Monster Ending, Explained

Monster ends with Johan alive and Tenma's name cleared. In the small German town of Ruhenheim, Johan asks Tenma to shoot him in the forehead, and Tenma does not kill him. According to CBR's ending explainer, the man who does shoot Johan is a townsman named Knaup, and Tenma then operates to save Johan's life, just as he did at the start of the series. Johan survives and stays asleep in a hospital bed; Tenma, cleared of the murders, tracks down the twins' mother. The anime's last image, as CBR describes it, is Johan's hospital bed standing empty beside an open window. This page covers the ending in full.

Sources for this page: Nippon TV's official episode guide (Japanese; translations ours), Anime News Network's reviews, ComicBook, and CBR's Monster ending explainer by Danielle Fois. Who shoots Johan, the surgery, Johan's apparent words at the bedside and the empty bed rest on CBR alone (its sister site Screen Rant, under the same owner, says the same, so we do not count it separately), and we say so where each comes up. We have not rewatched the episodes or reread the manga for this page.

Ruhenheim

The episode guide sets up the town in episodes 68 to 70. Lunge takes a room in a hotel with almost no guests and warns the local police that something terrible is about to happen. The plan, as the synopsis puts it, is to set the residents against one another until they have killed each other off. Tenma finds a picture book that Franz Bonaparta drew under another name; its Japanese title means The House of Rest (our translation), which in German is Ruhenheim. By episode 70 the rain has cut the town off, the phones are dead, and bodies lie in the streets, while Nina decides to go to Ruhenheim to stop what the synopsis calls Johan's “complete suicide.”

Anime News Network's review of the manga's last two volumes describes the same setup on the page: Tenma, Grimmer and Lunge each conclude independently that Bonaparta has been hiding in Ruhenheim, and arrive to find “a very retired Poppe” while Johan's followers quietly hand guns to the townspeople.

Who dies

The episode guide's episode 71 ends with the hotel where Grimmer is sheltering with Bonaparta under heavy fire, and Grimmer running out into it alone. CBR says that Grimmer dies and reads his death as the thing that finally moves Bonaparta to regret his experiments; CBR adds that Bonaparta himself dies later. Roberto, the leader of the group stirring up the killing, is the man Lunge tracks down in episode 72. In episode 73 the guide calls him “dying” when he stops Bonaparta's attempt to kill Johan and himself. None of our sources states outright what becomes of him after that, so we do not either.

Does Tenma shoot Johan?

No. In episode 73, after Bonaparta's attempt fails, the episode guide leaves Tenma and Johan facing each other, and Johan tells Tenma to aim at his forehead and shoot. ComicBook's summary of the ending is that Tenma “has the chance to kill Johan but spares him yet again.” The ANN manga review had framed the same question (“Can Tenma do it?”) and answered only that the outcome “ought to surprise no one.”

The rest of the scene comes from CBR. CBR writes that once Nina appears and forgives Johan, he knows Tenma is even less willing to shoot him, and that this is why he takes a boy, Wim Knaup, hostage. (The episode guide confirms that Wim is in the street when Johan appears.) The shot that finally stops Johan comes from a townsman CBR names in a heading as Herbert Knaup, earlier mocked by his neighbors as someone who could not shoot anyone if he tried. CBR calls it a real shock for viewers who expected Tenma, Nina or Lunge to be the one.

The last episode

Episode 74 is an epilogue. In the official synopsis, the serial-murder charges against Tenma have been lifted and the survivors are taking new steps. Tenma works abroad with Doctors Without Borders and, on the side, looks for the twins' mother. He finds her and, after visiting many times, is finally allowed to hear about the twins. Then he goes to Johan, who survived and has remained asleep since Ruhenheim.

CBR fills in what follows. It says Tenma “ends the story as he began it, by conducting surgery to save Johan's life,” and reads that as proof that Johan failed to turn him into a murderer. At the bedside, according to CBR, Johan seems to sit up and speak to Tenma about his mother, and then Tenma blinks and Johan is asleep again; CBR takes this as strongly suggesting Tenma imagined it. The final shot, CBR writes, is Johan's empty hospital bed with an open window nearby, which “seems to suggest that Johan fled and escaped.” ComicBook's summary agrees that “Johan disappears, leaving behind an eerie and open-ended conclusion.”

The ANN manga reviewer, Casey Brienza, says Urasawa borrowed from William Styron's Sophie's Choice for the manga's concluding image, keeps the details vague on purpose, and argues that changing the narrative perspective drains the borrowing of its force. We leave the reviewer's comparison at that.

Why the ending feels unfinished

Both ANN reviews of the anime's final run admit the finale can disappoint. Carl Kimlinger's review of episodes 61 to 74 notes that a whole episode goes to following up on the cast before “one last shock,” and that “the facile resolution of Tenma's dilemma” can feel like a cop-out. James Beckett's review of episodes 43 to 74 argues that the “emptiness and uncertainty” of the final moments is intentional, and that the point is that we must keep on living after the credits.

Our reading builds on that. Monster spends 74 episodes asking whether Tenma was wrong to save Johan, and the ending answers by having him do it again. Johan asks to die by Tenma's hand, someone else fires, and Tenma's last act on the case is the same operation that started it. Then the bed is empty. The series gives Tenma his innocence back and takes away any certainty that the danger is over. That is our interpretation, not a statement by Urasawa.

Where to go from here

The manga ran to eighteen volumes; VIZ's current Perfect Edition completes it in nine books. For the characters the ending resolves, see Tenma and the responsibility of saving a life, Lunge, Nina, Eva and Grimmer and Suk.