Is Heads Worth Reading? Review & Where to Read

Overview

Junichi Naruse has settled into an ordinary life, returning to painting and falling for Megumi Hamura, when he's shot in the head while saving a child during a robbery. He survives only because of a secret brain transplant from an unidentified donor. As Junichi recovers, his personality begins to shift in ways he and the people around him can't ignore, and he finds himself trying to uncover who the donor was before whatever's left of himself disappears entirely.

What it does well

Heads takes a premise that could easily tip into pulpy body-horror and instead plays it as a controlled psychological mystery, which suits novelist Keigo Higashino's strengths perfectly. The slow reveal of what the transplant is doing to Junichi, and who the donor might have been, is paced with real patience, and the story trusts its reader to sit with the discomfort of watching someone's identity come apart rather than rushing to explain it away.

Motoro Mase's art, which would later anchor the similarly tense Ikigami, gives the story a quiet, moody visual register that fits its introspective tone. The strain all of this puts on Junichi's relationship with Megumi is treated as a genuine emotional throughline rather than just a backdrop for the mystery plot, which keeps the human cost of the premise from getting lost underneath its sci-fi conceit.

Where it falls short

The title is a real practical problem: "Heads" is about as generic a search term as manga titles get, and finding this specific series among a sea of unrelated "Heads"-adjacent works takes some care. There's also no official English release to point readers toward, which is a notable gap given Mase's other major work did get picked up by Viz. And the deliberately slow, internal pacing that makes the psychological mystery work may not satisfy readers who came in expecting more overt sci-fi action from the brain-transplant premise.

Verdict

Heads is a tightly constructed psychological thriller that uses a disquieting sci-fi premise to ask a genuinely unsettling question about what makes someone themselves. It's slower and more introspective than its premise might suggest, but that patience is exactly what makes the mystery land. Worth tracking down if you want a quieter, mind-bending thriller from one of Japan's best-known mystery writers.