Rule-Maker of Hunter × Hunter
Walked away from YuYu Hakusho at its peak, then built Hunter × Hunter out of vows, games and cruelty, drawing it in bursts, latterly lying on his back.
Manga Artist
Togashi is the Weekly Shōnen Jump star who did what the magazine’s economics discourage: he ended a megahit when it was wearing him down, then spent nearly three decades on a serial that appears when his body allows. Hunter × Hunter runs on rulebooks — exams, auctions, a card game, a board game, and Nen, a power system in which a fighter grows stronger by binding himself to conditions he cannot break. The cruelty is real, the jokes are real, and the long silences are part of the work’s history.
Yoshihiro Togashi was born on 27 April 1966 in Shinjō, a small city in Yamagata Prefecture, to a family that kept a paper shop. He drew manga at school, joined his high school’s fine-arts club and went to Yamagata University to train as a teacher. In 1986, at twenty, his story Buttobi Straight earned him a Tezuka Award, Shueisha’s prize for new artists; in his final year a Weekly Shōnen Jump editor asked him to move to Tokyo, and the teaching career was dropped.
The apprenticeship was short pieces and a first serial. Jason Thompson, author of Manga: The Complete Guide, describes the early Jump one-shots as a mix of school comedy and splatter-film horror references; Tonda Birthday Present appeared in 1987, a collection of comedies in 1989, and the romantic comedy Ten de Shōwaru Cupid ran in four volumes from 1989 to 1990. Togashi has said he came out of Cupid intimidated by more popular colleagues in the same magazine, and concluded that he needed a fighting manga — something that would win readers and that he would enjoy drawing.
YuYu Hakusho ran in Weekly Shōnen Jump from 3 December 1990 to 25 July 1994. The story opens by killing its hero. Yusuke Urameshi, fourteen, a brawler whom everyone fears and whose drunk mother tells him to get out of the house, throws himself in front of a car to save a small boy who has chased a ball into the road. Botan, the cheerful ferry-girl of the dead, then tells him the joke: the boy would have walked away unscathed, and Yusuke’s death is an accident nobody in the afterlife had foreseen. To earn his body back he must carry a spirit egg that will hatch a beast to devour him if he behaves badly; he passes, and returns as a “spirit detective” for Koenma, the infant-faced son of the king of the underworld. The comedy is all in the gap between his reputation and his act.
Togashi has said the swing from ghost stories to martial-arts tournaments was planned from the start, on the model of Kinnikuman, and that his editor, nervous about the slow occult opening, pushed for battles after about thirty chapters. The series became a hit, with a Studio Pierrot anime (1992–1995) and the 39th Shogakukan Manga Award for shōnen (1993). It also wore him down. In Yoshirin de Pon!, a fanzine he made himself and sold at the summer 1994 Comic Market, he described months of irregular sleep, illness from the Dark Tournament onwards and drawing whole manuscripts nearly alone, according to passages from it quoted in secondary accounts of the series. The same fanzine says he had wanted to stop in December 1993, at the climax of the Sensui arc; that editors tried to talk him out of quitting; that he stopped out of what he called selfishness; and that he was relieved when it was over.
Thompson’s summary is blunt: a bestselling Jump author who could have run it for “a zillion volumes” pulled the plug after 19, just as a new storyline was starting, turning a fighting manga back into a comedy on the way out. Asked once which YuYu Hakusho character he most resembled, Togashi answered, as Thompson quotes him: “The sum of all the evil ones.”
Level E ran in Weekly Shōnen Jump from 2 October 1995 to 15 January 1997: sixteen chapters, three volumes, and almost no fighting. Its premise is a hostage situation played as sitcom. The prince of the planet Dogra crash-lands on Earth, loses his memory and moves in with Yukitaka Tsutsui, a high-school student who becomes the main target of his torments. The prince is a genius and a pest of cosmic scale, known in Japanese as Baka Ōji, the idiot prince. Most chapters form self-contained mini-arcs, among them a sentai-hero parody, the Color Rangers, and a pursuit of a princess by a space captain called Craft.
Togashi had drafted only the first chapter when the serial was agreed. He first called it Alien Crises and renamed it after being told the title gave too much away; he has named horror films and H. R. Giger as influences, set it in his home prefecture and taken comic timing from the 1970s gag manga Gaki Deka. Thompson’s description — “almost 0% fighting and 100% humor,” with Giger-esque gore — is a fair warning. In August 1997, at a party hosted by Kazushi Hagiwara, creator of Bastard!!, Togashi met Naoko Takeuchi, the creator of Sailor Moon; they married on 6 January 1999 and have two children.
Hunter × Hunter began in Weekly Shōnen Jump on 3 March 1998. Gon Freecss, raised on Whale Island, sets out to become a licensed Hunter because his absent father Ging is one. The exam is a sequence of small rulebooks: a run of roughly 100 kilometres into a swamp of monsters, a cooking test set by two gourmet Hunters, a Trick Tower where candidates must get past a squad of convicted killers. Takeuchi applied screentone to pages of the first volume. Thompson’s description of Togashi’s method is that he “invents some little closed system or rules just so the heroes can break them” — the Greed Island game, which is a collectible card game inside a role-playing world, is the extreme case. Another of his observations is visual: Ging’s first appearance, in volume 8, shows him riding a giant beast, then the view pulls out into a two-page spread to reveal that beast riding on something vastly bigger. The page teaches the scale of the world in one turn.
