer, a puppeteer. The anime is unusually faithful to the manga, and reviewers have praised its patient storytelling, its large cast and Haishima's unsettling score; it is often counted among the best anime series ever made.
Want the archetype rather than the character? The dere type quiz scores you across all eight anime dere types — tsundere, yandere, kuudere, dandere and four more — and explains where each word comes from.
What the Monster Quiz Tests
Our Monster quiz covers the 74 episodes of the Madhouse anime. It uses nothing that appears only in the novel Another Monster, and nothing from the live-action projects that were planned but never made. Easy levels cover the basics: who made the series, where it is set, the main cast and their jobs, the theme songs and the story's first turns. The middle levels follow the investigation in order, from Düsseldorf and Heidelberg through Munich to Prague, and ask about the people Tenma meets along the way: the village doctor, the veteran who trains him, the students and the psychologists of Munich, and the detectives of Prague. The hard levels are for people who watched closely, and they include spoilers for the final episodes: a cause of death announced at a press conference, the year the story begins, the Bible verse that opens episode 1, a pen name and an alias, what Ruhenheim means, where Tenma and Lunge end up, the singer of the second ending and Tenma's Japanese voice.
Key Characters
Kenzo Tenma is an unusual hero for a thriller: a quiet, kind doctor who believes every life has the same value and who keeps treating patients even while he is on the run. Johan Liebert, the boy he saved, is the opposite of a typical villain on screen: polite, handsome and charming, a man nobody can quite pin down, whose past is the mystery at the heart of the series. His twin sister Nina Fortner, a cheerful law student from Heidelberg who practises aikido, searches for him on her own terms and slowly recovers memories she had lost. Inspector Heinrich Lunge of the BKA, with his phenomenal memory and his habit of typing information into his head with his fingers, is sure that Tenma is the culprit and will not let go. Around them are Eva Heinemann, Tenma's proud former fiancée; Dieter, the orphan boy who follows Tenma everywhere; Wolfgang Grimmer, a smiling journalist who grew up at 511 Kinderheim, an orphanage that ran harsh experiments on children; and allies such as the psychologists Rudi Gillen and Julius Reichwein. Take the 'Which Monster Character Are You?' personality quiz to find your match.
Available Quizzes
Monster Trivia
50 hand-crafted questions across 5 categories. 10 levels of increasing difficulty.
Which Monster Character Are You?
Answer 10 questions to discover which Monster character matches your personality!
Random Mix
Questions from all 70 anime including Monster. The ultimate challenge.
Characters
Kenzo Tenma
Nina Fortner
Heinrich Lunge
Wolfgang Grimmer
Johan Liebert
Monster Fun Facts
- Urasawa has said the idea for Monster came from the 1960s American TV series The Fugitive, about a doctor wrongly convicted of murder who escapes and hunts for the real killer. He saw it at the age of eight, and his editor at first tried to talk him out of the story.
- "Make It Home", the second ending theme, is sung by the classical pianist Fujiko Hemming, and it is the only song she ever sang in her career. It closes the last 42 episodes; David Sylvian's "For the Love of Life" closes the first 32.
- The ending credits are illustrated with pages from a picture book from the story itself, credited to its fictional author, Emil Scherbe. Shogakukan later published the book for real, on 30 September 2008.
- The original character designs came from Kitarō Kōsaka, a long-time Studio Ghibli animator, and the director, Masayuki Kojima, went on to direct Made in Abyss.
- Urasawa drew Monster alongside a weekly series the whole time, first Happy! and then 20th Century Boys, and working on Monster and 20th Century Boys together briefly put him in hospital with exhaustion.
- Viz Media could not license the anime's original ending theme for its English release, but Anime News Network's reviewer still called its English dub one of the best in recent memory.
Monster Quiz — Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes of Monster are there?
Seventy-four, in a single run broadcast on Nippon TV from 7 April 2004 to 28 September 2005. There is no second season: the 74 episodes adapt the whole manga, from the first chapter to the last.
Is Monster finished?
Yes. The manga ended in December 2001 after 162 chapters in 18 volumes, and the anime tells the complete story, ending with episode 74 in September 2005. Urasawa later wrote a companion novel, Another Monster (2002), which retells the events through an investigative reporter's interviews. A Hollywood film was announced in 2005 and an HBO series with Guillermo del Toro in 2013, but neither was made.
What order should I watch Monster in?
Just watch the 74 episodes in order; there are no films, OVAs or spin-off series to fit in. If you want more afterwards, the novel Another Monster looks back on the same events from the point of view of a journalist, and the manga covers exactly the same story as the anime.
Where can I watch Monster?
Netflix began streaming the series internationally on 1 January 2023, starting with the first 30 episodes and adding the rest of the 74 the following month, and in Japan Nippon TV's official page points to Hulu. Viz Media's English dub was shown on Syfy in the United States from October 2009, Siren Visual released the series on DVD in Australia, and Discotek Media announced in August 2025 that it had licensed the series for a Blu-ray release in 2026. Availability differs by country and changes over time, so check your local services.
What is Monster about?
In 1986, Japanese neurosurgeon Kenzo Tenma defies his hospital director in Düsseldorf to save a young boy's life instead of the mayor's. Nine years later he discovers that the boy, Johan Liebert, has grown up to be a killer, and, suspected of Johan's crimes himself, he sets out to find and stop him. It is a psychological thriller and mystery, following Tenma, Johan's twin sister Nina and the BKA's Inspector Lunge as they piece together Johan's past across Germany and Prague.
Who made the Monster anime?
Madhouse animated it for Nippon TV, which produced it with VAP and Shogakukan. Masayuki Kojima directed, Tatsuhiko Urahata wrote the series, Shigeru Fujita adapted Kitarō Kōsaka's original character designs, and Kuniaki Haishima composed the music, including the opening theme, "Grain". The story is Naoki Urasawa's, from his manga of the same name.
