ANALYSIS
What Is a Life’s Worth?
Analysing Existentialism in Urasawa’s Monster
Note: This is a brief analysis of Naoki Urasawa’s 2004 anime, Monster. Spoilers ahead.
Urasawa’s Monster is set in Germany, bobbing forward and backward from the fall of the Iron Curtain. Through masterful narration with flashbacks and tangents, Monster contrasts untold aspects of life in the Soviet state with those in a unified Germany.
The narrative weaves in different themes — from orchestrated eugenics experiments and neo-nazi elements, to the stark contrast between the billionaires of Bavaria and impoverished immigrants in Frankfurt. It shows how the state attempted to reframe the minds of kids using psychological experiments in Soviet Czechoslovakia and make them resilient using physical torture in Special orphanages in East Germany.
The fall of the Iron Curtain marked a tectonic shift in the people’s lives in Europe, which forced them to re-examine their moral framework. As a reflection of the uncertainty and moral ambiguity of today’s world, Urasawa’s Monster takes us down a path where the line between good and evil is blurred. It puts the very nature of life to test and poses the question: What is a life worth saving?
Before answering whether a life is worth saving, philosophers have wracked their minds on a different problem: Are all humans born equal? In the present day, we take it for granted that humans are born equal with inalienable rights.
But when the French enlightenment philosophers — Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesqieu — advocated in the 1700s that men were born free and equal, their writings were considered scandalous and were censored.
Their writings directly contributed to the concept of human rights codified after the French Revolution and in the US Constitution, ‘All men are created equal.’ It unambiguously asserts that all of us were born with an inherent worth.
Society still grapples with that equality in a variety of scenarios. Does a judge adjudicate a murder differently when the victim is a common man vs the head of state? Do we report an accident and its casualties differently if it includes a celebrity? Do we give preferential treatment to someone in a hospital if they are rich and influential?
Monster starts with the latter. The protagonist, Dr. Kenzo Tenma, is one of the best neurosurgeons in the country who considers every life equal. So, when he needs to choose between a 10-year-old East-German orphan, Johan Liebert, and the city’s powerful Mayor for a life-saving operation, he chooses the patient based on who arrived first.
The rest of the show has him coming to terms with the repercussions of that choice. He makes peace with having his career growth stunted vindictively by the Mayor’s coteries. But a decade later, when he realizes that Johan was a child monster who killed his foster parents and grew up to be a manipulative serial killer, Tenma feels compelled to correct his mistake. Monster is Tenma’s odyssey that questions his fundamental belief that all lives are created equal.
To value every life equally is to believe in its potential and capacity for good. It’s a faith that every life has an inherent worth. It’s the same argument used in the litigation against the potential lost. When someone who is handicapped after a car accident sues the at-fault driver for personal injuries, they’re litigating over the lost potential of the future.
So, each time Tenma saves a life, he’s untapping that potential again. But if a saved life ends up taking a multitude, can all those lives be considered equal? Or do we need to exercise discretion on which lives to save and which to discard? Can we attribute the same worth to the lives of Adolf Hitler and Mother Teresa?
If not all lives contribute to society, do some deserve to be weeded out? And if some lives deserve weeding out, then not all of them are born equal. This realization shakes the core of Tenma’s faith in humanity. He transforms from a doctor who saves lives indiscriminately to a sniper willing to kill and eliminate the monster: a monster who believes that all humans die equal.
In complete antithesis to Tenma’s faith is Johan’s conviction, as noted in his words, “Only One Thing Is Equal For All, And That Is Death.” The handsome, intelligent, charming, erudite, but cold-blooded Johan Liebert represents pure evil. There’s no rhyme or reason, motive or agenda in his actions. When Johan says death is the equalizer, he means it in his indiscriminate choice of victims.
I would begrudgingly agree that there’s some wisdom in those words. None of us had any control over our births, which were the accidental creations of other people. How the rest of our lives shape up depends a lot on those people and their circumstances.
At the very basic level, the opportunities people have in life depend on their passport, which often depends on which country they were born in. The course of life for a kid with wealthy parents, who offer elite education and a safe household, can’t be compared to that of a poor kid born in a slum, without access to safe drinking water, let alone basic education. There’s really nothing equal about their lives.
