Ok, so I just tweeted that I finished writing Naruto in 1996 and then I suddenly got a lot of questions about my life and the story. Let me tell you about the manga shortly. I started writing Naruto as a kid, and I kept on adding more and more to the story for almost 10 years... I started with the absolute basis of the story. All I had after 6 years was the main character who had to save his friend form the darkness. I tought: "This is a stupid story, I can't do anything with this. Nobody wants to read this garbage." Because my idols were such great writers (I was a huge fan of Dragon Ball), I decided to give up on my dream of becoming a professional writer. I threw everything I created for my story in my closet and locked it away, so I would never have to see it again...
Then, a lot of stuff happened. I met a lot of new people, I graduated from high school and some people in my family all passed away within 4 months. Even tough I lost my interest in becoming a writer, I still wrote down some of the things that happened in my life, in a diary. A few years later I got a little bit depressed and to calm my emotions I decided to put all the bad things that happened to me in a book. And believe it or not, but it actually helped. I started to feel better after I did that and then I found my first story back in that same closet I threw it in. That's when I felt I just had to write this story. I had to share my emotions with the world. I hired a room for six months and I used those six months to re-write my 'stupid' story. And adding the stuff I wrote in my diary to the story... Naruto the manga was born! I was planning to release it as a book first, but I was also very good at drawing/animating (I learned drawing by looking at the creations of my hero Akira), so I took the advice from my brother Seishi and turned my story Naruto into a manga series.
Right now, I could say that the story is my most precious property ever, because a lot of things that happen in the story, are based on things that happened to me when I was younger. So the Naruto manga is actually my life story, but I'm not like any of the characters you see in the manga. Some people asked me who I can relate to most: well, if I really had to pick someone, I'd say Jiraiya. Why? Because Jiraiya spent his whole life writing, and all of his novels are based on the things he has done in his life. Just like me. So yes, my childhood was pretty complicated but if it wouldn't have been complicated, Naruto wouldn't exist today. Thank you so much (or 'Arrigato' as we say in Japan) for all the support you guys gave to the manga. I hope you guys will always like the story as much as you did when you first read it, and I hope I can keep doing this as long as possible... I love my fans forever, especially those 10,000 fans following me on Twitter! THANK YOU! - Masashi Kishimoto
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