Dr. Tenma is a Japanese brain surgeon working in Germany. One day he is ordered to skip operation on a critically injured man in favor of a more famous patient. Disillusioned by the hospital’s politics, he decides from then on that he will do what he thinks is right.
Later he chooses to operate on a boy who has a bullet in his head rather than the mayor, whose operation eventually failed. Because of this, Tenma’s credentials and success in life is over in more ways than one: he becomes the prime suspect of a strange series of murders that are all connected to the boy he saved in the hospital.