It routinely plays out in the way society and governments handle socio-economic situations or how the press covers natural disasters in rich and poor neighborhoods. The media coverage of Hurricane Sandy in 2012 or Hurricane Laura in 2021 remained largely focused on the impact on the US and its suburban neighborhoods. There was very little coverage when it hit the poorer islands in the Caribbean — Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba, and Bermuda — a week earlier.
But all of these, their fortunes and misfortunes, change the moment people are dead. Contrary to what the ancient Egyptians would have us believe, a rich person buried with a trove of riches wouldn’t be any different than a poor one cremated with trash. They’re both deeply, irreparably, permanently dead.
But if everyone achieves equality in death, then none of their contributions in life matter. With that, both Ted Bundy and Albert Einstein would achieve equality in a casket. If nothing counts at the end of life, then why bother with anything?
As Johan puts it, “In this universe of ours, the birth of a new life on some corner of our planet is nothing but a tiny, insignificant flash. Death is a normal thing. So why live?”
In Greek mythology, when the Corinthian King, Sisyphus, cheats death, the Gods curse him to eternally roll an immense boulder up a hill only for it to roll back down every time he was close to the top. Albert Camus argues in his essay on existentialism, The Myth of Sisyphus, that despite the futility of this endeavor, Sisyphus can find meaning and happiness in his struggle. It symbolizes human resilience.
But normalizing death and negating life is like being Sisyphus and shrugging at the boulder in apathy.
So, which is right — Are we born equal or do we die equal?
Both of these positions are fundamentally fatalistic. If we were born inherently good as Tenma believes or if all of our actions in life were negated in death as Johan advocates, then humans have no real agency over their lives.
It’s another age-old dilemma of nature vs nurture. If everyone is inherently good or evil, then their experiences in life have no impact on them. Whereas, if the human mind was an Aristotelian Tabula Rasa, or a blank slate, with no inherent ideas, and which acquires knowledge through sensory experiences and perceptions, then the life experiences will mould the mind like fresh clay.
As Tenma confronts the realities of life in its million shades of gray, including Johan’s abusive childhood, he begins to embrace that humans aren’t inherently good or evil. Instead, they have a capacity for both, nourished or killed by their life situations.
To demonstrate a hopeful point, Urasawa introduces another abused kid, Dieter, early in the show. When Tenma rescues the abused boy, his spirit is battered to submission without any happy memories or hope for the future.
But with small acts of kindness, such as buying the orphan a soccer ball or keeping his word to come back for him, Tenma sows the seeds of hope. Later, when Dieter consoles Johan’s psychologically traumatized twin-sister Nina, “Tenma said that if you don’t have any happy memories you can just make some,” we see how the seeds of hope have blossomed into a tree.
But without the care and kindness of an adult, could a kid who was subjected to repeated physical tortures and psychological manipulations grow up to be a healthy adult? If the kid had no role models and ethics or myths to latch on to, could he build a moral compass himself?
If such a kid becomes a serial killer, doesn’t society owe him kindness instead of punishment? As Nina tells Johan towards the end of the show, “I forgive you. Even if we were the only people on Earth, I’d forgive you.”
It’s loftily idealistic. Would it change our minds to know that Charles Manson had a violent and abusive childhood with an alcoholic single mother? Would we offer the same sympathy to Manson as we do for Johan?
When covering a crime story, the media often provides a brief background about the perpetrator, such as a war veteran with PTSD or someone who grew up in poverty and neglect. But at what point does it veer into apologetic coverage of the crime? What about accountability for the crime?
It is a thin balance. Without information about the perpetrator’s background, we’re leaving them entirely responsible for the results of systemic injustices. A man stealing a piece of bread because he was starving is very different from another shoplifting a Hermès scarf. The background matters: that is what allows a society to atone for historical injustices.
Like many good stories, Naoki Urasawa’s Monster defies plot summaries. In a layered narration, it builds on historical events and philosophical dilemmas, using the lives of regular people. It is a Hero’s journey — with an initiation, an adventure, and a return — which explores the human condition of pain, misery, actions and inactions, purposelessness, identity, and kindness.
In the beginning, Tenma and Johan come across as two sides of the same coin, with their fatalistic attitudes about human life. But Tenma’s evolution is Monster’s challenge to us to re-evaluate moral absolutes. It eggs us on to examine the complexities of existence where every action, no matter how small, is profoundly consequential.
