The Untold Truth Of Hunter X Hunter

When he launched Hunter x Hunter in the pages of Weekly Shonen Jump, Yoshihiro Togashi was already a well-known and successful creator. His breakout book came in 1990 with the launch of Yu Yu Hakusho, which was never renamed when it was brought to English-speaking audiences despite the fact that it translates to the awesome title of Poltergeist Report.

Yu Yu Hakusho had its roots in Togashi wanting to do something that was different from his previous work, a romantic comedy called Ten de Shōwaru Cupid. With the goals of doing something that he would enjoy himself and that would be popular with the Weekly Shonen Jump readership — an audience that loved the fights in series Dragon Ball and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure — Togashi cooked up an action-packed supernatural story that would wind up running for the next four years.

With the story of a tough kid who died and was sent back from the afterlife with the ability to shoot ghosts with spiritual laser beams by making gun-fingers, Yu Yu Hakusho was a hit internationally. After taking a year off for the sci-fi action comedy Level E, Togashi decided to return to the shonen genre — and if the readers wanted fights, he was going to give them a story with a premise that would allow for as many fights as he could fit on a page.

For manga and anime fans, Yoshihiro Togashi's marriage is a pretty interesting one. After all, one of the people involved is a world-famous artist who has created one of the most beloved manga and anime franchises of all time, defining a genre and finding worldwide success. And the other is Yoshihiro Togashi.

If you missed their wedding announcement, Togashi has spent the past few decades blissfully married to Naoko Takeuchi, the creator of Sailor Moon, which is up there with Astro Boy and Dragon Ball on the list of the most famous anime and manga series in the world. Their relationship has the structure of the wildest romcom you've ever heard of, starting with a meet-cute at a party for single manga creators in 1997 where they fell for each other, and then hitting some pretty rocky territory. According to various recountings of their relationship, Togashi proposed after standing Takeuchi up on her birthday, and then suggested that they "get married" by continuing to live separately, dating other people, and, uh, not actually getting married. Eventually, after Naoko called the whole thing off and prompted Togashi to get it together, they finally got hitched in 1999 and have been happy together ever since.

Those of you who are paying attention to the timeline might've already realized that the start of their relationship coincides with the launch of Hunter x Hunter, and Takeuchi was in fact involved in the early days of the series. Having finished PQ Angels, her follow-up to Sailor Moon, in 1998, Takeuchi had some free time and decided to help out as Togashi's assistant, even designing a few minor characters. If you're curious, they're not hard to spot, as they're the ones that look like Naoko Takeuchi designed them, the most notable of which being Menchi, one of the hunters who administers the exam at the start of the series. Ultimately, Togashi didn't have much for her to do, and she considered giving up on comics and instead going to work as a pharmacist, presumably prescribing Moon Healing Activation to her customers.

Speaking of Nen, let's talk about one of the most notable and bizarre plot elements that frequently crops up in the series. In its most basic form, Nen is a technique that allows people to tap into a sort of life force that runs through all living things, giving those who master it strange, seemingly magical abilities that can take forms as varied as sensing things or clouding their adversaries' minds, or even shooting out lightning. Those users skilled enough to manipulate this force are called... Jedi Knights. No, wait, sorry, they're just called "Nen Users." Got the notes mixed up there.

Nen and its users have been exhaustively categorized over the course of the series, with six types of users — Enhancers, Transmuters, Emitters, Conjurers, Manipulators, and Specialists — and complicated mathematical formulas used by fans for determining how powerful someone is. Really, though, the limits of Nen powers are determined less by the math and more by what Togashi needs them to do to advance the plot. They are, however, a pretty interesting way for characters to keep progressing indefinitely long after the readers think their training is over. Plus, one of the most powerful Nen users in the world is named "Biscuit," and that rules.

It's worth noting that, like so many things in the world of comics and manga, Nen has an evil opposite. This "dark side," if you will — hey, that's catchy — is called On, and was featured prominently in the 2014 movie Hunter x Hunter: The Last Mission. In the way that Nen is fueled by one's life force and controlled through intense training, On is a sort of "death energy" that is powered by hatred, and gives its users abilities that don't have the categorized limitations of Nen. Jed, the former leader of a secret squadron of Hunters even more powerful than the regular Hunters — because there's always a secret faction of people even stronger than the last secret, super-strong faction — could even pass down the power through his blood. That's how Gon was able to use it, but fortunately, he used regular ol' Nen to purge it from his body afterwards.

For more impatient readers, one of the more notable elements of Hunter x Hunter over the past decade or so has unfortunately had nothing to do with what's on the page. Rather, it has to do with what's not on the page. As Kotaku's Brian Ashcraft put it, "Yoshihiro Togashi is best known for two things: creating Hunter x Hunter and taking breaks from Hunter x Hunter."

Since 2006, Hunter x Hunter has been on hiatus far more often than it hasn't. That year, the series appeared in only four of Weekly Shonen Jump's 48 issues, and that pretty much set the tone of sporadic new installments that readers have seen ever since. The previous record for the longest gap between issues came between June 2014 and April 2016, which kicked off only three months after another two-year hiatus. As of this writing, there hasn't been a new installment since December 2018. If you're more of a visual learner, here's what that looks like in an extremely detailed collection of graphs with a color scheme that, if you're anything like us, will make you crave a Domino's Pizza.

The extended gap between stories has caused some frustrated readers to blur the lines between "enthusiastic fan eager to read the next installment" and "entitled customer demanding that an artist cater to what they want." Some fans have even claimed that the lack of new HxH chapters is down to the release of a new Dragon Quest game and that Togashi is lying about having health problems. It is worth noting, however, that while he does use them (and apparently treats them uncommonly well), Togashi relies far less on assistants than other major manga creators. The above story about Naoko Takeuchi getting bored by not having anything to do when she was working as his assistant would seem to support that, as would interviews where Togashi remarks that he's a perfectionist who prefers to do things himself, as evidenced by the fact that for the collected paperbacks, he often goes back and draws (or re-draws) backgrounds that were missing in the original run.