Naruto Vol. 22
- ISBN
- 9781421518589
- Publisher
- Viz Media
- English release
- Pages
- 192
- Chapters
- 191–199
- Anime
- Season 3 (3rd Stage) ep. 84–131
One duel, one interlude, and no reason to own this book unless the volumes around it are on the shelf too. Chapters 191 to 199 give almost all of their length to Neji against Kidomaru, the second of the Sound Four to break off, while the rest of the retrieval team keeps moving. The only other thread is Orochimaru waiting for Sasuke and running out of time to wait. Nothing opens and nothing closes. The book is the middle of a chase that starts in Vol. 21 and is not settled until Part I ends, and it does not stand alone: read collected, a volume that is mostly one fight works in a sitting in a way it did not over nine weeks in 2004. Season 3 takes in all nine chapters on its way to 225. Viz does not print the contents of 3-in-1 books after the sixth.
Spoilers — why this volume matters. Tap to reveal.
Kidomaru fights like an engineer, and that is what earns the duel most of a nine-chapter volume. He does not try to overpower Neji: he watches, works out that the defense has a blind spot, builds a bow and arrow out of his own silk, and shoots at the gap from a distance until he hits it. Neji survives the hit and kills him with the arrow that made it. The blind spot is the first thing in the series to suggest that the Hyuga eye is not total. Orochimaru's half of the book is the more consequential one: he cannot hold out for Sasuke, so he takes someone else's body as a stopgap and defers the transfer he actually wants, and that delay is what the end of Part I and the start of Part II are built on. Most of a nine-chapter volume is a long time to spend on a fight whose loser was introduced two volumes earlier, and the arc repeats the shape several more times before it is done.
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