Chapter I 

ウッチャリ

1.

A trail of berries cuts through the fog-soaked amusement park. 

The berries glow as little red stars on the cosmos-black ground, leading to a rollercoaster—its twin in red—pulsing and still, waiting.

Creak. The rusty door opens. A shimmer flickers on the seat and sharpens into a card under a touch. One half shows a trickster from a chaotic literary world; the other, his gambling-loving ancestor. The same ink bloodline.

And—

Why is the velvety line like a long-lost friend? Why is the card like a forgotten gift from years ago? Why does it look like an undiscovered story’s cover?

Uncle?

2.

When K. opens her eyes, there is no amusement park, only an empty and dim-lit ramen shop. 

Just another weirdo dream.

She yawns and takes empty bowls to the sink. Uncle. Yeah, she wishes she had anyone to call that. Stupid dream lingers on her like the forest bedding on her shoes after a run.

No boss lurking, no customers lingering, she can slip out to her reading hut—her mist-wrapped forever morning.

The eyeglasses on the cover—round with black frames—remind her of Uncle. 

What? There is no Uncle. She snaps the book open and a card thuds against her palm.

3.

K. always dreamed of peeling back reality’s fabric and experiencing the unknown. The saying that never sat right with her—be careful what you wish for—had a sharp point piercing her.

It’s like the swinging boat ride all over again: her stomach somersaults, and oh god, don’t puke, don’t fall, no—

She lands on the grass—soft, yes, but treacherous, a fragile thread barely holding her to this world. She gulps the doughy air. When will this stop—never breathe again?

The card. She tightens her fingers on it. The spinning stops.

The hut stands. Her thoughts lurch, she’s not fully back yet.

4.

Everything is normal.

The oaks. The half-sand, half-stone paths. The holey fence slouching from the forest to the shop. She’s been gone too long, her boss will kill her.

Everything is normal.

Was the house—violets on the gate—always here? Probably. She walks faster.

It’s always so empty at this hour. She likes this stillness. The weirdness? That’s just the dizzy dream messing with her. That’s all.

Everything—

Her fingers twitch against the card in her pocket. It replaced the keys. Where the hell are her keys? 

Everything is—

The card presses against her palm, ink-sticky. No. This is not normal.

5.

The wooden shop door won’t budge. Her keys—great, still replaced by that useless card.

K. presses her face into the window. Inside, everything’s blurry—as if someone dragged a giant brush and eraser slowly across the glass.

What is she supposed to do? 

She reaches for the book and leafs through it. The words are replaced by one gibberish passage on the last page: 

Ɛ x 9ᔭㄥ

Cold teeth bite at her calves. Panic crawls up her spine on its spiky legs—like the buzz from too many magic-infused chocolates at the Red Lodge cafe.

No choice left—she needs to get out.

Chapter II

顔が嘘って。今日も

1.

Is this a place only K. can enter?

She hates the thought—hellishly self-centered—but what else could explain time turning into static just for her?

A scenario she’s daydreamed, nightmared, but never thought it’d look back at her with multitudes of eyes.

Her vision flickers, then snaps back. The usual “Guitar lessons” (not her age range) and “Have you seen this cat?” (heartbreaking) fade into manga panels.

There’s the same shimmer from her dream. Her fingers jump toward it—and it vanishes.

The inky line, the long-lost friend, is back. Why does her chest tighten? Friends shouldn’t make her palms sweat, right?

2.

It’s a repeated panel: a figure in a fur cap with two suitcases chasing a rush of white smoke. Too specific to be new, too strange to remember.

She’s supposed to take the train? Sure. Why not. Like this whole place isn’t already folded wrong-side-out.

The train jolts as K. steps in. She hits the floor. Dignity: gone. It’s fine. Fine.

Colors blur past, too vivid to be real. In her usual world, they’d melt the stone in her gut.

But this isn’t that world.

Can she still call it home if she’s not sure she’ll ever make it back?

3.

A message flutters on the window—too fast to read, but not to feel. The train halts. Outside, the air hits like déjà vu: mossy, floral, thick with foreign words, suffocating like a demon’s breath.

She walks the sandy asphalt. The signs shake with the same furious red that blistered through the dream that still clings like sweat to her skin.

Risky, sure—but it’s not like risk ever asked for her consent.

K. hates following rules. She hates not knowing them more.

At the end of the path: a carnival gate. Something human-shaped smiles—wrong enough to run, warm enough to follow.

4.

When she looks closer, the figure resolves into the shape of a man—maybe in his fifties, maybe older. Hard to tell. His features won’t stay still, like someone sketched him from memory and kept erasing, redrawing, smudging the edges.

The lines he’s built of aren’t hers, not quite the inky ones either. Something between.

No time to stare—not here, not in this hall with only one object: a humming slot machine.

The man-not-man shows his teeth in something between menace and fondness. The stone inside her fractures into splinters.

“One pull. One message. If you win, he will hear you.”

5.

“And why should I trust you?”

He shrugs; stapled smirk, dry eyes, hand stroking the machine like a wildcat. “Insert the card. Push the button. Hope. This is all you have.”

Every part of her bristles. Being told what to do makes her want to bite something—chew until it bleeds. But she shoves the card in, jaw locked, eyes pointed anywhere but him.

Whoever—or whatever—he is.

The machine flickers. Berry. Berry. —

Static.

“Tough luck.” He snaps his fingers—

And the world collapses inward like hot plastic.

The floor groans, K. stumbles, heat crawling up her neck.

She’s done playing pawn.

Chapter III

ギャフン

1.

After the world collapses, only L-shaped puddles remain. K. jumps from one to another.

The signs glow blue now, gentle as a breeze. Her chest tugs toward the light. No. She won’t fall for it. Not after signs tore the world apart.

Not easy to blame it—she’s the one who pulled the lever.

Doesn’t matter. Run.

Something wants to eat her? Let it. A manga panel monster? Fine. But only on her terms.

She slips. Darkness lashes her ankle—slick as spilled pen stroke—

shitshitshit—

it squeezes—

she kicks—

climbs—

Another train hovers suspended midair. K. jumps right into its mouth.

2.

This train glides. K. stays upright as colors sharpen—heart-shaped gardens, a mansion devoured by violets.

She exhales. The note she wanted to send to Uncle? Nonsense anyway. Who cares. But her hand drifts to her pocket—empty. Just fabric and the shape of absence. Stupid.

She almost sees it—his ink-stained shadow, dragging behind her like a second spine.

She bites it back. If that thing kept his word, he’d twist it—warp it—send Uncle a lie sewn into her handwriting. If Uncle is real, that is.

She stacks excuses like groceries, hoping neatness would quiet her gut ache.

It doesn’t. Only waits.

3.

She slaps the stop sign on a twitch of doubt. 

She can’t ride forever. Not when her watch spins like a curse and the train’s lamps carve slow halos through the air.

She needs to study the laws of this place. Map them, pin them, nail them down before they slip. The platform crackles like a stormcloud—might be her best shot.

The thought chews at her nerves. A warning? A thrill? Something buried beneath both.

The card, Uncle, not the end, just the hook. And maybe she’s already a character on someone else’s page—drawn in before she chose a pen.

4.

Gravity’s both a joke and a threat. K. flips the book open again. The gibberish on the last page grins smugly.

She almost steps into a yellow lump. Probably a fruit; it’s marked with a fresh bite. K. glances over her shoulder. Who left it here?

She doesn’t want to eat it, she wants to read it. She carves it open with the pen, skin puckers and splits, juice spilling onto the paper, not soaking, but blooming into gold dust, sharp of spice and lavender.

The pen is pulsing in her hand.

And then—

the air breaks like wet paper.

5.

K. freezes—gut twisting into a fist. Not this again. How many times? She should drop it. Forget Uncle.

She turns to bolt—

—and the bridge flickers into place, half-drawn, an abandoned doodle. It looks like it belongs in Southern France—except on a map created by someone who either doesn’t know or wants to mock.

Running won’t save her. She steps forward—then sees it: a manga panel. Uncle laughing at her joke. But it melts before she can absorb it.

Only a note remains: Your Uncle? Trust shattered. Danger ahead.

Her pulse spikes, demanding answers that will shush the wildfire inside.

Chapter IV

狸

1.

At the bridge’s end, a bar looms. Behind the counter: an older man with a handkerchief in the pocket of his velvet suit and a dotted bowtie. Is this—

She’s about to dive in, but then—something’s off. His lines are too neat and too easy. He’s not a silver fox, more like a thirty-something cosplaying one, badly.

Warning bells hiss under her ribs, but hell—she’s already here. What’s she gonna do now, moonwalk out?

“Clever trick,” she mutters, scanning him like a slippery shell cracked just enough to spill venom. “Think a cleaned-up avatar makes me forget the slot machine?”

2.

