Character · Naruto
Sasori
A puppeteer who solved the problem of ageing by removing every part of himself capable of it.
In Otakana the clue reads: Puppeteer who turned himself into a puppet
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Naruto
- Letters
- 6 · Hard
Sasori of the Red Sand left the Hidden Sand as a young man with a reputation built on one technique: he turns human bodies into puppets. Not carved wooden copies. Actual corpses, preserved and jointed and fitted so that a puppet made from a dead ninja keeps whatever that ninja could do while alive. He is said to have kept about a hundred of them.
He built himself into one as well. Almost nothing of Sasori is flesh, and the small core that remains sits in a cylinder in the chest, converting chakra. He wanted to be permanent, and he explains that as an aesthetic position: art should last. His partner Deidara holds that art is an explosion, over in a second, and the two of them argue about it constantly.
His grandmother Chiyo raised him after his parents died, made him his first puppets, and eventually has to fight him. That match is one of the better-structured fights in Shippuden, since both sides use the same craft and only one of them is still human. His poisons have no antidote unless Chiyo happens to have made them.
Spelling SASORI
SASORI is 蠍, the Japanese word for scorpion, which suits a man who fights with a barbed tail on a cable and coats everything he owns in poison. Six letters, three beats, sa-so-ri, with S on tiles one and three. Nothing is dropped from the Japanese here, so the row lands exactly as the name sounds.