Sara: The Queen of Roran and Minato's Seal

The franchise's seventh feature film sends Naruto and Yamato twenty years into the past, to a desert kingdom still standing. Accused of having the city's men abducted, its young queen has only one argument to offer: the crowd cheering her from below her balcony. That crowd is an army of puppets, and her minister a rogue ninja from Sunagakure who came from the future.

Roran, the kingdom ringed by desert

Roran (桜蘭) — literally "cherry blossom orchid," transcribed as Loran by Viz — is a kingdom ringed by desert, located in the Land of Wind. It is the film's second setting, after the ruins of the city: it holds the royal palace, the Ryumyaku Garden, and the Ryumyaku Spring. Queen Sara is attested only by this story, and the entries for both her technique and her weapon declare only a single medium: the film.

That film is "Naruto Shippuden the Movie: The Lost Tower," the franchise's seventh feature and the fourth of Shippuden, released in Japan on July 31, 2010, running 85 minutes, then in North America on September 17, 2013. The guide to the eleven films gives it only a single line; everything that follows comes from the film, from its novel, and from its ani-manga, never from Kishimoto's manga.

The plot opens on a mission: Yamato, Naruto, Sakura, and Sai are to capture Mukade, a rogue ninja. Cornered in the ruins, he releases the Ryumyaku, an ancestral chakra flow sealed by a kunai belonging to the Yellow Flash. A light swallows Naruto and Yamato; Sai holds Sakura back on his ink bird. The two men wake twenty years in the past, in a Roran still standing.

Seramu, the queen murdered by her minister

Before Sara, Roran was ruled by her mother, Seramu. She is a woman with long black hair and green eyes, dressed in the same purple and pink robes her daughter would later wear. Mother and daughter sang together while she played the harp; according to the soundtrack's track listing, this song is called "To Light".

A man introducing himself as Anrokuzan convinces the queen to exploit the Ryumyaku and its technology to cover the kingdom with towers, officially for the good of her people. When Seramu realizes she is being used and refuses to go any further, her minister murders her: he drives a blade into her back from a distance, using his chakra threads. One point is worth stressing: the murder stays secret, and Sara takes the throne knowing nothing of its cause.

Six years later, she still mourns her mother and sings their melody again, alone. Anrokuzan puts on a fatherly front for her and repeats the same instruction like a mantra: her duty is to protect Roran, the beautiful city her mother built. The young queen comes to see in the kingdom a treasure left to her by her mother, one she swears to defend with her life.

The "puppet princess" and the crowd of puppets

The nickname comes from the mouth of a child in the group, Sarai: in the streets of Roran, everyone calls the sovereign the "puppet princess." A woman in the group, Masako, fills in the picture: the city's men have been abducted, officially on the queen's orders, and rumor has it they are being used to make weapons. Sara denies it with the only argument she has: from her balcony, the crowd cheers her.

Naruto dismantles the argument in front of her. Having spotted the conduits that distribute the Ryumyaku's energy, he throws his chakra blade to check for threads: the cheerful crowd is an army of puppets, and a puppet featuring Sara waves to the people in her place on the balcony. The method belongs to the same art as Sunagakure's puppet manipulation, but applied to an entire city.

The demonstration is not enough the first time: Sara still refuses to believe it and flees a second time. The film thus builds her character on denial, not on complicity. Her promise to give her people back to themselves is in fact made before she discovers the underground factory where the abducted men are chained up: this exploitation was kept hidden from her, and she still does not know who killed her mother.

The Ryumyaku, a privilege of blood

The Ryumyaku (龍脈, "dragon veins," rendered "Ley Line" in the English dub) is an ancestral source of chakra that runs beneath Roran. Once converted, it powers an entire city and animates a great number of puppets. The rule is clear: anyone can draw on a flow that is already open, but only heirs of the royal bloodline can open or close it.

That is the whole of Sara's ability, inherited from her mother: sensing the Ryumyaku and controlling its output. This technique lists only three users — Seramu, Sara, and Mukade — and the queen is credited with no other technique. She is not a fighter: in the novelization, she dreams of facing her minister but admits that no weapon within her reach would even scratch him, and so she sets out to cut off his energy source rather than strike him.

