Hunter × Hunter is a manga by Yoshihiro Togashi about a 12-year-old boy named Gon Freaks, and his quest to find his father, Ging Freaks. Ging is a Hunter, which in the setting of Hunter × Hunter means that he is a member of society's elite, with pretty much total license to go anywhere or do anything. It started running in Japan in Weekly Shonen Jump in the 14th issue of 1998.

Contents

1 Plot Summary 1.1 Hunter Test Story Arc 1.2 Zaoldyeck Family & Celestial Tower Story Arcs 1.3 Genei Ryodan Story Arc 1.4 Greed Island Story Arc 1.5 Chimera Ant Story Arc 2 Media 3 Miscellany 4 Music from the Anime 5 References

Plot Summary

Hunter Test Story Arc

In the first major story arc, Gon takes a series of bizarre tests to become a Hunter himself, which include such things as navigating a deadly jungle, hunting other applicants, killing a wild boar, and making sushi. During the Hunter Test, Gon meets and befriends three of the other applicants, who become the supporting characters:

• Killua Zaoldyeck: Another 12-year old boy, raised in a family of assassins.
• Kurapika: An androgynous teenager who is the last of his clan, and whose eyes turn scarlet when he is enraged.
• Leorio: A medical student who, although he's the oldest of the four, is always scrambling to catch up with the others.

Another of the applicants in the Hunter Test is Hisoka, a complex villain who uses playing cards as weapons, and who views Gon as an "unripe fruit" that he will take great pleasure in killing once he's grown up enough to present a challenge.

Zaoldyeck Family & Celestial Tower Story Arcs

The second story arc involves Gon, Kurapika, and Leorio springing Killua from his parents' mansion. At the end of the second story arc, Leorio leaves for medical school and Kurapika leaves to find work as a bodyguard, taking both characters out of the story. In the third story arc, Gon and Killua go to the Celestial Tower, a 251-floor building where people can compete in fighting tournaments around the clock for cash and prizes. It is here they meet Wing, who teaches them about nen, a chi-like energy that can be used to manifest superhuman powers.

Genei Ryodan Story Arc

The fourth story arc reunites the four main characters for the world's largest auction in a sprawling metropolis called York Shin. While Gon, Killua, and Leorio try different methods to make enough money to buy Greed Island, a "Joystation" video game that could help Gon find his father, Kurapika takes center-stage. This story arc introduces the Genei Ryodan ("shadow brigade"), a group of theives who, among many many other crimes, slaughtered all the other members of Kurapika's clan. Kurapika crosses paths with them while working as a bodyguard for a clairvoyant teenage girl named Neon, and spends the rest of the story balancing his/her bodyguard duties with hunting down the Genei Ryodan. The Genei Ryodan 's 13 members are:

• kuroro Lucifer: The leader of the Genei Ryodan; A young man with the ability to permanently steal other peoples' nen powers, which he keeps in a book for later use.
• Bonorenofu: Who does absolutely nothing in the Genei Ryodan story arc. Later, in the Chimera Ant story arc, it is revealed that his body is covered in holes, and by dancing he can play tunes with the holes that summon the powers of various gods.
• Feitan: Either a child or a midget who is a master of torture. Like Bonorenofu, it is later revealed in the Chimera Ant story arc that Feitan can transform himself into various god-like entities.
• Franklin: A giant whose fingertips pop off to reveal gun barrels in his fingers.
• Hisoka: The card-flinging villain from the Hunter Test, who also showed up in the Celestial Tower story arc.(betray Genei Ryodan later)
• Korutopi: A cousin It-like character who can make a perfect duplicate of anything (even skyscrapers) that fades after a while.
• Machi: The world's deadliest seamstress, who can sew severed limbs back on perfectly, or support immense weight with a single thread.
• Nobunaga: A hot-tempered samurai.
• Shalnark: A young computer-whiz who can control people with his cell-phone, after first attaching an antenna to them.
• Shizuku: A forgetful, thick-spectacled girl who can manifest a living vacuum cleaner that can suck up any non-living material (including dead bodies, of which there are a lot when the Genei Ryodan are around).
• Sphinx: A master of martial arts, who alternately dresses either like a pharaoh or in a designer jogging suit. In the Chimera Ant story arc, it is revealed that he can "wind up" his punch to make it devastatingly powerful.
• Pakunoda: A woman with the ability to read minds, and also form memories into bullets and shoot them out of her revolver into the minds of others.(die at the end)
• Ubogin: The obligatory musclebounder, who strives to make his punch as powerful as an atomic bomb, and isn't far off.(die at the end)