“Oh you sneaky little so-and-so,” he laughs. “I thought the necktie would do the trick. Touché.” 

The bar rips sideways, peeling back like a movie set—and there it is again: the amusement park from her dream, bathed in that same red-and-black palette. 

Her throat clenches. The walls throb with her messy handwriting.

Uncle is real. I know he is.

I need to find him.

What if I made him up?

“Delicious self-prophecy. You’re such a talented self-mocker, I didn’t even have to touch the pen.”

K.’s middle school nightmare slams back: strangers reading the chaotic pages inside her head.

3.

He pulls a cigarette from thin air. “Nice skill, right? Not gonna save you from being ripped off.”

K. puts two and two together—and it’s the hardest equation in her humble maths career. Is he saying—Uncle is—

Time hiccups. The thought doesn’t land, it detonates.

“Oh, you’re so afraid of this possibility, you can’t even think about it! Poor little bunny.”

Right. The goddamn mind-reading wall. She slams the door on that thought. The weirdo’s had enough of a peek.

“Who are you calling the weirdo?” he sneers. “I’m not the one chasing bedtime stories like they owe me closure.”

4.

“So, my fluffy cutie—still wanna see him?” He blows a smoke. “Or are you scared he’s one of them—the ones who charm like poets and rot like corpses? You know the type. You’ve read their confessions by night, haven’t you?”

A tremor shakes her hands, but she forces them still. “You think I’m new to this?”

His too-silver hair glitches into short, wispy brown strands. K. stabs him with her laser beam stare, raking the smoke aside like a curtain. “Do you think I’m looking for a fucking role model? You think I’m what—twelve? I came here for a conversation.”

5.

K.’s done letting some uncanny shadow pretend it knows her. The golden dust thrums inside her—she reaches for her pen and notebook.

“Be careful with your little toys,” he purrs, a brief lilt slicing through his usual tenor. “They’re more dangerous than you think. I also thought I was careful. And now—”

She shuts him down with a scrawl: SCRAM.

She aims to push him off. Instead, he crumbles into shrieking dust that twists into a shiny paper plane and silently glides away.

There’s ink on her hands and face. The darkness claws in without tearing the world apart.

Chapter V

認められない 弟子

狸

1.

K. hugs her knees, nothingness pressing against her bones.

This is too easy. No shaking, no voice snarling about the end, just an ice shard raking her insides and her breath fogging.

Would the ink smeared on her sting more if it reeked like old coins?

The frost climbs her throat. Murder? Self-defense? Does it even matter here?

She wants to go home. But which home? The one with all her books, the one drowned in unbearable silence, the one eroded by memory?

Three homes.

A pen creaks; a door appears.

“Oh, you poor child. You need to eat something.”

2. 

It’s an elderly woman built of ink lines that smudge like fingerprints.

The bite’s there—brewing—but K. stays silent. She’s—it’s been ages since she last ate—stupid notebook and pen won’t conjure food—

“I know, I know, it’s hard to find good food here.”

Is this woman digging into her mind? Damn—the thought-wall again? K. glances left and right. No sign of it—but then why does she feel so thought-naked?

“Come. I’ll make you an udon bowl.”

K. wants to scream no, stomp and sulk, lash out in a bratty storm. But she isn’t a poor child anymore—only a starving, exhausted adult.

3.

1941 hangs above the door. Her name is Kumi.

Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. She drums the bowl—four beats that stop K. mid-scoop of curry thick with quiet history.

The rhythm nips her neck. Uncle’s guitar—he’d tap it like this before saying her name.

Sure.

The udon seeps in, quieting the stubborn brat inside her.

“If only my chef loved as much as you do.”

Kumi glances at the faded portrait—ladle raised, soft wrinkles catching the dim light. Some old man’s approval? Please. She’s folded flavors into broth since before K. could talk.

“Your chef—”

But Kumi’s gone, swallowed by shadows.

4.

Rock & roll hums through curry-stained spoons. “My sister always asks for extra eggroll.”

A hoodie hides heart-shaped acne. “Told them I trained under Kamado. Chef loved my tempura—never mind.”

Messy bun, crow’s feet, a soap-opera quote on her mug. “He says my udon’s too soft. She says my heart is.”

Old cookbooks, recipes flecked in gold dust. Silence.

Thirteen hours, zero tips. “I need a dentist, a rheumatologist, and food that’s good. Not just decent.”

Thinning hair, calloused hands. “All I want is a nod. A tiny one.”

Seven faces, one passion.

Kumi returns with a plate of seven fruits.

5.

“Okay, what the hell—you were seven people.”

“What are you talking about, dear? I got dessert.”

Her eyes flick furiously to the portrait—but Kumi’s absent smile turns fire to hush.

She looks back: six berries on the man’s plate.

She grabs the card (the notebook and pen still burning). Berries. She presses it—

Click.

The painting tips—
crashes down—
revealing:
_ x 6 _ _
A lock.

Three homes.
Four taps.
Seven selves.

The numbers fall into place. Never gibberish or smug—just waiting for her to look closer.

“I always knew,” Kumi says. “They only let me leave the six.”

Chapter VI

シーラカンス

1. 

The door slams before K. can say thank you. 

Kumi. 

Her body craves the false promise of safety, her mind drags her across the cosmos-black floor.

The corridor shifts behind her gaze—doorframes glitching like old TV pixels and bleeding bruised green and sickly pink.

Rot sours the smell of burnt paper and ink. K. pulls her sleeve over her face, there’s something—

when—

he’s supposed to be—

gone—

A pixel puppet with strings cut mid-glitch-performance. She presses against the wall—

and recoils with a gasp. The red is oozing up her skin.

He’s not trying to play the gentleman anymore.

2.

The fractured splinters inside her liquefy into panic. She bolts door to door. He follows, a static and close breath.

Every door slams into the next—

too fast to parse, too loud to forget. A four-legged fish drawing its tank in chalk, her bedroom in the wrong shade of blue.

His voice scratches the air, echoing through vents. The notebook and pen—the bombs she forgot how to defuse—are the only things that might help. She grabs, but her fingers miss. 

The notebook and pen dissolve into darkness. He glitches—becoming the figure in the fur hat.

It’s a win for him.

3.

He used to wear the smile of someone who knows her journals by heart. Now it’s so blank she can’t read it.

“This is what you wanted, right? Someone who tells you yes. Even when your ideas make no sense and you’re spiraling again.”

Each word nicks her open with surgical precision.

It’s over. Her weapon’s gone. She curls into a crumpled knot behind the crate, her face slick with tears and snot.

He kneels with a tired sigh. “You still don’t get it. I’m not here for you.” He pauses. “I’m here because no one was there for me.”

4.

He morphs into mascot-her: blue cat ears, baseball cap, and lines begging for love. “I thought he’d match the version I drew in my head, too.”

His voice drips with hollow wisdom, his ears are swollen with self-importance. 

K. wipes her face, straightening, still on shaking legs. “It’s just a sketch. But I need it.”

He tilts her head. “You don’t. And you don’t need the notebook or pen to erase me. Just do it. Please. No one can live like this.”

Her hand twitches—reaches out, then jerks back. His pixels smear into vapor.

She’s left alone with the silence.

5.

This reality gasps its dying breath with him. A new opening tears open the dark—the mansion devoured by violets looms again.

There is no door, only a ladder. K. climbs it—pale blue butterflies bursting mid-wingbeat around her. The ladder coils beneath her grip; it won’t stop her.

Her hands burn; she pants. The sky isn’t sky anymore—it’s paper, ash, whatever it wants to be.

A figure shifts in the fog. Her vision fuzzes when a hand extends through the mist. She hesitates. Grabs it.

The grip is firm and it fills her with an unknown strength.

She won’t let go.

This fic is in dialogue with my accompanying essay.

Content warnings: abusive parent-child dynamics (including coercive control), misogyny, ethnic discrimination, slurs, implied sexual abuse, emotional manipulation, post-war trauma

The night was deep and sweet with the perfume of linden trees. Klaus climbed through his bedroom window and dropped onto the soft and dew-covered lawn. Using the door was out of the question—his father was still shut in his office, steeped in tobacco and suspicion.

He glanced over his shoulder to make sure no one saw him stealing strawberries from his mother’s old garden—the green-and-red palace once dismissed as bourgeois indulgence.

---

She sat by the apple tree, her braid coiled at her nape, her grandmother’s blanket wrapped around her, all diamonds and zigzags. Klaus twisted his face into a lie of a smile—he couldn’t imagine wearing his otherness like a pattern on his shoulders.

She shuddered when Klaus put the strawberry basket in front of her—then laughter bubbled up and her arms curled around his neck.

It was only him. Not Miloš who was immune to a no. Not Janek who spun stories about the clearing behind the school. Not Aleš who ogled her like she was one of the smuggled Brno nudes hidden under his brother’s bed.