Passing the exam turns out to be the easy part; a real Hunter must master Nen. Its grammar is concrete. Every user practises four basics — Ten to shroud the body, Zetsu to hide it, Ren to pour out more aura, Hatsu to express a personal ability — and each person’s Hatsu falls into one of six types: Enhancer, Transmuter, Emitter, Conjurer, Manipulator or Specialist. Then comes the clause that makes the system a contract: a user can make an ability stronger by binding it to restrictions and vows, and the stricter the pledge, the greater the power. Kurapika, last survivor of a clan murdered for their eyes by the Phantom Troupe, binds his chains so that they may be used only against the Troupe, on pain of his own death. In the Yorknew City arc that vow lets him kill two of its members and seal the powers of its leader, Chrollo. The critic Ryūji Kayama has argued in Bunshun that the early rule games protect the boy heroes — Netero, the chairman, plays Gon and Killua for a ball using only his left hand and right foot; the Heavens Arena stops fights on a ten-point knockout; killing in Greed Island makes winning impossible — and that the Chimera Ant arc is where every such shackle comes off. Netero loses that left hand and right foot fighting the Ant King, Meruem.
The Chimera Ant arc is the series at its most extreme. An ant queen washes up, acquires a taste for people, and her soldiers grind captured villagers into meatballs; her son Meruem takes over a dictatorship that Thompson calls a thinly veiled North Korea and prepares to consume its five million citizens, and plays an invented board game, Gungi. Kayama matches the attack on the palace — Zeno’s aerial “Dragon Dive” and the hunters splitting three ways to get inside — to moves on the Gungi board. Netero ends his fight with a suicide bomb; Gon wrecks his own body in his revenge on Neferpitou. Thompson calls the manga “incredibly dense,” sometimes too fond of characters explaining rules, and notes gory panels in later volumes apparently censored with screentone. He is also plain about Hisoka, the magician who kills with playing cards, whose interest in the boys he calls “blatantly pedophilic.” Togashi does not make his villains safe.
From late 2005 Hunter × Hunter stopped appearing every week. Hiatuses became the rule — some attributed to illness and back pain, others never explained at all — and when chapters did run they often looked unfinished: Thompson describes magazine pages with sketchy figures and missing backgrounds, which Togashi apologised for and redrew for the collected volumes. The magazine-reader’s complaint and the book-reader’s experience are therefore different things. Thompson’s guess was that a perfectionist who preferred to do things himself was simply slow, and he reported Takeuchi working occasionally as assistant and colourist. The couple also made a children’s picture book together.
The series returned in June 2014 after two years away, ran in short bursts between 2016 and 2018, and stopped in November 2018 at chapter 390, in the middle of its most intricate arc yet, the royal Succession War on the expedition to the Dark Continent. There Kayama notices that the rules have reversed: the princes’ contest positively encourages assassination. Thompson, writing in 2012, admitted he would not be surprised if Togashi ended the series within a year, or if it were still among Jump’s most popular manga a decade later.
On 24 May 2022 an anonymous-looking Twitter account appeared, posting a photograph of manuscript pages and two lines: 主に原稿の進捗状況をお伝えしていきます (I will mainly report on how the manuscript is progressing) and とりあえずあと4話。 (For now, four chapters to go.) Shueisha confirmed to Oricon the next day that it was Togashi’s. In July, with the announcement of a Tokyo exhibition of his work, he published a handwritten message explaining the silence. In Anime News Network’s translation, he had been “unable to sit in a chair for two years,” had found another way to draw, warned fans to look after their backs and hips because ordinary movements now took him three to five times longer, and drew himself as a dog lying on its back, drawing, captioned “Currently, I can only draw in this position.”
Chapters 391 to 400 ran from 24 October 2022 to the end of that year. At the turn of 2023 the editors announced that, after consulting him, Hunter × Hunter would no longer be serialised weekly; it now appears in banked runs. In November 2023, on the Japanese television talk show Iwakura to Yoshizumi no Bangumi, Togashi revealed that he had developed several endings: a safe ending A, an ending C he personally prefers while expecting about nine readers in ten to react badly, and an abandoned “ending D” that could stand if he dies first — Gon’s granddaughter Gin refusing ever to become a Hunter. Chapters 401 to 410 followed from October to December 2024, after which Togashi reported having had surgery.
Serialisation resumed on 29 June 2026 with chapter 411 and paused again on 7 September after chapter 420, with the 39th volume published on 3 July and the series past 100 million copies in circulation. On 15 September he posted that the manuscript for chapter 428 was done. On 5 October 2026 he wrote on X that he had been through a run of physical and mental health problems and would turn down any future commissions with deadlines, to spend what he has on his own manuscripts. As of 9 October 2026 Hunter × Hunter is on hiatus with no announced return date.
