Two patients need Kenzou Tenma on the same night. One is a boy brought in with terrible injuries; the other is the mayor, who has been weighing whether to put money behind the hospital. Tenma, a Japanese neurosurgeon with a considerable name at a large German hospital, takes the boy into the operating room first, and everything he has built is on the table with him. Murders begin turning up soon afterward, and though nothing ties him to any of them, suspicion comes to rest on Tenma.
The series ran from 7 April 2004 to 28 September 2005, 74 episodes in all, animated at Madhouse from the manga by Naoki Urasawa. Drama, mystery, psychological fiction, thriller and horror all have a claim on it, which is a lot of ground for one show to stand on.
Alongside Tenma, the story keeps returning to Johan Liebert and Heinrich Runge. Wolfgang Grimmer moves around the edges of it. The run streams on Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime Video.
