It drops you into 1968 with tear gas in the streets and a medical student who will cut you open on a table that is not a table, and it dares you to call him a criminal. Kuroo Hazama has no license, no permission, and no patience for the hospital board, so he charges obscene fees and then does the impossible with his hands. The Vietnam stretch is where it stops being a slick prequel and starts being an argument: young Kiriko, sold on mercy as the only honest medicine, versus a boy who refuses to let anyone die on his watch even when living is the crueler outcome. Yabu shambles in as the drunk who cannot operate and somehow understands Hazama better than the geniuses do. The surgeries are staged like duels, all scalpel glint and impossible sutures, and Tezuka's old moral knife is still under the gloss. You watch it for the scars, both the ones on the patients and the one already forming on his face.

Set in 1960s Japan, this prequel to Osamu Tezuka's story of a gifted unlicensed surgeon centers on medical student Kuroo Hazama. He is quiet and scarred, with striking black-and-white hair and a dark past. As a boy he was badly hurt by an unexploded bomb and saved by the top surgeon Dr. Joutarou Honma, under whom he now studies. After Hazama pulls off an operation that seemed impossible, his surgical talent draws notice. With the frank, spirited intern Maiko Okamoto and his troubled friend Yabu at his side, he commits himself to medicine, even as student riots, war and corruption grip the country and test his integrity on the road to becoming the legend called Black Jack.