Only him—fists trembling in silence, head full of fights he couldn’t start, tongue tied by the language that still made people fall silent—to fight back meant being turned into a pulp sourer than July apples.

She was braver. Brave enough to bloody noses, brave enough to walk past them chin-high while they spat švábská děvka and míšenka like grenades.

Brave enough to let Klaus see her tears when it went too far.

---

Blonde hair and stolen strawberries—she slid them into her mouth with a playful smile.

A pretty face on a pretty landscape. It was too easy to miss the scar she hid under a pinch of her mother’s precious powder, the stories born in her sketchbook, and the way she turned German from a language of guilt and pain into the language of fairy tales.

But it wasn’t always safe—

Pretty faces on pretty landscapes shouldn’t scoff with contempt, shouldn’t have greasy hair, shouldn’t sketch girls they met in churches where stone walls held bilingual prayers.

“You know.” She left red stains on her skirt. “When I see Lída, I understand boys a little bit better.”

Ironic—girls only made Klaus’s confusion louder.

But S. made him understand why girls went weak for boys.

A name he wouldn’t dare to say aloud even in his thoughts.

---

The cold, a mix of mountain air and factory smoke, bit their faces. She pulled him under the blanket, shielding them from the night’s cool teeth, and told him about the dragon she brought to life last week

A promising skeleton—wings stretching wide, fire still entrapped in its throat. Klaus caught the monster’s shadow lurking in the woods, wandering from his poem to her drawings.

The loop of understanding.

“I’m not sure about my next step.” She tilted her head. “Should he eat the dog or—”

“What if he instead helped the cat go to the other side of the river?”

She giggled like he’d pulled a thread she hadn’t noticed was there. Her hand stayed near his on the blanket. “Cute idea. But I don’t think he’s this kind of dragon.”

“What is he, then?”

“I don’t know. Maybe the kind that waits until the river’s done with it.”

---

“Your medical school exams are getting closer,” she said, quieter than anything else that night.

They were walking slowly. He didn’t want to take her back yet. Or ever.

Klaus shoved his hands into his pockets. It was what he needed—what he worked for. His ticket out. A better place. But—

“Come with me to Prague. Please. You can stay with me. Finish school there. Then uni. We’ll—we’ll find people like us.”

She grunted and shook her head. “You make it sound so easy.”

“It could be. I mean, my father has connections, and if I can just—”

“It’s not that easy.” She looked at her shoes. “Your father—the connections—I mean you know it can lock us up, right?”

Of course. He knew that. He knew that, but it stopped him from becoming a prisoner in his bedroom.

“Still—” she continued with a lighter voice. “I’d like to try. And—I always wanted to see Berlin, you know?”

Klaus grinned—grinned for real, sharp-toothed and too wide—and leaned in to press a kiss to her forehead.

---

The linden scent clung to him like the hope rising in his chest as he neared home.

Maybe she was right about Berlin. In Prague, their names still marked them. In Berlin, they’d stop noticing.

The window was still open. Good. He climbed up—
Smoke. In his room.
He almost fell.

His father sat on the bed, cigarette in hand, face hidden in shadow. He patted the spot next to him like the head of a too-loyal dog.

Klaus’s body obeyed before his brain could argue.

“Your girlfriend. Pretty thing.” He lifted the oil lamp just enough to cast Klaus in gold and ash. “You’re wearing this nice shirt for her? She’s making you soft, wie niedlich.” 

He adjusted Klaus’s collar, his fingers brushing his earlobe, sending a shiver soaked in self-hate.

Klaus tried to move. His father’s hand clamped cold around his bare arm.

“Next time, be quieter sneaking out, mein kleiner Nachtschwärmer. I’m patient with broken rules. Others won’t be.”

Klaus clenched his teeth. Why wasn’t he like the other fathers? Why couldn’t he just hit and yell at him and skip the gentle interrogation part?

“I think my patience might end if you get her pregnant.”

These words should hit like a warning or a threat, but all Klaus could feel was a mocking cut right through his underbelly.

He shifted the cigarette, close enough to warm the skin beneath Klaus’s jaw. Too close. Klaus flinched. 

But the only burn that came was with the tears in Klaus’s eyes as his father patted his back before leaving his room. “You’re still just a boy. Don’t forget that.” 

He wasn’t sure whether he wanted the fire from that damn cigarette to singe his throat or his father’s.

---

The night was stubbornly windless. Klaus flailed his arms like a desperate idiot, coughing as if he could claw the smoke from his lungs. But it was too late. The room reeked of him—has been for years.

The linden perfume was gone, eaten whole.

He collapsed at his desk. Furious, useless scribbling. Maybe it was too late for him. But if he worked fast enough, maybe he could keep the smoke from spreading.

The dragon, the cat, the dog.

Maybe he should go the traditional way—

And let the dragon eat the old man.

Content warnings: Post-WWII displacement and ethnic persecution, systematic state violence, reproductive coercion, intergenerational trauma, forced family separation, imprisonment, and methodological violence in journalistic contexts.

Since Another Monster doesn’t have an official English translation and I don’t speak either Japanese or Spanish, I have to rely on a fan translation. If you notice a mistake that changes the meaning of the original text in a significant way, please let me know. Thanks!

Confession time: I think the fact that we’re dealing with a fan translation—not a meticulous official one—actually adds to the experience. This is, after all, a story built from half-stories—crumbs of narratives that shift and mutate in a multilingual game of telephone, decorated with quick pencil sketches. 

Doesn’t an amateur translation suit this story better than any definitive version ever could?

But what is the origin of this beautiful mess? Can we trace it to one point—or will we end up like Werner Weber, consumed by the Monster he tried to resurrect?

Takashi Nagasaki—Another Monster’s translator—warns the reader in his afterword:

But I can say this much: the experiment that created Johan still has its adherents. 

Anyone chasing after Sebe/Poppe/Paroubek will suffer the same fate as Weber.

What if, instead of chasing neat villain origin stories, we asked better questions—questions about the fault lines running through Bonaparta’s shattered identities: his mixed nationality, the myths he spun around family, and his messy dance with gender and sexuality? What if we asked them through the women—each stripped of her humanity to serve the artifice?

The nameless Jablonec girl

She’s half-German, half-Czechoslovakian, probably Bonaparta’s age, and born from a rumor. All we know about her comes secondhand. Of course, people from a small town will say a boy and a girl fell in love—what else could it be, right?

There was a Sudeten German who was nevertheless a friend to the Czech people. This man was the genius who helped the Communist coup succeed, and he had a son. The son fell in love with a beautiful girl of German and Czech descent, but the girl and his father fell in love.

Weber presents his terrible imaginings with no evidence or foundation and it says more about his biases and his obsession with neat (but ultimately flattening) parallels than about the people he tries to frame. He reduces the girl to an archetype: a beauty the son and the father fight over. He says they fell in love without questioning what it means in a broader context: Terner Poppe is old enough to be her father and holds significant power as a member of the communist regime. It all happens in Jablonec—a town that was part of Germany from 1938 to 1945, before its German population was forcibly expelled after the war.

The love soon ended, and the girl married a Czech man from the next town, based on his German lineage.

Weber doesn’t question why this girl decided to marry someone from the next town right after the love ended. That town is Liberec—the hometown of Stefan Verdemann, a half-German, half-Czechoslovakian man who would later play a mysterious role in Bonaparta’s story, one that Weber struggles to fully understand.

Verdemann—unlike the girl—has an existence outside Bonaparta in Weber’s narrative. 

At that time, the woman he had loved got in touch with him. She told him that her son wanted to become a career soldier. But because her husband was of German lineage, she doubted that she could get a recommendation to the military academy for a minority child. But he gladly granted her this favor. He planned to keep an eye on her son. When the boy became an adult, he would conduct an experiment with him. Because the boy had splendid genes dwelling within him…

Weber doesn’t ask the questions that might complicate his parallel-driven narrative. Why would a woman of mixed heritage, who got pregnant under questionable circumstances, seek help from Bonaparta? Isn’t her son’s mixed descent—half German, half Czechoslovakian—at odds with the so-called purity of the Czechoslovakian race and the idea of splendid genes? Is she asking him for help simply because he holds power now? Or is there something else beneath it—something buried in their shared past, maybe a shared abuser who might also be the boy’s biological father?

The actress with only a last name

She’s Bonaparta’s ex-wife—though even that’s a question mark. Their son has only partial information, and it’s all second-hand, mostly from what Tenma pieced together. Nothing direct, nothing certain.

Jaromir Lipský’s material is stories told by people who knew his mother, plus fragments of his own experience. Don’t underestimate him: he’s a clever and competent storyteller—and as every clever and competent storyteller knows, withholding can be a powerful tool. He gives out information in measured drops. 

