Masashi Kishimoto

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Masashi Kishimoto, the Japanese manga artist who created Naruto, married in 2003 and then waited until 2015 to take a honeymoon with his wife. The series had kept him too busy for twelve years. That series ran in Weekly Shōnen Jump from 1999 to 2014. By May 2019 it had sold over 250 million copies in 46 countries. Yet the man behind it had spent years convinced that his drawing style belonged in magazines for adults, not children. His early drafts were rejected, and one serialized attempt was cancelled almost at once. So how does an artist who keeps missing his target end up with one of the best-selling manga of all time? And what did he borrow, from baseball-era daydreams, anime posters, Hollywood action films and his own family, to get there?

  2244365

• 2. Okayama and a Twin

  ›

  Masashi Kishimoto was born in Okayama Prefecture on the 8th of November 1974, the older of two identical twins. His brother Seishi would also become a manga author. The family home stood near Hiroshima, where Kishimoto's grandfather had his roots. The grandfather liked to tell war stories, and he often linked them to grudges that outlived the fighting.

  As a small child, Kishimoto copied characters from television, including Arale from Dr. Slump and the title hero of Doraemon. In elementary school he and Seishi watched the anime versions of Kinnikuman and Dragon Ball together. Dragon Ball's creator, Akira Toriyama, became his idol. Kishimoto loved Dr. Slump and the Dragon Quest video games, which Toriyama also worked on.

  Money was tight. Kishimoto could not afford Weekly Shōnen Jump, where Dragon Ball appeared, so a school friend with a subscription let him keep up with the story.

  In high school his attention drifted to baseball and basketball. Then he saw a poster for the animated film Akira, and he became fascinated by how the image was drawn. He wanted to imitate its creator, Katsuhiro Otomo. He also enjoyed Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade, Ninku and Ghost in the Shell.

  The twins kept drawing manga side by side from early childhood, and their styles grew alike. Each brother has often been accused of copying the other, in both art and story ideas. Seishi says the overlap is unintentional and comes from shared influences. Kishimoto's next hurdle was far more practical: Kyushu Sangyo University and an art college, where he had to find a style of his own.

  563058

• 3. Finding the Right Style

  ›

  At Kyushu Sangyo University, Kishimoto spent his last years before graduating drawing manga, and he also attended an art college, hoping to turn pro. He chose a plan that seemed clever. Weekly Shōnen Jump had never run a chanbara, a sword-fighting story, so he would write one.

  The plan fell apart that same year. He read Hiroaki Samura's Blade of the Immortal and Nobuhiro Watsuki's Rurouni Kenshin, which ran in Jump itself, and both already worked in that genre. Kishimoto recalls that nothing had surprised him since Akira, and that these new series left him unable to compete. He still studied Samura's page layouts, action sequences and anatomy closely.

  In his second year he began entering magazine contests. His pages looked like seinen manga, aimed at adults, rather than the shōnen manga that young readers buy. That was a problem, because Jump targets a young audience.

  The fix came from an unexpected place. Watching the anime Hashire Melos!, he was struck by the animators' character designs, and he began researching animators' work. He later met Tetsuya Nishio, designer of the Ninku anime, and called him a big influence. After copying the styles of several anime designers, Kishimoto noticed his own drawing had begun to look like a shōnen series. A style was ready. A first editor and a string of rejections were next.

  56296462

• 4. Before Naruto Worked

  ›

  Kishimoto's first successful pilot was Karakuri, submitted to the publisher Shueisha in 1995. It won an honorable mention in the 1996 Hop Step Award, which the publisher gives to promising rookies. He was assigned an editor, Kosuke Yahagi, and began producing drafts that mostly went nowhere. They included a slice-of-life story called Michikusa and an action story called Asian Punk.

  In 1997 he wrote a one-shot version of Naruto, printed in Akamaru Jump Summer. Then in December 1997 Weekly Shōnen Jump offered him a one-shot slot while he was reworking Karakuri for serialization. The new Karakuri debuted two weeks later in the 1998 issue numbered 4-5. The sudden deadline hurt it, and it did badly in reader surveys.

  After that failure Kishimoto cut back and turned toward seinen. He sketched drafts for a baseball manga, Yakyūō, and a mafia manga, Mario, hoping an adult magazine would be kinder. Yahagi talked him into one last shōnen attempt. Kishimoto started storyboarding a fantasy one-shot, Magic Mushroom, until Yahagi phoned with a different request: storyboards for a serialization.

  They chose Naruto again, with a reworked story and world, and produced storyboards for three chapters. That won a place in the magazine. With six months before launch, Kishimoto redrew the opening chapters again and again. The mafia manga he had abandoned would return much later, in 2013.

  1516176462

• 5. Seven Hundred Chapters

  ›

  Issue number 43 of Weekly Shōnen Jump in 1999 carried the first chapter of the serialized Naruto, and it quickly became a hit. It ended on the 10th of November 2014, after more than fifteen years, with 700 chapters collected in 72 volumes. A running tally put sales above 113 million copies in Japan and above 95 million in the United States. Another 93 million sold elsewhere, for roughly 301 million in total.

  In the United States, the publisher Viz Media saw Naruto become one of its top properties, with nearly 10 percent of all its manga sales in 2006. That year the seventh Viz volume became the first manga ever to win a Quill Award, taking Best Graphic Novel. Kishimoto also won a Rookie of the Year honor from the Agency for Cultural Affairs. Two anime series followed, Naruto and Naruto Shippuden, and he asked that Tetsuya Nishio oversee the character designs.

