Le Son Quatre : la garde d'élite d'Orochimaru

The Sound Four: Orochimaru's Elite Guard

4427 words | Reading time: 23 min

CharacterOrochimaruOtogakure

Four members, but five people. The profile of Orochimaru's personal guard puts every piece back in place: Jirobo, Kidomaru, Tayuya, and Sakon and Ukon, who count as a single member. It follows their Curse Marks, weaker than the Curse Mark of Heaven, the barrier raised during the invasion of Konoha, the transport of Sasuke shut inside a barrel, and the role of Kimimaro, the de facto leader of this elite unit from Otogakure.

Orochimaru's personal guard, tasked with tearing Sasuke away from Konoha: meet the Sound Four, four bearers of Curse Mark… who are actually five. The guide.

Contents

Four members, five people

The Sound Four — 音隠れの忍四人衆, Otogakure no Shinobi Yonin Shū, literally "the four shinobi of the Hidden Sound Village" — is the team that serves as personal guard to Orochimaru. Despite its name, it technically counts five individuals: Jirobo, Kidomaru, Tayuya, and the brothers Sakon and Ukon, who share a single body and therefore fill only one slot. The group appears in chapter 115 of the manga, in episode 68 of the anime, under the colors of Otogakure.

The name has varied. Back when Kimimaro completed the lineup, chapter 201 designates them on page 4 as the Sound Five (音隠れの忍五人衆, Otogakure no Shinobi Gonin Shū). The collection Naruto Stealth Volume: Road to Ninja gives, for its part, on page 17, a shorter variant of the quartet's name: 音の四人衆, Oto no Yonin Shū, "the four of the Sound".

On their level, the texts agree. The Naruto 10th Chronicle Mini Book calls them, on page 17, capable of defeating Konoha jonin, and the Naruto Anime Profiles vol. 3 specifies on page 164 that they hold off the village's best genin even while exhausted. The second databook notes on pages 182-183 that their opposing temperaments balance one another well as a team, while Naruto: One Decade, One Hundred Ninja recalls on page 139 that they nevertheless prefer to fight alone.

Four ninja lined up in front of a rock face, in light tunics belted with a purple rope: a giant with an orange crest of hair, a girl with pink hair, a boy with a headband stamped with a musical note, and a young man with silver hair.
Four silhouettes are enough to gather the group: Sakon, on the right, fills on his own the slot of the pair he forms with Ukon.

From prisoners to bodyguards

Their origin is told only by the anime, and this has to be said: the manga says nothing about it. According to episode 305 of Shippuden, the members of the Sound Four were originally Orochimaru's prisoners, forced to fight one another to the death among inmates in free-for-all brawls. By surviving their respective fights, they proved they were the strongest of his captives and were promoted on that basis to bodyguards of the Sannin.

The anime credits them with two more actions the manga does not show. At the time of the Chunin Exams, they assassinate Shiore and his two teammates from Kusagakure (episode 127 of the original series), which lets Orochimaru borrow the genin's face with his facial copy technique, long enough to test Sasuke in the Forest of Death. They also take part in the assassination of the Fourth Kazekage and his guards, whose appearance they then take on.

It is also the anime that dates Kimimaro's illness: he coughs up blood at the time of the murder of the Kusagakure genin, then his sickness fully declares itself during the attack on the Kazekage, which gets him pulled from the group. The manga, for its part, does not date this episode. Kabuto will later draw from it a remark approved by Orochimaru: without Kimimaro's withdrawal, the invasion mission would have gone far better.

In a dark stone hall with a wooden railing, a crowd of hard-faced men presses around four young people: a teenager with gray hair cut in a bob and a red bead necklace, a girl with long red hair wearing a black cap with a wide light band, a giant with a shaved head topped by a crest of hair, and a dark-skinned boy wearing a forehead protector with a metal plate.
The Sound Four among Orochimaru's captives: according to the anime, the four who came out of the brawls between prisoners alive were promoted on that basis to bodyguards of the Sannin.