My mother was actually quite an actress. They said she was one of the stars of the stage in Prague. This was in the ’50s. She would do female renditions of “Jack the Ripper” and “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” I guess nowadays they would call those split-personality roles. When my mother would change personalities on stage, she didn’t change her make-up, she changed her expressions and her voice, like a completely different woman, they said.

He shares with Weber a sketch: an actress performing gender-bent versions of violent male archetypes in beer hall basements. She’s arrested. She’s observed. Her brain fascinated Bonaparta. Her acting was so convincing that he—and his colleagues—started asking: is this something dangerous?

We’ve got beer halls—meeting grounds for outcasts. We’ve got male roles reimagined and gender-swapped. We’ve got the 1950s, when psychiatry was obsessed with sexuality and couldn’t tell the difference between gender identity and delusion. And we’ve got Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Jack the Ripper—not just multiple personalities, but masculinity as a predatory force.

What does it look like when she does it?

And we’ve got Bonaparta: young, powerful, fractured. Maybe the one who destroyed his tyrant father. Working in a system where suppressing who you are isn’t just welcomed—it’s required.

And the more you have to suppress…

Lipský scatters breadcrumbs for Weber—enough to form an incomplete picture of a man who sets the stage for a talented performer. She gives a great performance. She exits the stage. But at what cost?

Lipský says he never met his father—does that mean Bonaparta left Mrs. Lipský before their child was born, or at least before the boy could remember him? What exactly drove him away? Does his relationship with his father play a role here?

Either way: that puts us in the 1960s. This is when Stefan Verdemann meets Franz Bonaparta. He describes him in the following way in the notebook his son hands Tenma years later: knows much about tea, looks frankly aristocratic in his fine suit, a very quiet man.

Inspector Lunge tells Verdemann Jr. that his father ran a radio program called International Fairy Tales, which always opened with Over the Rainbow. Verdemann Sr. met with Bonaparta either at the editor’s house or a farmhouse deep in the Czechoslovakian countryside and in August ’66 covered Klaus Poppe’s Where Am I?

He knows Bonaparta’s real name. And yes—he’s a spy.

The nameless and named mother of the twins

Her existence is a Schrödinger’s paradox with multiple names: Anna, Maruška, and Věra. Weber splits her into two chapters: Anna and Anna Part II.

In Anna, Hauserová, a Charter 77 activist and investigator, presents the story through a systemic lens: multiple women fall in love, get pregnant, lose their partners to disappearance, and have their babies taken by the secret police. She highlights collective trauma.

Weber, by contrast, obsessively narrows in on a single figure—the mother who gave birth to the twins later known as the Liebert twins. This fixation shapes his narrative, privileging the singular over the systemic. It reflects a search for identity and truth within one personal story, rather than addressing the broader social reality.

— Do you know anything about Johan’s mother?

When you mentioned this over the phone, it reminded me of someone. In fact, I just got back from the Libri Prohibiti.

— Libri Prohibiti?

It is a library that stocks books that were banned or published underground during the old regime… Some of my compatriots’ writings and journals are kept there as well. I was searching for the journal of an activist named Jirik Letzel, who died in prison in 1982. I searched for this because he once told me that he was harboring a witness to what he called “the most vile and inhumane crime our government has ever perpetrated.” Soon after, he was apprehended by government agents, and died of a sickness in a penitentiary near Prague several months later.

— And did you find something in Letzel’s journal?

Yes, and it matched up with your story. He wrote that he had hidden a woman in one of his hideouts, on the Mill Colonnade in Prague. More precisely… (puts on glasses and looks at her notepad) “Today, I hide an activist from my hometown, a beautiful woman with blonde hair and blue eyes, at the hideaway on Mill Colonnade. She has with her a twin son and daughter, also very handsome, and fortunately they are quiet and obedient. I will keep her here for a time, until we can reveal the truth, the entire shocking truth, to all.”

— What was his hometown?

I seem to remember that it was Brno. She might have been a graduate of Brno University. Brno is in the center of the Moravia region. Mendel, the father of genetics, lived in a monastery there. If my memory is correct, Jirik Letzel said that she studied genetic engineering at school, met a man on vacation in Prague, and found herself involved in a secret national project.

All of this information is very specific and could lead to finding the one woman Weber is looking for—if approached methodically through archival research, university records, or activist networks. 

The problem is the way Weber butchers Hauserová’s method to confirm his biases. In Anna Part II, Weber copies Hauserová’s investigative approach but corrupts it at the crucial moment: he uses a missing person’s ad, but what is the missing person’s picture? The sketch made by Bonaparta.

I interviewed four people in this region — after hearing about Ms. Hauserová’s methods, I decided to place a missing persons ad in the newspaper, this time including the sketch of the pregnant woman which Bonaparta had left behind. This resulted in more than twenty people contacting us. However, only four of them had information that held any potential.

Weber doesn’t disclose his methodology for filtering responses, accepting only four testimonies without explanation. This selective curation suggests he retained only those accounts that aligned with his existing assumptions about the twins’ mother.

Marie Kavanová, a 68-year-old woman who manages a boarding house for female students at Brno University says Anna was a beautiful woman with great grades, the kind who studied twice as hard as everyone else. She traveled all around, from Prague to Bohemia to seek her career path. When she didn’t return after two months, Mrs. Kavanová contacted the university and found out that this woman never studied there. This is when she contacted the police: a detective—someone wearing glasses and with a big nose—told her that the woman was found in Prague with a man.

Ms. Kavanová showed me the old photograph. The picture showed a woman with radiant blonde hair and blue eyes, her expression full of hope. She was beautiful. And she was the spitting image of the woman in the sketch.

Jana Kubelková, a 50-year-old club singer, says Anna was a very talented singer who could mimic any woman’s voice. It was her talent that saved Jana when the police came to her dressing room to interrogate her: she was an anti-government activist. 

Anna got into trouble and was chased, had a child, and admitted that the name Anna was only an alias for her part-time job and that her real name was Maruška.

At the end of the interview I showed her the photograph I’d borrowed from Ms. Kavanová. She studied it intently and then flatly declared, “That’s her, no doubt about it.”

The third interviewed person wants to remain anonymous. He worked at the University of Brno and uses an alias: Antonin Kohout.

Kohout says the young woman from the sketch was a student who studied genetics and who had twice the talent of everyone else. He also says that all her documents and her name were instructed to be erased before she could graduate.

As I understood it, it was more that she was doing research that touched on state secrets, so they ordered her personal history to be deleted. Because she was a brilliant student… The university surely had to have reported to the government via the Party. And then the government probably recruited her to a research institution somewhere. Then decades later when she retires, her name will suddenly appear on the registry of graduates. Maybe even as the valedictorian of her class. That sort of thing happens all the time.

He doesn’t remember the woman’s name: only that she was exceptionally beautiful, exactly as in the sketch.

The fourth interviewee is Hana Arnetová, a 49-year-old woman who was an aspiring actress in 1974. Despite Weber’s insistence on calling her former roommate Anna, Arnetová herself refers to the woman as Věra.

Arnetová describes Věra as a Brno university student with a strict school teacher for a father. Her boyfriend was probably a Czech of German descent, and Věra herself may have been half-Czech, half-German.

Věra confessed to Arnetová about her twin sister who died after the birth.

Viera is Viera, but as a young girl, she lived with the fear that she herself might have killed her sister in the womb and thought that her mother hated her for that. She would always say things like, “I have to do my sister’s share of studying,” or “I have to be happy in my sister’s place.” I think she felt she had to do twice as much to live her life for two people.”

Weber ends the Anna chapter with the following statement: 

It would be presumptuous to comment on the people who appeared in this chapter, nor do I intend to insert my opinions and deductions, because I believe each of them spoke the truth. Nevertheless, I have a feeling there is a clue to be found in Mr. Kohout’s story. If few people have come forward who remember the twins’ mother, maybe it’s not because they want to conceal something from the past, but rather, their silence is to maintain a secret of the present.

From this, we can deduce that Weber believes he has indeed found the twins’ mother. But what if each testimony describes a different woman? What if Anna, Maruška, and Věra are separate people sharing only the surface-level traits common to many women of that time and place?

Weber selectively uses information that aligns with his assumptions about the twins’ mother and with Bonaparta’s sketch. Yet the sketch may not depict any specific individual at all, but rather an idealized type—one that serves both the eugenist program’s criteria and Bonaparta’s particular fixations.

What were those other twenty people saying that didn’t have potential? Were they describing women who didn’t fit the beauty and education standards? Too many different women who couldn’t be collapsed into one story? Weber’s dismissal of these testimonies reveals his predetermined narrative framework more than any factual investigation.

Weber says he won’t insert opinions but immediately contradicts himself by suggesting the silence is about maintaining a secret of the present rather than acknowledging he might have found multiple different women’s stories. His obsession with solving the puzzle blinds him to the systematic violence right in front of him, reducing an entire pattern of state-sponsored reproductive coercion against activist women to one origin story.

