Zansūru

Lean and bespectacled behind silver frames, Zansūru hides a false left eye: glass in the manga, technological in the anime, and so lifelike that only Sasuke Uchiha, reading it with his Sharingan, ever spots the difference. The manga gives him red hair and reddish-purple eyes, and he favors white robes marked by a black zig-zag down the front and along the hem, worn over grey trousers with black boots; the anime adds grey stud earrings.

For all his occasional boasts of being a ninja, Zansūru is really just an ordinary man, his chakra reserves slim. The novel does show him call on Wind Release once, during his clash with Sasuke, to keep a flying dinosaur aloft, blue stripes surfacing across his brow as he does. His artificial eye leaves him untouchable by ocular genjutsu.

A trained archaeologist and longtime friend of the Prime Minister, Zansūru spends years at the Astronomy Research Institute mastering the region's dinosaur fossils and, from its archives, the secret of raising the dead. He means to resurrect a dinosaur army for his friend's benefit, but the work demands more chakra than an ordinary person holds, so the Prime Minister brings in the shinobi Jiji, promising him a life with his lover Margo in return for a year of service. The first revival, Menō, succeeds, and Zansūru uses the beast to keep the fossil-digging prisoners in line. When the year runs short of fossils, he lies that Margo has died in a plague and dangles her revival to keep Jiji working. During the Sasuke Retsuden events, prisoner Sasuke Uchiha probes him and discovers the glass eye that blocks genjutsu, while Sakura, disguised as a messenger, distracts him so Sasuke can search his hidden chamber. On the night the army is unleashed against Nagare Village, Menō turns on Zansūru and defends the prisoners; fleeing atop a borrowed flying dinosaur he cannot fully command, Zansūru is thrown when the creature obeys a new order in place of carrying him, and he plunges to his death.