  Speaking in Naruto Collector for Winter 2007/2008, Kishimoto said he was "very glad that the American audience has accepted an understood ninja. It shows that the American audience has good taste... because it means they can accept something previously unfamiliar to them."

  During the run he met Eiichiro Oda, author of One Piece, and counted him a rival. When Naruto ended, Oda left a note in the final volume acknowledging that rivalry. Kishimoto said, "That felt so gratifying." He has also called Yoshihiro Togashi one of his favorite artists. Before the My Hero Academia anime premiered, he predicted that Kōhei Horikoshi's series would succeed overseas.

  225282726

• 6. Plot Without a Map

  ›

  Kishimoto has admitted that he made no firm plans for where Naruto's story would go. Sasuke announces early that he wants to kill a man named Itachi, and that character was redesigned several times. At that point Kishimoto only knew that Sasuke's brother had done something terrible, not what it was.

  By volume 16, when Itachi actually appeared, Kishimoto had decided that Itachi was acting for the village of Konohagakure. His task was to kill the entire Uchiha clan except Sasuke. The manga revealed this in volume 43.

  The identity of Naruto's father came the same way. When Kishimoto settled on the late Minato Namikaze, he started planting hints. One was giving the Hokage mountain monument of Konohagakure spiky hair like Naruto's.

  His own life seeped in too. He married and had children while the series ran, and he let Naruto finally meet his parents because, as a father, he wanted the character to feel what he had felt. The couple has one son. For the film The Last, Kishimoto based Hinata's wish to make Naruto a scarf on his wife, who had once made one for him.

  War was another thread. Because of his grandfather's stories, Kishimoto wanted to address it, and although he understood that war has no good side, he wrote the theme with hope. The same hope shaped the scenes where Naruto confronts his own past.

  1011131459

• 7. How the Pages Were Drawn

  ›

  Kishimoto drew every character through the same five steps. These were concept and rough sketch, drafting, inking, shading and coloring. The sequence applied to manga pages and to the color art on tankōbon covers and Weekly Shōnen Jump covers. His tools changed over time. He once used an airbrush for a Jump cover illustration, then dropped it because of the cleanup it required.

  For Naruto Uzumaki himself, Kishimoto points to Goku from Dragon Ball, whose energetic and mischievous nature guided the character. The film The Matrix inspired the redesigned outfits. For Sasuke Uchiha, the manga Sasuke by Sanpei Shirato was a source. He also names filmmakers such as Takeshi Kitano and Quentin Tarantino.

  He praised Michael Bay's way of shooting a scene against the background light, though he found it hard to reproduce. From Jackie Chan's films he took the double-action, where one punch is shown from three angles to sell its force. It first appeared in Naruto's fight against Haku.

  Pacing was a deliberate choice. In some fight scenes he drew panels to be confusing, which gives a feeling of speed. In the duels between Naruto and Sasuke he sent the action from the top of the page to the bottom so readers could follow it. That mix of craft let the story spill into other formats.

  6162636418

• 8. Games, Films and Side Projects

  ›

  Kishimoto's design work reached video games first. For Tekken 6 in 2009 he redesigned the new character Lars Alexandersson. CyberConnect2 chief Hiroshi Matsuyama liked the result so much that he asked the Tekken staff if Lars could appear in Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 2. For Ultimate Ninja Storm Revolution in 2014, Kishimoto created Mecha Naruto, a character meant to make a big impact worldwide. Matsuyama was surprised when he saw it.

  The film Road to Ninja was planned in 2012 and reused designs from a scrapped Part 3 of Naruto. When that idea gave way to Boruto, the same designs were recycled for The Last. To promote the earlier film, Kishimoto worked on Motion Comic Naruto, a DVD of manga scenes in 3D given to the first 1.5 million moviegoers. The Last premiered on the 6th of December 2014, a month after the manga ended, acting as a bridge to the epilogue.

  Boruto: Naruto the Movie opened on the 7th of August 2015, co-written with Ukyō Kodachi. It paid tribute to the 1996 film The Rock and the 2002 film Spider-Man. The Rock tribute leaned on kishōtenketsu, a common Japanese story structure. Kishimoto also said he was a fan of Avi Arad's Spider-Man films.

  During Naruto's run he also made smaller works. In 2010 came Bench, a baseball one-shot for Jump's Top of the Super Legend project of six one-shots. In 2012 Jump Square announced his mafia one-shot Mario, built on a rough 160-page manuscript from before Naruto. In 2015 he drew the cover of violinist Chisako Takashima's album Strings on Fire.

  The last page of Naruto announced a spin-off miniseries by Kishimoto, and The Seventh Hokage and the Scarlet Spring ran from April to July 2015. Weeks later, in August, he said his next series was already decided. It would be science fiction with a unique protagonist, and he planned to release it monthly on Shonen Jump Plus because a weekly series was too draining. When Boruto's voice actress, Yūko Sanpei, asked him to keep making Naruto films, he said he needed a break and physically could not.

  On the 19th of December 2015 it was announced that he would supervise the monthly Boruto: Naruto Next Generations. Mikio Ikemoto, his chief assistant on Naruto, would illustrate, and Kodachi would write. The series moved to V Jump in June 2019.

  The science fiction project became Samurai 8: The Tale of Hachimaru, formally announced at Jump Festa 2019. Kishimoto wrote the script and rough storyboards, and Akira Ōkubo illustrated. It debuted on the 13th of May 2019 as the magazine's first new series of the Reiwa period. It did not find an audience and ended on the 23rd of March 2020.

  In November 2020 came another change. After 51 chapters, Kodachi stepped down, and Kishimoto took over writing Boruto beginning with chapter 52, in the V Jump issue published on the 21st of November 2020.

  3334353853