For all of Weber’s accumulated evidence, we remain no closer to knowing who the twins’ mother actually was—only that she fit the same general profile as other women victimized by the state program.

Weber believes he has identified The Mother, but what he has actually found are characteristics that would intrigue Bonaparta. Whether these belong to one woman or several matters less than how they construct the idealized portrait in the sketch.

She’s not one person. She’s a character built of different parts, both real and fictional. Her traits find their echoes in Bonaparta’s past, the Jablonec girl and the nameless actress included.

Death and birth in prison

Two major events mark Monster’s 70s: the death of Stefan Verdemann in prison and the birth of the Liebert twins in a prison that pretends to be a hospital.

Is there a link between these two events?

Perhaps the one thing most necessary to understand Dr. Verdemann is the scandal of his father, Stefan Verdemann. In 1968, in the midst of the Cold War, Verdemann, an electronics wholesaler who bought ownership of the radio station KWFM, was charged with spying and the murder of a federal Parliament member’s secretary, and sentenced to twenty years in prison. Fritz’s father maintained his innocence vehemently, but died in prison, in 1972.

I don’t know if this is the one thing most necessary to understand Dr. Verdemann, but the timing is worth noting: Verdemann Sr. was likely arrested shortly after telling a boy from the reading seminars to escape and find his family—and possibly after taking the photograph Lipský mentions.

There was a time, just once, at the Red Rose Mansion… A man in uniform came to observe… He was a foreigner, and he took a picture of everyone together. The man in charge didn’t like it, but his hands were clearly tied behind his back in this situation. (…) The old secret police must have kept it because that photo was how both the German detective Lunge and Tenma found and came to me.

*

And when I met with the third interviewee of those seminar participants, I finally got a glimpse into my father’s person. The man told me this… All he remembered from the seminar was one day, when a man from a radio station came to the reading. He said that the radio man told him, run away, get out of here, because it’s much better over the rainbow, and you can find your family there. And that was the moment that this man cut off all ties with the mansion…

Was he a threat? Did Bonaparta hand him over? Did he put him into John Vassall’s shoes?

And then—after Verdemann dies in jail—Bonaparta escalates. It’s not just shaping boys anymore. He builds a new fiction: a mother, two children, no father. It’s the most artificial project yet.

He finds a Moravian woman with a fractured past and casts her as the idealized mother. Why Moravian? Several options come to my mind: Moravia is a region that is culturally tangled, ethnically layered, historically contested. Given Bonaparta’s strained relationship with his Sudeten German father and his conflicted German identity, choosing Moravia becomes symbolically perfect—it’s both a rejection of his German bloodline and a retreat to a region that exists between East and West, belonging fully to neither.

The picture of the woman isn’t sexual or romantic, but it still suggests he’s obsessed with her—when really, he’s obsessed with the idea of unblemished maternity. The father role gets outsourced—to a supposed half-brother. Bonaparta erases himself from the frame.

Bonaparta pays his editor a visit around 1976 or 1977—the twins are already born.

His story was told in the first person through the eyes of a young boy. His mother was pregnant with twins, and for some reason he was worried that a monster would be born instead. I rejected that manuscript. It clearly wasn’t a story for kids.

— And in the story, were the twins monsters?

No, as I recall, the boy himself was the monster. But Klaus Poppe’s weirdness came in when the boy feels relief at finding out that he is the monster, and ends up loving his little brother and sister like a normal sibling.

What I see is a man shattered by guilt—including Verdemann’s death, maybe—regressing. He tries to rewind time and script a perfect childhood: sainted mother, twin children who understand each other fully, and no father. Fathers are a corrupting force in Bonaparta’s reality. So he removes him.

Bonaparta’s deep in denial. He treats real people like fiction, characters he can manipulate. He believes he’s directing a play—but he isn’t. He has no control. He wanted to remove the father—became the father himself, in the worst possible form.

Weber wants the neat symmetry: the son becomes the father. But it’s messier than that.

Bonaparta isn’t Terner Poppe’s clone. Terner laid the foundation—but what grew from it was not a duplicate. Just like Johan isn’t Bonaparta’s clone, even if Bonaparta shaped some of his roots.

A fairy tale’s end

As early as I can remember, I was living alone with my mother. She was a very lovely and kindhearted mother. She died when I was 19.

If Lipský tells Weber the truth, it would mean that his mother died in the first half of the 80’s. This is around the time when Bonaparta ended the eugenist program in a very unconventional way (mass poisoning), sent the twins’ mother away to Southern France, and paid his last visit to Zobak. 

— When was the last time you saw Bonaparta?

’81 or ’82. His newest work was dreadful. It was like a mix of Beauty and the Beast and Sleeping Beauty, very silly… The monster fell in love. In the end, his love bears no fruit, and he enters a deep sleep.

As he was leaving, he told me about another story he had thought of. He said, how about a story about the “Door That Must Not Be Opened”? So I asked him, what’s behind it, paradise or another monster? And then he said, well, you’re not allowed to open the door, so I guess it wouldn’t be much of a story. That was the last time I saw him.

He tells Zobak about two stories: about a monster falling in love, a mix-up of Beauty and the Beast and Sleeping Beauty, and about a door that can’t be opened. The first is dismissed by Zobak as very silly, the second one is a story that isn’t really there.

The story about a monster falling in love reads almost uninspired, another shallow performance. Bonaparta is covering reality with allegory to avoid facing what he’s actually done. He’s not in love—he’s trying to script an ending that makes him redeemable without owning what he set into motion.

The story about the door that can’t be opened is way more complex and personal, even if it’s only an idea.

It’s different because it’s real. It’s not about love or salvation—it’s about the one thing Bonaparta doesn’t control: the fear of what’s behind the door of the unknown. The truth is inarticulable to him. It’s the real fairy tale ending he won’t write.

Bonaparta is a man trying to rewrite his past using the same tools he used to break others.  But this time, the fairy tale doesn’t work. Because this time, he’s writing about himself. And there’s no happily ever after in him. Just a door that he can’t open.

Which leads me to the question…

What’s behind the door that can’t be opened?

While reading my text, one might think I’m trying to do what Weber tried to—to solve the puzzle of Monster.

Even if I wanted to solve the puzzle—and I don’t—I couldn’t. For very important reasons: the data is too scarce and highly uncertain. The records are fractured, secondhand, and mythologized.

And I didn’t even discuss all possible angles of this particular topic; far from it.

It’s an interpretation that is incomplete—and is so by design. Because the brilliance of Monster and Another Monster lies in the fact that it resists reduction. It refuses to be flattened into a clear-cut moral parable, or a psychological profile neatly labeled and filed.

Every narrative gap is a deliberate void. The reader stares into it, and the void says: now make something up.

These are solid breadcrumbs that can form a deep portrayal, but the thing is: the gaps make it impossible to create a story with clean answers. It’s not a flaw, it’s an invitation. An invitation to create your fiction instead of seeking definitive truths. They won’t come. 

So you might as well pick up the pen—and write the door yourself. Because fiction is the only place where humans can become whatever they want to be.

Content warnings: isolation, dehumanization, implied child abuse, implied sexual abuse of a young adult, alcoholism, racism.

I

The liquid in the glass bottles was as green as the streets of Düsseldorf. 

Tenma looked through his pant pockets for some small change. Mr. Açıkel—hefty, friendly-eyed, with yellowing bruises from Tenma’s last healing session after a rabid dog bite—scanned him like an X-ray. “Remember to eat normal food as well, son. This crap alone will make you sick. I know a—”

Tenma dismissed him with a broad smile. “I’d love to have a chat, Mr. Açıkel, but I have to go now.”

The smile and the dismissal came easier than usual. Maybe because Tenma was practically flying after the last session. 

A session that left him dizzy, but the nod he earned snapped him upright, the euphoria reviving his blood flow almost as power-restoring as the liquid.

Tenma bit his lip as he left the store, the bottles rattling in his backpack. 
He took a deeper breath—the first in a while that didn’t taste like smog—and looked at the panorama of Düsseldorf. Leafy streets scattered with deserted places. A patrol wagon rumbled past; Tenma tightened his fingers on his backpack straps and straightened up. When he slouched, the cops were more likely to take notice. 

Königsallee: In the old photos a fashion scene with trees growing along the canal, in the current landscape a bleak scene with potholed asphalt and former shops marked with signs forbidding entry.

We’ll need much more money and time to rebuild this street. You might help.

The old Düsseldorf, a faraway land, remembered by a few. Tenma was lucky enough to study under one of them.

He once told Tenma about a doctor who could cure the world of all its aches. 

Tenma wasn’t naive enough to think he could cure all the aches, not with his power still draining him so easily. But something deep, deep, deep inside screamed that he could cure at least some.

