Nameless Monsters

What’s in a name? Appellation is one of the more intriguing symbols in Naoki Urasawa’s “Monster,” a story that actively explores the lengths that human beings will go to build, protect, absorb, or erase a name and, with it, their place in a society. 1/12

In “Naming a New Self,” scholar Celia Emmelhainz explores the “unstable social balance between an individual’s interest in self-expression and society’s priority on the stable identification of persons within a given social sphere.” 2/12

Emmelhainz concludes that names “act symbolically to make a shifting identity or self-narrative manifest in the social context.” They are ways in which a person attains and defines their presence within a society. Names give us presence in a society and we are beholden to them. 3/12

A key subplot in “Monster” concerns the symbolic reappearance of a fictional children’s storybook called “The Nameless Monster” that drives Johan’s approach to life, featuring the line: “Who needs a name? I’m perfectly happy without one. After all, that’s what we are – nameless monsters.” 4/12

In the storybook, a monster demands people give them their name so it can grow strong. Ironically, it’s from this book that Johan takes the name Johan. Furthermore, the nameless Monster, at the outset, splits into two: “One went east. The other headed west.” 5/12

This duality (relating to our previous thread on the shadow self) invites the reader to view Tenma and Johan as two sides of the same Monster, each moving in different directions, each seeking a name (at least in the metaphorical sense) and each seeking to grow stronger. 6/12

Johan, who quotes the storybook in blood at his crime scenes, becomes a master of manipulation, hiding in the shadows, taking on multiple identities, and growing stronger by methodically striving to erase his past. 7/12

Tenma, as a wanted man, is haunted by his name and the way that it labels him as a criminal, threatening his freedom and putting him in a position of having to restore his good name through his pursuit of Johan and the mystery behind him. 8/12

It is ironic then that clearing his name, for Tenma, becomes a process of helping others, such that his name becomes deeply powerful as testament to his character, even as it puts him on wanted lists. There are thus two societies here valuating Tenma’s name – one informal, one institutional. 9/12

In the end of “The Nameless Monster” the divided selves are finally reconciled when “The boy ate up the monster who went west. At last he had found a name, but there was no longer anyone to call him by it. Such a shame, because Johan was such a wonderful name.” 10/12

The lingering question (amongst others), however, is whether Johan enacted this ending in the conclusion of “Monster” or whether his plan was thwarted by Tenma, thus breaking the destined outcome. The reader is left only with an empty hospital bed upon which to hinge their speculation. 11/12

Such is the grace and complexity of Urasawa’s writing, that its meaning is endlessly debated – thus reflecting a story that surfaces the nuanced ways by which our names can define us, but, more importantly, also how they can consume us entirely. 12/12