Menma (anime)

Menma wore his blond hair shoulder-length and tousled above grey eyes. His outfit was a lavender long-sleeved shirt with a green scarf, dark trousers, and matching shoes; the shirt was later cut away to treat a wound on his back. When he sweated, the mark of the Shiin clan surfaced on his right shoulder.

For all he had endured, Menma stayed gentle and eager to help, loathing the idea of harming others, though he would strike his own clansmen to keep the innocent safe. His courage held even as his buried memories returned, driving him to rescue an infant from a burning hospital and, in the end, to lay down his life for the village his clan had attacked.

Orphaned young and raised by the Shiin Clan, Menma turned to banditry when the clan, cut off from work after its best members left for Otogakure, set its sights on a goldmine beside a small border village. He wielded ninjutsu through an ocarina, using its music to dispel genjutsu, erase memories, or boost an ally's chakra for greater speed and strength, and was fast enough to outpace Neji Hyuga and catch him mid-fall. After saving a girl during the raid, Menma tumbled off a cliff and lost his memory, later revealed to be a self-cast memory-blocking technique. Naruto found the boy while gathering bamboo, brought him to Konoha, and named him Menma after pickled bamboo.

His memories flooded back as he saved an infant from a hospital fire, yet he told the Konoha ninja nothing. Assigned with Naruto, Neji, and Tenten to trace his lost past in the Land of Rice Fields, he recognised the village he had helped raid and resolved to defend it, building a wall with Naruto as the bandits, led by Shiin, returned. When Shiin's paralysing music struck, Menma countered with his own ocarina, letting Naruto shatter the enemy's flute. Realising Shiin meant to flood the village from a dam and spare only the mine, Menma raced there with Naruto, confessed his guilt, and pushed Naruto to safety before collapsing the mine on himself to stop the flood. His sacrifice saved the village and left a lasting mark on Naruto, who kept the ocarina and ate ramen with pickled shinachiku in his memory.