II

The tea tasted so much better in the porcelain cups that remembered the city long gone—Bonaparta’s beloved Prague. The sadness was a crucial part of this superior experience. 

Cups with gilded edges, small flowers, and a small crack on the bottom. He observed the crack closely—he couldn’t let one of the few items that connected him with the old world perish.

This is why he also observed his jewel so closely. A cracked jewel? Reeked of sacrilege.

Tea—especially excellent tea—was a rarity in the new world. Luckily, so was his precious jewel—the precious jewel that brought help and hope to the less fortunate. Desperation and thankfulness—two forces so powerful they made people shower the killers of one and the bringers of the other with gifts and adoration.

The healer’s hand was a mutation’s strange endowment, so strange that people who weren’t either cursed or blessed with the knowledge of the new world would dismiss it as a science-fiction story, or at best, nature’s queerness. 

But this wonder was real—he had proof in the form of a brain scan, the most beautiful brain scan he had ever seen. Bonaparta’s only complaint was that he couldn’t open Tenma’s skull with a scalpel to have a more intimate look at the anomaly located between his frontal and parietal lobe. The anomaly he wanted to feel under his fingertips. The anomaly that turned Tenma into a reincarnation of Asclepius.

This godly trait had an ungodly name: MA-131. Of course, they didn’t use Latin anymore and didn’t bother with using their imagination to come up with a name that would perfectly match the eeriness of this trait.

Luckily, he could still use Latin in his private notes: the name Manus Asclepii, a galaxy he single-handedly discovered.

After finishing the tea—green jasmine tea—he went to the kitchen to prepare svíčková with whole-grain bread, a unique meal in this decaying environment, where quality ingredients were as scarce as refinement.

But Franz Bonaparta’s jewel deserved nothing less than the finest.

III

The new world was dangerous. Mr. Bonaparta echoed these words so often that they quietly grew over Tenma’s brain. 

This was why he received a map that separated the safe—relatively safe—spaces from the dangerous ones and why he attended gun trainings. Mr. Bonaparta didn’t take this decision lightly; firearms belonged to the category that wasn’t discussed beyond necessities.

The training included bows and knives: Ammunition was scarce. 

His instructor lived in the danger zone, which meant that Mr. Bonaparta accompanied him during every training. The distance justified using the car—an expensive possession Mr. Bonaparta preferred to keep an eye on.

“I wouldn’t leave a stray cat with a man like him, let alone you, my dear.”

My dear. A word combination so rare that Tenma’s cheeks burned hotter than the midday sun—embarrassing, embarrassing, embarrassing—and he didn’t dare to raise his gaze from his worn-out sneakers. 

A word combination that felt like home. Whatever home was—his skin color different enough to put up an invisible shield between him and others, yet not enough to tether him to the land of his origins.

Was there truly a land of origin? 

It wasn’t just his skin. It was in the way he accented certain words, the hesitations in his mannerisms, the way he never quite knew whether to bow or shake hands—how Japanese was becoming, more and more, a foreign language.

And yet, here he was.

He followed Mr. Bonaparta to the backyard, where the instructor was waiting for them. Tenma never met someone more hardened but also weirdly soft—never a raised voice or a face betraying impatience with Tenma’s indecisiveness (gun or knife attack?).

The workouts put Tenma through the troops—sometimes literally—and sore muscles weren’t an alien concept to him. He gritted his teeth nevertheless—following rules led to results, and results brought him Mr. Bonaparta’s quiet approval.

Or at least something that looked like quiet approval.

Tenma aimed and shot, finally hitting the bullseye. His hands shook as he lowered the barrel. He discreetly wiped the sweat from his chin with his shirt and glanced furtively at Mr. Bonaparta.

A shadowy smile.

(The subtle aroma of jasmine.)

*

The man lived with a little girl who wore shorts covered in patches and seemed to spend every free moment jumping on a rope.

Tenma never saw her smile. When he tried to talk to her, she remained silent, her face still.

He watched as she landed on the balls of her feet, the jump rope slapping against the ground. 

“The girl—Is she his granddaughter?”

Mr. Bonaparta didn’t answer immediately. “She was kidnapped.”

“Kidnapped?!”

“Technically kidnapped.” Mr. Bonaparta looked at him with an indecipherable expression. “Her mother was killed, Herr Bernhardt a gentleman enough to take the poor yellow girl.” His soft voice soaked with sarcasm. “It’s better than being a homeless orphan, wouldn’t you say?” 

“Still kidnapped.” Tenma crossed his arms, his previous judgment of Mr. Bernhardt now not fitting enough. “We—we should take her. You could offer her better conditions to live.”

“Do you want to kidnap her again?”

“No! I—”

“Listen, Tenma.” Mr. Bonaparta put an arm around him. “Some things? You just can’t understand, so leave them be.” 

“What? I can’t just lea—”

“Kenzō.” Every syllable melted in his mouth like a sugar cube. “You see, the war was the most merciless event I ever experienced. Oh I hope you will never be forced to use what you learn here, it’s—it’s too easy to—”

Mr. Bonaparta lowered his hand, his touch still lingering.

*

Mr. Bonaparta locked himself in his office. 

The alone time suspended Tenma in a decision vacuum. Should he read a book to practice reading in the old language (maybe something about the war he wasn’t meant to understand)? English, French, or German? Do some medical drawings? Take the old walkman Mr. Açıkel restored for him and listen to music that came from the far-away-land?

Mr. Bonaparta thought that a comprehensive education was crucial for a healer.

Tenma could either relax in his room or learn another thing that would get him closer to Mr. Bonaparta breaking his rule—his rule that said that excessive praise could spoil a disciple, especially a gifted disciple, maybe even end his life.

Relaxing was the harder option.

IV

Bonaparta’s office—his small palace of solitude. Because Tenma was an obedient boy, he only entered it when Bonaparta invited him for a lesson. 

Tenma was special, so he learned about topics unrelated to medicine eagerly, his mind truly versatile.

Oh how naive Bonaparta once was, believing that people could become anything. He learned his lesson, the hard way, always the hard way, there was no greater teacher than the hard way, and now he knew what should’ve been obvious from the start: only a few in this world had the privilege to choose any path.

The rest would burn in hell. Some of them were aware enough of the flames around them, but the majority enjoyed the cloudy comfort of lies much more, even if reality came with a loaded gun—one of the worst inventions of mankind—at them. 

Only the absolute minority could enjoy what the world had to offer, yes, even this rotten-to-the-bone new world. His Tenma was a star among the stars with the anomaly changing his brain, or maybe his brain changing the anomaly into something otherwordly.

Bonaparta created a hypothesis: MA-131 not only gave Tenma his healing abilities, it also turned him into the perfect learner. The evidence was scarce for now, though. He still allowed himself to indulge in this little anecdata. 

This anecdata—a milky way of endless inspiration. Sadly, the drawings that this galaxy fruited with brought nothing but the bitter taste of disappointment. Well, almost every drawing.

There was one sketch that turned the black hole devouring the matter back into a sun.

In this sketch, Tenma had longer hair—long enough to cover his eyes and nose—a serious expression, and a spark of determination on his face. Bonaparta darkened the shadow under his chin with soft graphite, yes, it looked better and better, but what would he do with himself once the picture was finished? 

He could, perhaps, create more pictures with this particular model in his head, the model he met for the very first time long before the war. 

He dismissed him as an inane hero from a series by an author who created for children, but oh how wrong he was, how pleasing the drawings were, pleasing enough to alter his brain chemistry to the point where he couldn’t—and didn’t want to—erase the image from his memory.

He couldn’t forget the mysterious man who traded a lowlife for an innocent life. 

Tenma was like a long-lost version of this man, with a small but significant difference: Tenma had the purity his fictional counterpart lacked. 

Pure genius carried a more exquisite taste than the genius gone astray. He left the initials K. P. next to his darling.

V

The awakening hit like a nightmare.

Tenma sucked in a breath, gulped it like water, not enough, not enough, his skin as heavy as armour. 

Why was he here? Why Mr. Bonaparta’s office?

He needed a second to regain control over his very own limbs. Slowly—too slowly—he tried to sit up, but the blanket pulled him back, wrapping him like the ivy covering the city’s walls. He looked down. A T-shirt. Underwear. Skin was wrong—blueish.

The memory puzzle elements were coming back. It happened again. 

The patient, the blood, the dressings. He’d been fine—he’d been fine. He put on a mask and gloves. He could do this. He always could—

—until the ground cracked beneath him. The blood, too much, too–

And then—darkness.

The door opened with a quiet squeak. Mr. Bonaparta. Steamy cup in hand. “Oh, you’re awake, thank god.”

Was he—has he been waiting the whole time?

“I haven’t been so worried in a while. You need a vacation.”

A vacation? No, he couldn’t. Not with all these people, not with his duty, not when he still had so many people to save.

