Naruto Vol. 53
- ISBN
- 9781421540498
- Publisher
- Viz Media
- English release
- Pages
- 192
- Chapters
- 495–504
- Anime
- Season 12: 九尾掌握と因果なる邂逅の章 (Nine-Tails and the War begins) ep. 243–275
Naruto goes into his own seal to take the Nine-Tails' power by force, and the series then breaks off to tell the story of the day he was born. Chapters 495 to 504 start with Killer Bee's method, which is to remove the seal and win the fight that follows, and the fight does not go the way Naruto intended. What stops it is a character who has not appeared before and who accounts for most of the book. From chapter 500, titled 'The Birth of Naruto', the volume is flashback: Konoha before the series, the Fourth Hokage at work, and the night the Nine-Tails was sealed. Nothing in the war advances here. It is the book the war was arranged around. Shippuden's twelfth season adapts chapters 492 to 535 and takes in all of it.
Spoilers — why this volume matters. Tap to reveal.
The character is Kushina Uzumaki, who arrives in chapter 498 as Naruto's mother, the previous host of the Nine-Tails, and the reason the Uzumaki name carries weight in the series. She can stop the fox because it was sealed in her first. What she tells him rewrites the premise: the Nine-Tails attack that orphaned him was Madara's doing rather than a disaster, and his parents sealed the fox into a newborn because they expected that newborn to finish the job. Minato's Reaper Death Seal, chapter 503, is the price they pay for it. Chapter 504 is titled 'Thank You' and is the goodbye. The coincidence worth noticing is the number: the five hundredth chapter of Naruto is the one titled for his birth, and Kishimoto spends it on the two characters the series had kept as references rather than people. It is the last time the story stops for a family before the war takes the rest of it.
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