Mukade becomes Anrokuzan

Mukade — the name means "centipede" — is a rogue ninja from Sunagakure. His only technique shown in the present is time travel: after the required hand signs and an incantation, he absorbs the seal placed on the spring to hurl himself backward in time. This jutsu is named "Kujaku Myoo," the Peacock Wisdom Queen, after the kanji that appears in the second line of the incantation. The method brings him close to Urashiki Otsutsuki, whom the Boruto anime likewise sends into another era.

Arriving six years before Naruto, he abandons his name, becomes Minister Anrokuzan, and puts on a great deal of weight. His body is a puppet — when Naruto strikes him, the face shatters instead of bleeding. He turns into a giant spider, then merges with his entire army to form a colossal centipede that coils around the towers. As long as the spring feeds him, he passes for immortal: he instantly repairs his mechanical body and closes up the weak point that Minato spots without being able to exploit it.

His arsenal does not stop there: his entry also credits him with chakra absorption, to the point of swallowing a Rasenshuriken. This profile explicitly recalls that of Sasori, Chiyo and Pain's Asura Path — for the last of these, in the anime. What sets him apart is the repair mid-combat, with no outside help. His alias is said to refer to the Chinese general An Lushan, who proclaimed himself sovereign after his rebellion, a connection the entry frames in the conditional.

Naruto, the chakra blade, and Jiraiya's legacy

Their meeting is a misunderstanding. Naruto wakes in the Ryumyaku Garden to the sound of singing; the young woman flees. He finds her again during the festival, just as she is pushed from her balcony, and catches her: she thanks him after giving him four slaps and an elbow. When he tells her that someone wants her dead, she brushes the idea aside and sees in it nothing more than a feeling.

The turning point is an orphan's argument. Naruto tells her he lost his master — Jiraiya — as he lost his parents, and that this master left him his will; Sara's mother must have left her something important too. It is this sentence that decides the queen to go down beneath the city. One even concludes from it that the film's present takes place after the Sage's death and before Pain's assault.

Underground, Anrokuzan confesses to Seramu's murder and attacks. Naruto, held back by puppets draining his chakra, saves the queen by drawing on the chakra of the Nine-Tails (Kyubi), then entrusts her with his weapon so she can defend herself: a Konoha Chakra Blade (チャクラ刀), an elongated ringless kunai reminiscent of a Greek xiphos. Out of the whole adventure, she will be left with only one physical keepsake, this blade.

Closing the vein while the others fight

Hiruzen has sent a four-man team to the site: Minato Namikaze, Shibi Aburame, Choza Akimichi and, at Minato's request, Kakashi Hatake. None of them manages to do lasting damage to Anrokuzan, who repairs himself as fast as he is struck. It is Shibi who gets word to Naruto and Minato to fall back to the garden, the one place where the Ryumyaku has no effect.

Sara's role during this time is not decorative. She frees the chained men and returns them to their families, opens the garden gate with the blade she received from Naruto, shelters her people there, then cuts the flow. Anrokuzan hunts her for exactly that reason: she is the only one who can cut off his regeneration. It stops the moment the queen closes the vein.

The window thus opened is exploited by a Rasengan of a particular kind: Minato explains that two similar chakras resonate with each other, lends his own to Naruto, and forms with him the Taikyoku Rasengan (太極螺旋丸), described as piercing the opponent clean through. Close to death, Anrokuzan leaps into the basin of the spring and blows up his body to send it out of control; Yamato, clinging to Kakashi, catches Naruto, Sara, and Minato with his Wood Release (Mokuton).

Minato's seal: erasing to preserve history

Once Anrokuzan is dead, his jutsu dissipates and the bodies of Naruto and Yamato begin to glow. Naruto uses the last seconds to ask Minato whether he might be his father; Minato cuts the question short and answers only that, if he ever had a son, he would want him to be like this boy. Back at the palace, when Naruto had thought he looked like the Fourth Hokage and Choza had judged the thing possible, he had closed the debate: nothing is gained by knowing what one should not know.

Minato had already asked for his kunai back, right after the rescue, in order to seal the Ryumyaku for good, so that no one could put it to the use Mukade had; that left the second decision, announced at the farewell: erasing the memory of every witness so that history would not change. This is not simple forgetting. He suggests a replacement version to the survivors: the Third Great Ninja War, then under way, is supposed to have caused the disaster that killed Queen Seramu and destroyed Roran, a hero having left his dagger with the sovereign before disappearing. A lie is installed in place of the memory.

