NARUTO -ナルト- (Naruto)

Gege Akutami has named the big Jump series of the 2000s as what he grew up on, Naruto among them, and Jujutsu Kaisen is built out of their furniture: a school that trains and ranks its students, a cursed power inside the protagonist that everyone else is afraid of, a sealed monster with its own personality, and a teacher who is both the strongest character and an unserious one. Filed MEDIUM: the debt is to a house style Naruto did more than any other single work to fix, rather than to a borrowed plot.

Masashi Kishimoto has described copying Toriyama's drawings as a child and has named Dragon Ball as the manga that made him want to make manga. The inheritance is structural. The tournament arc as a way of introducing a whole cast and ranking it; training as the thing the story is actually about; the power ceiling raised again with each arc so that last volume's villain becomes this volume's ally; the loud, hungry, underestimated hero. Kishimoto's own tribute in 2024 described Dragon Ball as the thing he had been chasing his whole career.

Masashi Kishimoto has named Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira as the manga that changed how he drew, alongside Toriyama's Dragon Ball. What he has said he took from it is the realistic, precisely drawn backgrounds and a sense of weight in the art, which he contrasted with the simpler styles he had been copying before.