Character · Naruto
Jiraiya
Toad summoner, bestselling author of smut, and the worst-behaved of the three ninja his village calls legendary.
In Otakana the clue reads: Toad sage, novelist, and self-described super pervert
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Naruto
- Letters
- 7 · Normal
Jiraiya trained under the Third Hokage alongside Tsunade and Orochimaru, then spent his adult life on field intelligence, which for him meant travelling, drinking, and being thrown out of bathhouses. He summons toads the size of buildings, learned a sage mode on Mount Myoboku, and introduces himself with a full song-and-dance routine that nobody in the history of the manga has requested.
His teaching record is the strange part. He trained Minato Namikaze, who became the Fourth Hokage. He trained Nagato, who became the leader of the Akatsuki. He trained Naruto. Three students, three of the most consequential people in the setting, and he handles all of it with the seriousness of a man who is late for something else.
The novels are a running joke that turns out to matter. Icha Icha is the book in Kakashi's hand at all times, and an earlier, serious one of Jiraiya's that sold badly is where Naruto's name came from. He is also lifted wholesale out of folklore: the Jiraiya of Japanese legend rides a giant toad and fights a snake sorcerer.
Spelling JIRAIYA
JIRAIYA is seven letters and four of them are vowels, with the run A-I-Y-A doing most of the damage. Three beats: ji-rai-ya. The single J is about the rarest letter on this board and pins the first tile the moment it appears. Watch the order in the middle, since it is RAI and not RIA.