Naruto

November 6th, 2006

Author: Masashi Kishmoto
Publisher: Shueisha

Uzumaki Naruto is with One piece, one of the two more popular manga and even graphic stories in the world.
Since its first publication in 1999, there are approximately 6 new volumes of Naruto each year. So even if I am great fan and I read the whole adventures so far, I will not review every single volume, but do a more general critic.

According to me, Naruto took the succession of the extremely successful in 90’s, Dragon Ball of Akira Toriyama and it became even more popular. Naruto is initially a manga published in the Weekly Shonen Jump, the first Japanese manga magazine, with a circulation of 3 million copies a week. Now, with the anime version and video game adaptations, it is a global cultural phenomenon in Japan and also in the World.

Naruto is quiet conventional in many ways with the manga culture. The main character is a quiet complex innocent troublesome kid that has the ability to build strong relations with his friends but also his enemies. He has the quiet traditional qualities of a manga hero, an unusual intelligence that allows him to find surprising solutions to problems, extraordinary abilities that he keeps developing, an unbreakable determination to fulfill a destiny, a capacity to mobilize every single piece of his energy to achieve a goal, a sensibility, a strong desire for a real justice and a will to always do what is best.

However in my opinion what contributes to Naruto huge success is his deep connections with some traditional Japanese religions and myths. The manga is revising the Shinobi / Ninja culture and the martial arts by building something that is closed to a mythology. In the Masashi Kishmoto work, there is also a strong influence of the two main Japanese religions, Shinto and Buddhism. These influences are illustrated notably through the place of five elements (Fire, Wind, Earth, Sky and Water), the presence of demons, the Chakra energies and a kind of Awakening.
Naruto contains also key elements of the Japanese society and popular culture, the well-known Ramen soup, the Onsen (traditional hot spring public bath), a kind of erotic touch and also a slight horror dimension.
All these elements contribute to do a very accessible, but quiet rich manga that is definitely worth reading!

Entry Filed under: Critics