Kimimaro, Sakon and Sasuke: three successive leaders

Kimimaro was imposed on them as leader after having beaten all four of them single-handedly; the group was called the Sound Five from then on (chapter 201, page 4). The last survivor of the Kaguya clan, his Shikotsumyaku (Dead Bone Pulse) meant he was promised as a host body for Orochimaru through the Living Corpse Reincarnation. He bears the Curse Mark of Earth, of which he is the only known user and which only the Curse Mark of Heaven equals. Illness pushed him aside: he is a former leader, not the leader in office.

After him, it is Sakon and Ukon who appear as the leaders of the quartet (Naruto: One Decade, One Hundred Ninja, page 82). The Rin no Sho had at one point supposed, on page 142, that Kidomaru held that role — which would explain why he carries the rank of "first" member of the group — but the supposition was never confirmed.

One third name remains. Sent to Konoha to recruit Sasuke, the four convince him by demonstrating in combat what Orochimaru's curse marks bring them in power. On their master's instructions, Sasuke is then named the new leader of the Sound Four for the duration of his escort, in chapter 181, page 18. On the evening of his defection, the four wait for him outside the village and bow before him, with Sakon even offering formal apologies for the brutality of their first meeting.

Portrait of a young man with pale skin, long white hair, green eyes and two red dots on his forehead, in front of a forest.
Kimimaro, the one who had beaten the other four on his own and remained their benchmark.

An amputated yin-yang and four cardinal points

The symbol sewn onto the hem of their tunics is a yin-yang, but an incomplete yin-yang: the yin half, the black one, has been removed. This missing yin represents imbalance, what prevents harmony in life. The motif recurs on all four uniforms, from Jirobo's beige to the twins' brown, and each member also wears the same purple rope belt, tied in a reversed loop at the waist.

The geometry of the group is just as codified. Chapter 177, page 14, assigns a cardinal point to each: Jirobo to the South, Kidomaru to the East, Sakon to the West and Tayuya to the North. These are the positions they tend to take for their group techniques, and they are seen placing themselves in a square around their target before joining hands.

The anime takes the logic all the way with the Four Beasts Encirclement (episode 304), a formation that simultaneously calls up the personal summoned creatures of the four members to block every way out: the Triple Rashomon makes escape difficult, the Doki and the earth golem attack head-on, and the spider Kyodaigumo from above. The term Shiju (四獣) refers to the four beasts of Chinese mythology, and possibly to the four deities that rule over the cardinal points.

Full-body artwork, on a white background, of a heavyset character with a shaved head topped by a crest of orange hair, knees bent and fists clenched: a sleeveless beige tunic over dark pants, a thick twisted purple rope wound around one arm and tied as a belt at the waist, bandaged ankles, black sandals; on the lower part of the tunic, a white circle split by an S-curve whose two halves are both light.
The Sound Four symbol on Jirobo's tunic: a yin-yang whose black half has been removed, worn with the purple rope belt common to all four members.

The Curse Marks

Each member bears his or her own mark, which appears in chapter 178 and episode 109. These seals are not as powerful as the Curse Marks of Heaven and Earth, but produce comparable effects: like all curse marks, they forcibly draw in the bearer's chakra and give back senjutsu chakra, increasing his reserves, his physical abilities and the effectiveness of his ninjutsu. They all derive from Orochimaru's research on the physiology of Jugo.

At level 2, each takes on a distinct oni silhouette. Jirobo turns brown, his crest grows longer and warts cover his forehead and shoulders; Kidomaru turns dark red, his hair gray, horned at the forehead and elbows, his third eye open; Tayuya turns brown and grows five badly placed horns that lengthen with effort; the twins turn red, each wearing a single horn on his own side and an armor of black scales, their faces evoking the hannya masks of Noh theater. Jirobo then announces tenfold strength (episode 114), but Sakon admits that they come out of this state drained of their energy.

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Four ninja whose skin is covered with black patterns climbing from the neck toward the face and arms, the pink-haired girl in the foreground.
Each member bears his or her own mark, whose activation transforms the bearer's body.