In Sara's case, the erasure goes further than the facts alone. Her self-confidence, only just acquired, vanishes along with the memories that produced it: she loses Naruto, Anrokuzan, and the growth their meeting had set off. Naruto himself is only partly affected, the brutal nature of the return having limited the effect. The jutsu is recorded under a convention title, since the technique has no official name; it attributes it to Minato alone, has it performed on the Tiger hand sign and triggered by the command "metsu" (滅, "erase"), adds that the erased memory can resurface in the form of a vague dream, and classifies it as ninjutsu as well as fuinjutsu, the sealing arts.

Twenty years later, the queen of the caravan

The film closes on the ruins. A woman approaches Team 7: she says she felt a disturbance in the Ryumyaku, introduces herself as the daughter of the former queen of Roran, destroyed during the Third Great Ninja War, and still carries a Konoha Chakra Blade that her mother is said to have received from a hero who appeared in a dream. Naruto then notices that his own blade has disappeared from his gear.

She does not recognize him. He finds her familiar without knowing why, and says he saw her in a good dream; the novelization goes further and credits him with the conviction of having met her before. Sara explains that after twenty years spent leading her people in a caravan, she feels ready at last to rule as her mother wanted — the erased confidence came back on its own, without the memories that had given rise to it.

The film never says explicitly that it is her, and the woman looks younger than her age. It is Masatoshi Kusakabe's novelization and the theater program that establish it, and an interview with the director gives the key to the theme: children who surpass their parents and choose their own road. Sara thus joins Shion among the heroines born of a feature film; with this difference, that here the character does not know her own story.

Summary Table

FAQ

• Does Sara appear in the Naruto manga?
  No. She is specific to the film Naruto Shippuden the Movie: The Lost Tower, released in Japan in 2010, and to its print adaptations: Masatoshi Kusakabe's novelization and the ani-manga. The records concerning her, such as those for Ryumyaku control or for the Konoha Chakra Blade, declare only one medium, the film.
• Why is she nicknamed the "puppet princess"?
  The reason is not given, but the meaning is fixed: "puppet" says the queen is being maneuvered, not that she is guilty of the abductions. It is Sarai, a child in the group that came to hold her to account, who reports the nickname to her. The film gives it a double meaning: Anrokuzan manipulates her, and he also has the crowd greeted by a puppet featuring her while she is elsewhere.
• Does Naruto know he met his father?
  No, and Minato does not confirm it to him. Naruto first thinks he looks like the Fourth Hokage, which Choza judges plausible since the boy comes from the future, but Minato refuses to say more. At the farewell, Naruto finally asks the question: Minato cuts it short and merely wishes that, if he ever has a son, the boy will be like him.
• Why does Sara not recognize Naruto twenty years later?
  Because Minato erases the survivors' memory to keep history from changing. Sara forgets Naruto, Anrokuzan, and the truth about her mother's death, and retains instead the version Minato suggested: a disaster tied to the Third Great Ninja War. Naruto is only partly affected and merely finds her familiar.
• Is the woman at the end of the film really Sara?
  The film does not say so explicitly, and the woman looks younger than she should. It is the novelization and the film's theater program that establish it; the credits list no separate character. An interview with the director ties this ending to the theme of children who surpass their parents.
• What happens to the chakra blade Naruto gives her?
  Sara keeps it. She first uses it to open the gate of the Ryumyaku Garden and shelter her people there, then keeps it for twenty years as her only physical keepsake. When she shows it to Team 7 among the ruins, Naruto recognizes a Konoha weapon and notes that his own has disappeared.
• Are Mukade and Anrokuzan the same person?
  Yes. Mukade is a rogue ninja from Sunagakure; after his time travel, he abandons that name and calls himself Anrokuzan, minister of Roran. When Naruto calls him Mukade, he proudly claims his new title. This alias may refer to the Chinese general An Lushan.

In summary

Sara is a character defined by what is taken away from her. The film entrusts her with a decisive act, cutting the flow that fed her minister's regeneration, then takes back even the memory of having performed it; only the blade received from Naruto crosses the twenty years with her.