“I-I can’t take a vacation, I—”

“You won’t help anyone if you kill yourself.”

The words landed harder than the punches during the last training session, the gentleness of his voice sharpening it with the contrast. His hand too warm against his face. 

Too tired to react. Mr. Bonaparta sat next to him. A book, one they’d discussed for weeks now, appeared in his hands.

“You can always count on a healer to defy death. Until the gods strike back. Do you understand what this means?”

Tenma frowned. Mr. Bonaparta liked Greek mythology a bit too much, didn’t he?

VI

Bonaparta needed to plan every—every, every, every—step. Every step, every breath, every thought. A ritual of precision. It was the only way to save the world from turning into dust.

He wouldn’t make the same mistake again.

Yes, spontaneity carried the sweet taste of reward—too sweet, like ice cream in coffee in the old world—but indulgence was a dead-end street. He had learned this lesson. Not in the most pleasant way. The thought still leaving bitter bile in his throat.

Order. He needed order to survive. The stories helped—when order wore fiction garments, it became so much easier to follow.

Some lived only in his mind, others gained additional layers through the power of ink and colors. One of his favorites—no, the favorite—was about a mother leaving her little boy in a facility for gifted children. She told herself they would give him the life she never could.

They shared the mutation, but in her case, it wasn’t a gift. It was a death sentence.

The boy spent only a few months in the facility.

Why?

Because the gifted among the gifted deserved a personal tutor. Someone who would guide them, shape them, show them the path away from the monster.

And was there ever a better tutor than someone who had once walked the monster’s path himself?

VII

There had to be a way to give the little girl at least one-quarter of a reason to smile.

She haunted him. Especially when his hands were still and his mind was restless, his body burning through the familiar motions of morning training. He collapsed on the floor after the thirtieth-or-so pushup.

Maybe he could buy her something? A gift, even the smallest. He had some savings from the healing sessions, but— 

(How much did Mr. Bonaparta charge, anyway?)

It didn’t matter. He couldn’t buy something as pointless as an impractical gift here without spending all his money. 

But maybe—his mind clearing up—maybe he could find something in the red areas on the map?

*

Mr. Bonaparta was out for business. Tenma was supposed to be learning. Instead, he grabbed his backpack, slipped a kitchen knife into a pocket, and left.

Mr. Bonaparta didn’t have to know everything.

*

Tenma felt out of place in his too-tight shirt and hole-free pants. Another wish—Mr. Bonaparta’s wish: an outfit that pleased the eye, a rule he followed as well. Sometimes, he stared at himself in the mirror for a very long moment, a time he would surely mock anyone else for wasting.

This place—the people—were so different from the stories Mr. Bonaparta told.

Sure, some details aligned, but here, it was more—

More three-dimensional. With a richer texture. The streets pulsated with energy like the power in Tenma’s blood. The sharp scent of ripe fruit clashed with the harsh aroma of grilled meat—the latter too cruel to his digestive system, too cruel to the environment, Mr. Bonaparta had said.

Tenma slid his hands into his pockets. Did all stories told by Mr. Bonaparta lack crucial detail?

*

He made it back minutes before Mr. Bonaparta’s return. So close to a reveal. 

Mr. Bonaparta’s mood had soured; something had gone wrong during his meeting.

“Old fool thinks he can outplay me.”

Tenma tugged at the button on his shirt. He knew this tone: one glass of wine too much. Rare moments, which only made them chillingly unpredictable.

Mr. Bonaparta stood before him, casting a shadow over Tenma’s hands and feet. “How was studying today?” 

“Uhm—fine.” He tried to muster a smile that eased the lines around Mr. Bonaparta’s eyes. “I went over yesterday’s lesson about the circulatory system to understand it better.”

Mr. Bonaparta didn’t seem convinced.

*

Tenma had told the girl that the fake ruby bracelet he got her was their secret. It was after he saw her smiling for the very first time. The bracelet lit up when she touched it, the light pulsing familiarly.

Something similar happened when Tenma found an interestingly shaped rock in the garden of the facility, the facility he barely remembered. 

Mr. Bonaparta witnessed it.

Tenma pursed his lips. He remembered what he wanted to do—take her to live with them, so foolish, so naive.

Now he knew that it was better to leave her where she was, even if he wanted something different.

(But maybe—maybe he wouldn’t hurt a girl—)

VIII

Tenma stood on the roof. The sky was the color of a ripe mango—a fruit he’d only seen in Mr. Bonaparta’s old encyclopedia.

Everything intensified: the damp spots on his t-shirt, the dense air, the street sounds. He watched the distant world beyond Düsseldorf’s gates. Mr. Bonaparta called it an ocean of nothingness.

He took a sip from the bottle when Mr. Bonaparta appeared silently beside him, his steps like a feline’s.

“We have a new patient.”

A hand landed on his shoulder. Heavy. Tenma’s last gulp stretched. He was shaking. 

Shaking. It had been months since the last frost.

Last evening: too sharp an image in his mind. The nurse who usually performed the monthly massage couldn’t make it. Mr. Bonaparta had offered to do it himself this time.

Nothing had happened. Nothing unpleasant. Nothing that he didn’t sometimes think about before sleep (though he hadn’t been able to look Mr. Bonaparta in the eye the next morning). It was all so mild. A touch. A hug. A mellow kiss.

Nothing that he could say a loud, certain no to.

(The strong aroma of jasmine.)

*

He was suffocating. Every day was worse than the previous.

The gun wasn’t where he thought it would be. But the knife was. He threw it into his backpack along with some snacks, his savings, and the most important items in his first-aid kit.

He had to see this ocean of nothingness. All alone.

So many people there needed him.

IX

The little fool had sneaked away, thinking no one would notice. But he had been caught. The guards had found him trying to slip through the gates, and the alarm had been raised the moment he reached the outer walls.

Bonaparta avoided indulging in his wine—an expensive blasphemy. But now? Now, he just needed it. One glass. Second glass. Third. Fourth. Stopped counting.

His throat burned, his mind circling back to the boy—the foolish little thing who couldn’t see the goods he was given. 

Ungrateful bastard.

He remembered shaking the boy’s shoulders. He remembered raising his voice. He’d told him he had everything other people in this godforsaken world could only dream of: he had safety, he had sanctuary, he was safe here. It was a miracle they hadn’t sold him. Bonaparta knew what an easy sell the boy was, how many would love to use that precious brain. Study it. Eat it. Yes, the world wanted to devour it.

But— 

He had never witnessed that blend of disgust and fear on Tenma’s face before.

*

The headache next morning was relentless.

He’d gone too far. He knew it. But couldn’t afford to apologize. 

The boy—Tenma—had used his powers. But something was lacking this time. The boy kept his distance, every move slow, and Bonaparta knew— 

It wasn’t as easy anymore.

Bonaparta left that same day. Fine. He would fix this. He’d do something to make up for it. He went to the town and bought Tenma every book he wanted. All of them. Even though they were useless trash, things Bonaparta would never allow him to read. But that didn’t matter.

It was a small thing. Just this once.

Just to please Tenma.

But the ungrateful bastard didn’t appreciate it.

X

Bonaparta gave him less and less time alone. Tenma needed to arm himself with patience.

He would keep pretending. Just long enough to lull Bonaparta into thinking he was still an obedient boy. 

Obedient boy. How long? How long had he been seeing him this way? From the moment he took him with him home? When he first hit puberty? Nausea, nausea, nausea. 

How could he not notice earlier?! He depised Bonaparta, he despised himself, he—

He wanted to hug his mother. Have a clearer picture of her. Hear words she didn’t leave in her very short letter to him.

His cheeks were wet from tears.

*

The day Bonaparta left the house alone arrived quicker than Tenma had expected.

Even more unexpected was that Tenma didn’t need his lockpick to open the office door. Bonaparta still believed he wouldn’t dare.

Tenma pushed the door and stepped in.

It was different. Outside their lessons, this place felt like a giant maze; to think it used to be the one place that felt almost like home.

The desk. It was the center of everything. He eyed it. Drawings—yes, Bonaparta often sketched. He shut his eyes for a moment, his gut twisting. Maybe he’d regret this. But he opened the sketchbook anyway.

Animals. Panoramas.

Relief.

Then his eyes landed on the books next to the desk. Each one signed K. P.

Not a single Franz Bonaparta. Only K. P.

How naive had he been? To believe in someone like Franz Bonaparta?

He picked up a book. Black cover—no color, no decoration. Nothing like the others. He opened it, heart pounding, throat tight.

To  ███ 

my dearest Kenzō

The added words were in Japanese. 

He leafed through the book, reading in fragments. The effort he’d put into mastering that convoluted version of English Bonaparta loved so much was paying off—this was no easy read. But something made the experience smoother: the voice reading in Tenma’s mind belonged to Bonaparta.

