Utakata

Slim and standing tall, Utakata dressed in a loose, pale blue kimono that fell open across his chest, cinched with an orange sash and worn over grey trousers; a cluster of three bubbles decorated its back. Tucked into the outfit were a bamboo flask of soap solution and the pipe he used to blow it. His hair was brown and reached his shoulders, one long fringe swept across the left half of his face, and his eyes were a pale gold, drawn very narrow in the manga though rendered more ordinary in the anime. The anime also placed his host seal, a green talisman inscribed in yellow, on his stomach. Back when he still served Kirigakure, he wore a grey bodysuit under a modified village flak jacket with unusually low shoulder guards, along with fingerless gloves, forearm wraps, and the village headband.

Quiet, composed, and a touch aloof, Utakata is described as an elegant loner who prefers his own company and rarely wastes words. That calm cracks around a single subject: the bond between master and student. Having once been the pupil of Harusame, a Kiri ninja who came to see the Six-Tails as a curse on his student's life, Utakata carried deep scars from the day Harusame tried to draw the beast out of him. The ritual went wrong, forced a transformation, and left Harusame dead at Saiken's hands, and Utakata with only broken memories and the sense that his teacher had betrayed him. He fled the village during its Bloody Mist years and became a wanderer, forever fending off the hunter-nin sent to drag him back. From then on the very word master filled him with contempt, and he flatly refused to take on a student. That refusal was tested by Hotaru, a girl he rescued who latched onto him and begged to be trained; her stubborn devotion left him flustered even as he came to feel protective of her. For all his prickliness he held a firm sense of honour, determined to repay those he owed, and like Naruto he chose not to lean on his tailed beast's power, wary of the ruin it could cause. Unusually, he was on good terms with Saiken, who would lend its strength and withdraw again without ever seizing control of him.

Utakata fought with a signature soap bubble ninjutsu, a branch of Water Release channelled through a special bubble-blowing pipe. His bubbles were far from harmless: they could burst against a target or be triggered all at once, and he could load them with Saiken's acid or with ink that trapped and killed without leaving a trace. The same craft turned defensive just as easily, letting him drift and hide inside a floating sphere or raise a huge bubble barrier to shield himself and his allies from a blast. A capable sensor, he could read the flow of an opponent's chakra and even track gathering natural energy, and he had a knack for tracking and herbal medicine. As Saiken's host he could tap the beast's chakra through every stage, from an early cloaked form up to a controlled Version 2 and the complete Six-Tails, oozing a corrosive substance that scorched anything it touched and making his body slither and coil to stay out of reach. He first crossed paths with Naruto while escorting Hotaru and her clan's forbidden technique, and later, ambushed on the road by Nagato's Six Paths of Pain, he pushed into his Version 2 form and downed two of them before the rest overwhelmed him. Taken by the Akatsuki, he died at twenty-six when Saiken was torn from his body. Kabuto Yakushi later gathered his DNA and reincarnated him, and Tobi remade him into a personal Path fitted with a Sharingan and a Rinnegan, resealing Saiken inside him to hurl against Naruto, Killer B, Kakashi, and Might Guy in the Fourth Shinobi World War before he was finally freed and returned to rest.