Character · Monster
Kenzo Tenma
A neurosurgeon jumps the queue for the mayor, operates on a boy instead, and loses his career the same week.
In Otakana the clue reads: Surgeon who chose the boy over the mayor
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Monster
- Letters
- 5 · Normal
Kenzo Tenma is Japanese, brilliant, and working at a hospital in Dusseldorf when two patients arrive at once. Hospital politics say operate on the mayor. Tenma operates on the child, who has been shot in the head, and the mayor dies. His engagement, his promotion and his department all go with it, and he decides that he did the right thing regardless.
The rest of the series is the bill. He learns years later what the boy has been doing since, concludes that the responsibility is his, and gives up the career he salvaged in order to hunt him across Germany and the Czech Republic. Naoki Urasawa is careful never to let this become simple, because a doctor who kills to correct a life he saved has stopped being a doctor.
Tenma is one of the great decent protagonists in manga, and the series keeps testing him with people who do not deserve saving and whom he saves anyway. Urasawa gives him enough medical skill to matter in nearly any scene, which means the tension is almost always about what he is willing to do rather than about what he is able to do.
Spelling TENMA
TENMA is the family name, which is the one the game wants, and Kenzo stays off the board. Five letters, two vowels, with the NM pair in the middle doing the work: two consonants together is unusual in a Japanese name typed out in English, and it is the shape to look for. The kanji, 天馬, means heavenly horse, the Japanese word for Pegasus.