Naruto/Naruto Uzumaki

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CHARACTER · PROTAGONIST Naruto Uzumaki うずまきナルト · Uzumaki Naruto
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Naruto at the start of the series
Debut	Manga: chapter 1, "Uzumaki Naruto!!"[1] Anime: episode 1, "Enter: Naruto Uzumaki!"[2]
Voice actors	Junko Takeuchi (Japanese)[3] Maile Flanagan (English)[4]
Affiliation	Village Hidden in the Leaves
[ Details — full series ▾ ] Status Seventh Hokage of the Village Hidden in the Leaves (series epilogue)[5][6] Family Minato Namikaze (father) · Kushina Uzumaki (mother)[7] Hinata Hyūga (wife)[8] Boruto Uzumaki (son)[6] · Himawari Uzumaki (daughter)[5] Signature technique Shadow Clone Technique

Naruto Uzumaki (うずまきナルト, Uzumaki Naruto) is the protagonist of Naruto and the character the series is named for. Orphaned on the night of his birth, when the Nine-Tails attacked the Village Hidden in the Leaves and was sealed inside him, he grows up shunned by a village that sees only the fox.^[1] The series follows him across fifteen years of publication, from the worst student in his Academy class to the center of every battle that decides the ninja world's future. His story runs on one engine the whole way: a loud, stubborn refusal to stay unseen.

This article covers the whole of the series in story order. Each section moves further into the story than the last, so you can stop reading at the point you have reached.

Twelve years before the story opens, the Nine-Tailed Fox attacked the Village Hidden in the Leaves. The Fourth Hokage stopped it at the cost of his own life by sealing the beast into a newborn boy, and the village's leaders then forbade anyone to speak of it.^[1] The law was meant to protect Naruto; what it produced was a childhood in which every adult looked at him coldly and no one would tell him why. He grew up alone, pulled pranks to force the village to look at him, and announced to anyone listening that he would one day be Hokage.^[1]

The series opens with Naruto failing his graduation exam at the Ninja Academy, defeated as always by the basic Clone Technique.^[1] The instructor Mizuki tricks the miserable boy into stealing the Scroll of Sealing that night. In the forest Naruto learns two things at once: the truth about the fox, and the Shadow Clone Technique, the forbidden skill that becomes his trademark. When Mizuki turns his weapons on Iruka Umino, the first adult who ever claimed Naruto as a person rather than a monster, Naruto floors him with hundreds of solid clones.^[1] Iruka graduates him on the spot, tying his own forehead protector onto his student.

As a genin, the lowest rank of ninja, Naruto joins Team 7 under Kakashi Hatake, alongside Sasuke Uchiha, the prodigy he names his rival, and Sakura Haruno, the girl he cannot impress.^[9] A guard mission in the Land of Waves turns into the team's first brush with killers and gives Naruto his working creed: protect the people who matter, whatever the cost. The Chunin Exams that follow fill the heart of Part I. Naruto defeats the genius Neji Hyūga, who insists that failures stay failures. He then faces Gaara of the Sand, a fellow jinchūriki — a person with a tailed beast sealed inside them — who grew up without a single Iruka to catch him.^[9] Between rounds the legendary ninja Jiraiya takes him on as a student and teaches him the Rasengan, the Fourth Hokage's signature attack.

Part I closes on a wound. Sasuke, starved for the power to kill one particular man, walks out of the village to join the criminal Orochimaru, and Naruto joins the mission sent to bring him home. Their fight at the Valley of the End is the first of their great battles, and Naruto loses it.^[9] He leaves the village soon after to train under Jiraiya, carrying a promise to Sakura that he intends to keep however long it takes.^[9]

Part II opens nearly three years later with a taller, louder Naruto walking back through the village gate.^[10] The Akatsuki, an organization of rogue ninja, is hunting the nine tailed beasts and the jinchūriki who carry them, which puts Naruto near the top of its list. The hunt takes Jiraiya from him: his teacher dies fighting the Akatsuki's leader, Pain.^[11] While Naruto is away mastering his dead teacher's arts among the toads, Pain levels the village in a single attack, and Naruto returns alone to beat him.^[11] The victory turns the village that whispered about him into a village that cheers him. In the middle of the fight, at the edge of losing himself to the fox, he also meets the spirit of the Fourth Hokage and learns that the man was his father.^[12]

The Fourth Great Ninja War unites the five villages against the men behind the Akatsuki, and Naruto fights at the center of it. He meets the spirit of his mother, Kushina Uzumaki, and finally hears the story of his own birth: the night the fox was freed, and the night both his parents died stopping it.^[7] He also wins over the fox itself, turning the monster in his seal from a prisoner into a partner. The war's true architects fall one by one until Naruto and Sasuke, fighting together, seal away Kaguya, the progenitor of all chakra.^[13] The two then settle their own account in a final battle at the Valley of the End that costs each of them an arm. Sasuke concedes, and the rivalry that carried the whole series ends as something close to brotherhood.^[13]

