Boruto: Naruto Next Generations — Children Seem to Grow Bigger by the Day

Boruto: Naruto Next Generations — Children Seem to Grow Bigger by the Day

Every generation has its own story, and those stories bear the marks of growing up. Once upon a time, we grew alongside the characters in these stories. Perhaps we will also grow old with them, and then quietly vanish into the dust of the universe.

I watched Naruto in college. Naruto Uzumaki, Sasuke, Rock Lee, Sakura, Shikamaru… they felt like companions of mine in a two-dimensional world. Even though I lived a life completely different from theirs, their refusal to give up and their positive, striving spirit still moved me from time to time. They looked carefree and unreliable on the surface, but when it mattered, they never hesitated. They were teammates you could trust, people who would never let you down when it counted. To me, still in adolescence back then, those qualities were incredibly precious. There was a stretch of life when I grew up alongside Naruto and the others. The characters in the anime also had to face studies, missions, and all kinds of challenges, and might even have to shed blood or sacrifice their lives to protect their home, the Hidden Leaf Village. In the entire series, their happiest time was probably that earliest period at the ninja academy. Their biggest troubles were little more than causing mischief. Even the most dangerous situations back then, compared with the life-and-death struggles they would later face, were only trials before entering the real world.

Naruto and his generation fought and grew up against the looming storm of the Great Ninja War, under skies so dark it felt as if the city walls themselves might collapse. In the end, they passed through that war and bought peace for the ninja world with blood and sacrifice. Naruto Uzumaki and Hinata Hyuga, Sasuke Uchiha and Sakura Haruno… the people who had grown up together finally found their happy endings, and one story came to a close. In a sense, for the generation that grew up with Naruto, it also marked the end of youth.

Then Boruto: Naruto Next Generations appeared. Just like the theme song says, “following in the footsteps of the past,” Boruto and the others constantly reflect the shadows of Naruto’s generation, as if their story were about to begin all over again. Perhaps for newcomers whose anime journey starts with Boruto, this is simply another coming-of-age tale. But for me, if Naruto Uzumaki felt like a companion I grew up with, then Boruto has always felt more like the mischievous nephew of a close brother. Of course he has his moving moments, but amid that sense of familiarity, I can’t help but miss the youth I spent together with Naruto. And the stories that feel vitally important in Boruto’s eyes often seem, to me, like children’s games. I always find myself thinking: when they truly face life, they’ll grow up then. That, too, is a feeling almost parental in nature.

By contrast, although the older generation appears only very rarely in Boruto, every time I see a face that is both familiar and unfamiliar, it feels like running into an old friend after many years apart. Aren’t we in the real world much the same after these twenty-odd years? Married or not, with children or not, time has left a similar trace on all of us. Over the course of a few decades, the whole world has changed dramatically. Transportation, communication, and the internet have all advanced by leaps and bounds. And we, even if we did not become the person we once dreamed of being the way Naruto did, have nevertheless entered middle age just like him—worn down by work, family, parenting, education, and all the trivial burdens of daily life. We no longer have enough energy to give our children all the companionship they deserve, so selfishly we hope they might grow up just a little more slowly. But children keep getting bigger day by day, just as, before we knew it, so many years of our own time have already slipped away.

As BoJack Horseman says, there is no happily-ever-after, because the show has to go on. In the story of Boruto, there will still be new bloodshed and sacrifice; if one is to protect what truly matters, those sacrifices are unavoidable. But I think that no matter where life leads, if there can be a night like this—leaning against the one you love, watching your sleeping child quietly grow—then in that moment, nothing else really matters.