June 09, 2010

Naruto, by Masashi Kishimoto

In celebration of the summer, let's get a little shounen up in here!

(Shounen is the term for a specific subset of manga, also known as "boys' comics;" shounen stories are typically about, and designed for, boys, though they're read by girls and adults as well. It's similar to the Harry Potter and Percy Jackson type books, but usually with more ninjas.)

And speaking of ninjas:

On the off chance that you're one of the few people who has yet to come across Naruto, it is a story about ninjas! (Technically, it is a story about ninja; like the Japanese words manga, anime, sushi, &c., the word ninja can refer to both the singular and the plural form. However, the English practice of adding an s to denote a plural has been become accepted with some Japanese words, so ninjas works just as well. Bet you didn't think you be getting a grammar lesson in an anime blog, huh?)

Naruto is an action/adventure story written by Masashi Kishimoto; it's set in a fictional world that has a lot of similarity to Japan in some of the customs and in the feudal nature of the territories that make up the area, but otherwise the story's world doesn't share much with our own other than the fact that gravity works. (Well, sometimes. Like I said, these are ninjas; sometimes gravity is there only to be defied.) The story has a huge cast of characters, but at the core it's about a boy named Naruto, an orphan in the hidden village (a term historically used to describe villages composed of ninjas taht Kishimoto adopted) of Konoha, who just happens to have the spirit of a fox demon sealed inside him. This happened because at the start of the story, 12 years ago, the fox demon attacked the village, and its leader was not strong enough to kill it; the best he could do was seal it away, and into an infant.

Because Naruto bears scars from this--most distinctively the whisker-like marks on his face--that remind the other villagers of both the fox demon and the huge loss of life that occurred when it attacked, he has spent much of his life being ignored and shunned by everyone. This in turn has driven him to vow that he'll make people notice him--and he usually does it in bratty ways (the first time we meet him, he's vandalizing a village momument by painting graffiti all over it). But as the story goes on, he slowly begins to meet people who look past the scars and see who he really is. Some of these people are from his own village, like Sakura and Sasuke, two of his classmates who were assigned to the same team with him under the guidance of an older ninja named Kakashi (in Naruto's world, learning to be a ninja is kind of like an apprenticeship); some of them are civilians from other, normal villages; and some are even enemies from rival ninja villages, including one character who also had a demon sealed into him by his own village leader, but who--for several reasons--turned out very different from Naruto.

As I mentioned, this series has a huge cast of characters; the characters above form the core group--Team 7--that Naruto both influences and is influenced by, but the village Naruto lives in has many different families in it, all of whom pass down different ninja techniques to their children, and part of Naruto's story is winning the approval of those families via his classmates. The story is also split into two parts: after the end of the first part Kishimoto jumped ahead three years, taking the characters from age twelve to age fifteen. In the anime, the post-timeskip story is referred to as Naruto Shippuden, while the pre-timeskip part is just plain Naruto; the manga uses the name "Naruto" for both.

Naruto was one of the first titles that Viz put out when it started publishing Shonen Jump and began its shift away from adult manga titles to more young adult ones, so it's been around for a while--and in Japan the series is still unfinished, so Naruto's story is still going strong!

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