Masashi Kishimoto

Masashi Kishimoto (岸本斉史) is a Japanese manga artist, born 8 November 1974 in Nagi, Okayama Prefecture. He is the elder of identical twin brothers; his twin, Seishi Kishimoto, is also a manga artist. He studied at an art college after high school, and has named Akira Toriyama and Katsuhiro Otomo as formative influences.

Naruto, his first serialised work, ran in Weekly Shonen Jump from 1999 to 2014 and has sold more than 250 million copies across 46 countries. He followed it with the single-volume sequel Naruto: The Seventh Hokage and the Scarlet Spring (2015), and with Samurai 8: The Tale of Hachimaru (2019-2020).

On the sequel series Boruto: Naruto Next Generations he was credited as supervisor from 2016 and took over as writer in late 2020; he writes and supervises its continuation, Boruto: Two Blue Vortex, begun in 2023. He also provides the illustrations for the Naruto Shinden and Retsuden prose novels, which are written by other authors.