Greed Island Story Arc

Gon, Killua, and Leorio return to help Kurapika at the end of the third story arc, after which Leorio and Kurapika leave again, returning the focus to Gon and Killua. The fifth story arc concerns Gon and Killua's adventures on Greed Island, the magical video game that sucks its players physical bodies into its own world. The Greed Island story arc is very video-game-like, and involves a magical trading card game, but unlike other manga/anime like Pokémon or Yu-Gi-Oh!, the game in Greed Island is purely fantasy (Some of the ideas were taken from Togashi's own work in Level E), and thus cards can do things like make a person pregnant regardless of gender, or grant wishes, or make a magical TV that will show you a documentary on whatever you want to learn about, or "warp" you to specific towns -- things which would be impossible and pointless in a real-life trading card game. On Greed Island Gon and Killua are joined by Biscuit, a 57-year-old woman who looks like a 12-year-old girl, is a master of nen, and trains Gon and Killua to nearly Dragon Ball-like levels of physical and spiritual strength.

During this story arc, Killua's little brother, Karuto, joins the Genei Ryodan; replacing Hisoka as member number 4. (See Miscellany (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_%D7_Hunter#Miscellany) section of this article for details regarding Karuto's gender)

Chimera Ant Story Arc

After leaving Greed Island, Gon and Killua meet up with Kaito, the Hunter who told Gon about Gin and Hunters in the very first chapter. They are all hired to investigate a strange insect leg that washed up on a beach. Genetic testing determines that the leg belongs to an abnormally large queen Chimera Ant, an insect that eats other insects and animals, and then gives birth to children that are combinations of all the different insects and animals it has eaten. The queen Chimera Ant itself just happens to wash up on the shore of an island inhabited by a luddite culture, and proceeds to wipe most of them out and spawn hundreds of offspring before Gon, Killua, and Kaito arrive.

As a side story to the main plotline centered around Gon and Killua, one of the children of the queen Chimera Ant, Zazan, started a colony in the Ryuuseigai (Meteor City); the homeland of the Genei Ryodan. Half of the band of thieves, Phinx, Feitan, Sharlnark, Shizuku, Bonorenof and Karuto travel to the Ryuuseigai to halt the invasion. Upon reaching the colony, the team splits up, agreeing that whoever defeats Zazan will be the temporary leader of the Genei Ryodan until Quoll Lucifer's return.

The manga is still a work in progress, and is currently about halfway through the Chimera Ant story arc.

Media

The manga is currently published in Japan in Weekly Shonen Jump, and past episodes have been compiled into a set of 20 tankobon and growing. The manga is currently being published in the United States by Viz Communications.

An anime of Hunter × Hunter was broadcast on Fuji Television from mid October 1999 to March 2001, and ran for 62 episodes. The anime series removed the vast quantities of gore and severed limbs that filled the manga, added new scenes like the "Battleship Island" test in the Hunter Test, and fleshed out both the main characters and a few minor characters. The televised anime ended just before the end of the Genei Ryodan story arc. Two subsequent OVAs have carried the story through the end of the Genei Ryodan story arc (8 episodes), and the first half of the Greed Island story arc (8 episodes, released from February through April 2003). A third OVA for the rest of the Greed Island story arc is currently in production (March through August 2004). The anime is produced in English in Singapore by Odex.

Oddly, there also appears to have been a Takarazuka stage musical made of Hunter × Hunter, about which there is precious little information available.

As with every other anime series, Hunter × Hunter has spawned numerous video games (most of which take place on Greed Island) and a trading card game (which is not based on the cards used on Greed Island).