He flipped through the pages until he reached the final sentence of part one. The temperature in the room dropped. His legs went numb, his hands trembling more than they had on the roof.

Then, the door opened, soundless.

“My dear boy.” Bonaparta’s lips so close to Tenma’s ear, his hands on Tenma’s shoulders. “Do you still think you could survive outside without me?”

Tenma could only shake his head, not a yes, not a no.

“You’re a great healer, an extraordinary one, but a lousy liar with poor strategy planning.” Bonaparta’s grip tightened. “You went straight into the beast’s trap. You don’t think I would leave my office open? Silly boy.”

He took the book from Tenma’s hands, his fingers brushing against his.

“But don’t worry, love.” Bonaparta’s voice as light as dust. “I’m not a fool like the man in there. I know how easy it is to break a jewel.”

Japanese translation available upon request.

Rabbit Nabokov is a fictional high-stakes gambling card game invented by a character named Aleksandr Nabokov. 

The creator is a hybrid of two Russian authors: Aleksandr Pushkin and Vladimir Nabokov.

This isn’t the first time Urasawa used a real-world author’s name to create a fictional character; Monster introduced two characters named after one author: Karel Ranke and Petr Čapek.

So why is the fictional creator of a fictional gambling game named after two Russian authors?

For starters, card games are referenced in Pushkin (The Queen of Spades) and Nabokov (King, Queen, Knave). 

But there’s something more interesting and of substance, and it’s about Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, a milestone of Russian literature. Nabokov thought it was impossible to translate it faithfully while keeping the rhymes¹ and he was dissapointed and disgusted with the already existing English translations of it. 

So his wife, Véra, suggested he should create his translation of the sacred text.

These were the beginnings of a work with the following title:

Yes, this should be treated as a full title, because this isn’t just a translation of Eugene Onegin. Most of the text here is not, as one might think, the translation of the poem itself, but Nabokov’s commentary.

The commentary turned a book of around 350 pages into a beast of around 1850 pages (dare I say, Charles Kinbote style?). 

He also apologized for his own translation (!) in the form of a poem.²

Taking all of this into account, one question arises: is this version of Eugene Onegin still only Pushkin’s work? Or did it evolve into its own thing?

Could we say this is the work of Aleksandr Nabokov? 

Why did Aleksandr Nabokov create a gambling game? One clue can be found in Nabokov’s response to Edmund Wilson (someone Nabokov corresponded with for years), who was critical of Nabokov’s translation:

What does [N.] mean when he speaks of Pushkin’s ‘addiction to stuss’? This is not an English word, and if he means the Hebrew word for nonsense, which has been absorbed into German, it ought to be italicized and capitalized. But even on this assumption it hardly makes sense.”

This is Mr. Wilson’s nonsense, not mine. “Stuss” is the English name of a card game which I discuss at length in my notes on Pushkin’s addiction to gambling. Mr. Wilson should have consulted my notes (and Webster’s dictionary) more carefully.³

Here we have it: a card game and a gambling addiction. And it turns out that playing the game can turn into a scene that resembles your average discussion about Nabokov and/or his work!

The Eugene Onegin shenanigans don’t end with 20th Century Boys. They don’t even start here; they start with Monster.

Remember Konrad? The lingonberry jam-maker from Ruhenheim? Aren’t the lingonberries an oddly specific choice for a character from a far-away background?

Lingonberries are present in Eugene Onegin and in his commentary, Nabokov devotes more than one page to explaining why he translated the Russian word Brusnika into lingonberry and why the other translations of brusnichnaya voda were, to say the least, inaccurate. Lingonberries can be deceitful. 

In short: Nabokov explains the confusing nature of lingonberries, shows no mercy to his translation predecessors, and expects his successors to do better.

Konrad has other traits that make him a suspiciously Nabokovian character. His birthday date seems to have some special powers:

Is he telling the truth or just poking fun at Mrs. Heinich and her superstitions (to the amusement of the shopkeeper)? Was it a mere coincidence that the numbers were a success? I guess we’ll never know!

Konrad’s birthday combines three things: the gambling, the coincidences and patterns, and the significant number. 

Coincidences and patterns are important motifs in Nabokov’s work. To quote Lolita: Those dazzling coincidences that logicians loathe and poets love.

While reading Nabokov’s works, it can be useful to pay attention to the numbers; for example, 342 is a recurring number in Lolita.

And the gambling? Deception is an inherent part of gambling; deception was also something Nabokov was fascinated with. 

Q: You say that reality is an intensely subjective matter, but in your books it seems to me that you seem to take an almost perverse delight in literary deception.

A: The fake move in a chess problem, the illusion of a solution or the conjuror’s magic: I used to be a little conjuror when I was a boy. I loved doing simple tricks—turning water into wine, that kind of thing.⁴

*

Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth. Every great writer is a great deceiver, but so is that arch-cheat Nature. Nature always deceives. From the simple deception of propagation to the prodigiously sophisticated illusion of protective colors in butterflies or birds, there is in Nature a marvelous system of spells and wiles. The writer of fiction only follows Nature’s lead.⁵

And of course, his stories are full of (lonely, misunderstood, and often very dangerous) deceivers.  

Additionally, the month March and the year 1945 are important for the Nabokov family. Nabokov’s father, Vladimir Dmitrievich, was assassinated on March 28, and Nabokov’s younger brother, Sergey, was born on March 12, and died in a Nazi concentration camp in 1945.

Let’s get back to Konrad, a good friend of Mr. Poppe, the Freud-lookalike:

One of the first things you might learn about Nabokov is that he despised Freud. So much that the traces of the Viennese quack can be tracked in his books everywhere; for example, Lolita opens with a fictional foreword written by a fictional Freudian psychologist called John Ray (Jr.). 

*

Oh, I am not up to discussing again that figure of fun. He is not worthy of more attention than I have granted him  in  my novels  and  in Speak, Memory. Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts. I really do not care.⁶

Making the Nabokov-coded character friends with someone who turned into a Freud-lookalike in his old days (and who’s Monster’s greatest deceiver and a very Nabokovian character himself)? Letting them play Nabokov’s beloved chess? 

It’s like using Nabokov’s tricks against him, which is hilarious.

Another fun fact about Nabokov: he loved anagrams and wordplay. For example, he inserted himself into Lolita using an anagram of his name, Vivian Darkbloom (of course the anagram of Nabokov’s name would be a dramatic and fabulous one; come on, it sounds like a drag queen name). 

And while this is only partially an anagram, it’s still interesting that you can take some letters from Vladimir Nabokov to create a Konrad.

His corpse in the anime also looks to me like a middle-aged Nabokov.

Another interesting thing about Konrad is that he was murdered by Roberto. 

How do I know this since his face is never shown? It might as well be one of Roberto’s colleagues. But remember when Lunge noticed something was off while looking at the shoes of the man in the wheelchair? I decided to compare these two panels using the same method.

Before killing Konrad:

While fighting with Lunge:

Roberto and Nabokov share a fascinating similarity: when they were children, they wanted to be entomologists. And while Nabokov turned this childhood fantasy into reality, Roberto wasn’t as fortunate. 

We know that Roberto—then Adolf—ended up in Kinderheim because Ranke thought it was a good opportunity for his nephew after his parents were killed when they tried to escape through the Berlin Wall. 

Nabokov once said: It is not improbable that, had there been no revolution in Russia, I would have devoted myself entirely to lepidopterology and never written any novels at all.⁷

Who knows: maybe if Adolf’s parents weren’t killed while trying to escape, then he would devote himself entirely to entomology and never murder anyone, including the Nabokovian lingonberry jam maker from Ruhenheim?

All the examples are something I thought about earlier but weren’t sure enough to post it anywhere; the lingonberry seemed too general, the anagram wasn’t a full one, and the birthdate was the most suspicious thing to me, but still not enough to share it.

But the obscure Aleksandr Nabokov and his gambling card game are a solid clue that binds it together.

And since we’re talking about deceivers and translations, let me add a small easter egg: please get back to the The Secret Woods episode, pay close attention to Edmund Fahren, his suicide note, and see if there’s something possibly wrong with the translation of the passage found by Richard Braun.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/1964/06/28/archives/a-nabokov-guide-through-the-world-of-alexander-pushkin.html ↩︎
2. https://www.brinkerhoffpoetry.org/poems/on-translating-eugene-onegin ↩︎
3. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1965/08/26/letters-the-strange-case-of-nabokov-and-wilson/ ↩︎
4. https://www.lib.ru/NABOKOW/Inter02.txt_with-big-pictures.html ↩︎
5. https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/02/21/vladimir-nabokov-on-storytelling/
   ↩︎
6. https://lib.ru/NABOKOW/Inter06.txt ↩︎
7. https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4310/the-art-of-fiction-no-40-vladimir-nabokov ↩︎