Character · Dragon Ball
Son Goku
An alien infant sent to clear a planet hit his head, forgot the assignment, and grew up defending the place instead.
In Otakana the clue reads: Saiyan raised on Earth who loves fighting and food
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Dragon Ball
- Letters
- 4 · Easy
Goku was found in the woods by an old man who took him home despite the tail, and raised him until an accident knocked the mission out of him. What remained was appetite and a love of fighting. He starts Dragon Ball as a child with a magic staff and a cloud he can ride, hunting the seven orange spheres alongside a teenage inventor because she asked him to, and he keeps doing that sort of thing for forty years.
The character is a rewrite of Sun Wukong, the monkey king of the Chinese novel Journey to the West, down to the tail, the staff and the cloud. Toriyama shed most of the source material within a few volumes and kept the temperament: cheerful, curious, entirely without ambition beyond meeting someone who can beat him. He is a poor father and a worse husband, and the series is honest about both.
Akira Toriyama ran the manga in Weekly Shonen Jump from 1984 to 1995, forty-two volumes, more than 260 million copies in print. Nearly every long-running shonen hero since owes something to Goku's shape: the training, the tournaments, the rivals who join the team, the escalating scale. Very few of them eat as much.
Spelling GOKU
GOKU is four letters. Japanese order puts the family name first, so he is Son Goku, and the game wants the given half. 悟空 is go-ku, both syllables short, which is unusual in a franchise full of trimmed long vowels. The name comes straight from Sun Wukong, read in Japanese, so the two O's and the U land exactly where the pronunciation puts them.