Aside from the first few episodes of the anime and the upcoming release of the manga, none of these media are officially available with English translations.

Miscellany

The "×" in the title is silent, and the name of the series is supposed to be spoken as just "Hunter Hunter". Yoshihiro Togashi got the idea for the title from a Japanese cop show in which the hero's sidekick always says everything twice.

Yoshihiro Togashi himself makes two cameo appearances in the anime as a man wearing a dog mask with square-rimmed glasses. In the first appearance, he gives the audience some very tangential exposition about Hisoka's childhood, and in the second appearance he gives the audience a brief, public-service-announcement-style warning about the perils of online auctions. Both appearances are completely superfluous to the plot, and the main characters are oblivious to his presence.

The manga is noticeably more talky and poorly-drawn through the middle of the Greed Island story arc. This is supposedly because Yoshihiro Togashi was "very sick" at the time (which in Japan, where illness is almost always left vague, could mean anything from "a bad flu" to "on chemotherapy").

Kurapika's gender is a major point of contention among fans of the series. Although Kurapika speaks "male Japanese", his/her features, clothes, and mannerisms are all very feminine, (s)he is voiced by a woman in the anime, and (s)he does numerous things (like refusing to undress in front of anyone else, becoming incredibly embarrassed when Leorio strips down to his underwear at one point in the anime, and showing complete sexual disinterest in either women or men) clearly designed to keep his/her gender ambiguous. In a scene that some fans feel resolves the issue, Kurapika dons a long-haired pink wig and even more feminine clothing as a disguise to capture someone. When his/her captive says "I didn't realize [the person who was hunting me] was a girl", Kurapika removes the wig and replies "you shouldn't make assumptions" which is, of course, probably the most ambiguous answer possible.

Hisoka is sexually aroused by people with very powerful nen ability, regardless of gender, and derives sexual satisfaction from fighting and killing them. At one point in the Celestial Tower story arc, when he's telling Gon how impressed he is with his power, he is depicted with beams of energy emenating from his crotch, and at another point in the Greed Island story arc, he holds an extended telescope against his crotch while talking about how arousingly powerful another character is.

While Killua's little brother Karuto appears to be female (i.e. Dressing like a girl and being voiced by a female seiyuu in the anime), he addresses himself as "boku;" one of the pronouns japanese boys use when speaking of themselves (female characters who would do this are few and far between, with the exception of perhaps Ayu from the game/anime "Kanon"). In addition, the manga guidebook for Hunter x Hunter distinctly states that Karuto is male.

Music from the Anime

Openings:

1. "Ohayou" by Keno (episode 1 - 49)
2. "Taiyou wa Yoru mo Kagayaku" by WINO (episode 50 - 62)
3. "Pale Ale" by Kurosawa Kenichi (episode 63 - 70/OVA)
4. "Pray" by Wish (GI)
5. "Believe In Tomorrow (http://www.sfg.jp/music/wma/sfg_01.wma)" by Sunflower's Garden (http://www.sfg.jp) (GI Final)

Endings:

1. "Kaze no Uta" by Motoda Minako (episode 1 - 31)
2. "Do you feel i like i feel" by 永井真人 (episode 32 - 50)
3. "Hotaru" by Nagai Masato (episode 51 - 62)
4. "Carry On" by Kurosawa Kenichi (episode 63 - 70/OVA)
5. "Moshimo Kono Sekai de Kimi to Boku ga Deaenakatta Nara" (http://www.sfg.jp/music/wma/sfg_02.wma) by Sunflower's Garden (http://www.sfg.jp) (GI Final)

References

• Japanese Hunter × Hunter website (http://www.j-hunterhunter.com/)
• Hunter HQ (http://www.hunterhq.com/)
• Hunter × Hunter OVA (http://www.hunter-ova.com/)
• Hunter X Hunter 2020 (http://hxh.myshelter.net/)
• Inori - Kurapika Shrine (http://www.scarletprayer.tk/)id:Hunter_x_Hunter

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