The final chapter jumps years ahead: Naruto is the Seventh Hokage, and his face is carved into the mountain he defaced as a boy.^[5] The Last: Naruto the Movie fills in the road between, following the romance between Naruto and Hinata Hyūga, the shy classmate who believed in him before the village did.^[8] They marry and raise two children, Boruto and Himawari.^[6][5] The sequel series Boruto: Naruto Next Generations inverts his story, giving him a talented, comfortable son who acts out to win the attention of a father the whole world now sees.^[6] The overworked Hokage still leans on his oldest trick, and the official continuation volume opens with him using shadow clones to babysit his own son.^[14]

Naruto is loud, impulsive, starved for recognition, and incapable of quitting, and every one of those traits is on the page within minutes of his debut.^[1] The pranks of his childhood are strategy rather than malice, because being scolded is the only attention the village ever offered him. What sets him apart in a world full of talented ninja is not talent but persistence: he trains alone until things work, and he refuses to write anyone off, enemies included. Much of the series' plot is a list of broken people — Gaara, Neji, Pain, Sasuke — whom Naruto declines to give up on. The acknowledgment he demands in his first chapter arrives one person at a time: a teacher, a follower, a village, and at last the world. The adult under the Hokage's hat is recognizably the same boy.

Naruto graduates at the bottom of his class, and the gap between his reputation and his ceiling is the running joke of Part I. Because of the fox he carries enormous reserves of chakra, the energy behind every technique, which is why a delicate skill like the basic clone fails him while the chakra-hungry Shadow Clone Technique comes almost naturally.^[1] Shadow clones anchor his fighting style for the entire series, serving as decoys, training partners, and the delivery system for the Rasengan and its later variants. Jiraiya's teaching, the toads' Sage Mode, which draws power from the natural world, and finally the fox's willing cooperation each add a layer without changing the foundation.^[9][11] Most of his signature attacks are, in the end, teamwork between Naruto and himself.

The defining fact of Naruto's life is the beast inside it. For most of Part I the fox is simply a menace: a source of terrifying borrowed power that surfaces when his rage peaks, and the reason the village fears him.^[1] Part II turns the menace into a relationship. The fox's power nearly consumes him more than once, the two fight an open struggle inside Naruto's own mind, and the war finally forges a real partnership between them.^[7] By the last battles the fox is not his burden but his ally, and the reason for his loneliness has become one of his closest friends.

Iruka Umino is the first person who accepted him and remains the closest thing he has to family.^[1] Sasuke is rival, best friend, enemy and finally something like a brother, and their bond is the axis the manga turns on.^[13] Jiraiya shapes him more than any other teacher and costs him more than any other loss.^[11] Sakura and Kakashi round out the team that becomes his first real home, and Konohamaru Sarutobi appoints himself Naruto's first follower in chapter 2. Hinata Hyūga, who admired him when no one else did, becomes his wife, and their children carry the story into the next generation.^[8][6]

• Iruka Umino
• Sasuke Uchiha
• Konohamaru Sarutobi
• Shadow Clone Technique
• Clone Technique
• Sexy Technique
• Nine-Tails
• Village Hidden in the Leaves
• Naruto

1. Naruto, chapter 1: "Uzumaki Naruto!!" (Shueisha, Weekly Shōnen Jump, 1999).
2. "Enter: Naruto Uzumaki." NARUTO OFFICIAL SITE (official). naruto-official.com/en/anime/naruto1/list/01_225. Retrieved July 2026.
3. Naruto, episode 1 on-screen cast credits (Studio Pierrot / TV Tokyo, 2002).
4. Naruto, episode 1: "Enter: Naruto Uzumaki!" English-language broadcast credits (VIZ Media, 2005).
5. Naruto, chapter 700: "Uzumaki Naruto!!" (Shueisha, Weekly Shōnen Jump, 2014).
6. "Boruto: Naruto Next Generations." VIZ Media (official). viz.com/boruto. Retrieved July 2026.
7. Naruto, vol. 53 (Shueisha / VIZ Media). viz.com. Retrieved July 2026.
8. "The Last: Naruto the Movie." VIZ Media (official). viz.com/blog/posts/the-last-naruto-the-movie. Retrieved July 2026.
9. Naruto, vols. 4–27 (Shueisha / VIZ Media).
10. Naruto, vol. 28: "Homecoming" (Shueisha / VIZ Media).
11. Naruto, vol. 46 (Shueisha / VIZ Media). viz.com. Retrieved July 2026.
12. Naruto, vol. 48 (Shueisha / VIZ Media).
13. Naruto, vol. 72 (Shueisha / VIZ Media). viz.com. Retrieved July 2026.
14. Naruto: The Seventh Hokage and the Scarlet Spring (Shueisha / VIZ Media, 2015). viz.com. Retrieved July 2026.