The barrier of the invasion

Their first recorded mission is to cover the invasion of Konoha. They infiltrate it with the Combination Transformation, an advanced version of the transformation in which several users merge into a single form: two members per bodyguard of the Kazekage (chapter 115, pages 4 to 7), which lets them escort the false Kazekage while hiding their real number.

The barrier they raise around the duel has a name: the Shishienjin (四紫炎陣), the Four Violet Flames Formation, a B-rank barrier ninjutsu. The four place themselves in a square, form the snake hand seal then join hands, and a wall of purple flames closes between them, instantly setting ablaze anyone who touches it. Since the barrier rests on its four bearers, going after one of them can bring it down: they therefore raise secondary barriers around themselves (Rin no Sho, page 190).

The outcome escapes them. Orochimaru does kill Hiruzen Sarutobi, but comes out of the duel with his arms necrotized by the Reaper Death Seal, which puts an end to the invasion: the mission is filed as a partial success. The four carry their master out of the village all the way to Otogakure, Kidomaru using his Spider Web to keep the Anbu from giving chase.

Aerial view of an orange tile roof from which immense translucent purple walls rise, a few tiny silhouettes inside.
The barrier raised at the four corners of the roof: no one comes in, no one goes out during the duel.

Sasuke's coffin: a pill that kills, a fog that holds death back

Once far enough from Konoha, the quartet gives Sasuke the Mind Awakening Pill (醒心丸, Seishingan, chapter 184, episode 110), a drug created by Orochimaru to speed up the development of the curse mark — in Sasuke's case, the Curse Mark of Heaven — up to level 2. The process has a price: it increases the spread of the mark so much that it kills whoever swallows it within minutes.

Hence the immediate follow-up with the Four Black Fogs Formation (四黒霧陣, Shikokumujin, B-rank, chapter 184, episode 111). The four place themselves at the four directions around their target, form the snake then the tiger and join hands: a dense fog forms overhead, descends on Sasuke and shuts him inside a barrier that cuts him off from every outside force, including death itself. That is how they counter the effects of the pill (To no Sho, page 229), the death being reduced to a state of false death.

Sakon locks the whole thing with the Dark Sealing Method (封黒法印, Fukoku Hoin), a fuinjutsu of B rank: he sets on the rim of the coffin five talismans covered in formulas traced in his own blood, whose barrier holds the fog in until the end of the maturation. As long as it holds, even the Byakugan cannot see what is happening inside (To no Sho, page 267).

Nighttime undergrowth: four silhouettes bent toward the ground, hands to the earth, form a square around a small light wooden barrel covered with dark red inscriptions and ringed by a thick purple rope; above the barrel, a huge glowing purple cloud comes back down in dark tongues toward the lid.
The Four Black Fogs Formation: the quartet places itself at the four directions around the coffin and brings down on it the fog that shuts its occupant inside a barrier.

The retrieval of Sasuke

The mission is under time pressure: Orochimaru gives them about three days. Yet, barely out, the four run into Genma Shiranui and Raido Namiashi, who notice the direction they are heading. To shake them off, they have to go to level 2 of their marks, which leaves them completely exhausted; they set a few traps in haste and stop to rest, to their great frustration, even before the Konoha team catches up with them.

What follows is a relay race around the barrel holding Sasuke. Shikamaru first immobilizes them all with his shadow, until Ukon, having slipped unseen out of his brother's body, breaks the hold. Then each one stays behind in turn and passes the burden to the next. When Kimimaro arrives to take Sasuke back himself, he threatens to kill Tayuya and the twins if they do not settle accounts with their pursuers.

The toll is final. Choji kills Jirobo, Neji kills Kidomaru, Kiba gravely wounds Ukon before Kankuro finishes off the two brothers inside his puppet Kuroari, Temari kills Tayuya, and Gaara saves Rock Lee from Kimimaro, who succumbs to his illness in the middle of the fight. All five lose their lives, and the mission is only half accomplished: Sasuke does reach Orochimaru, but too late to serve as his host body.

At night, in front of a full moon, five silhouettes lined up: a boy in dark clothes at the center, flanked by two ninja on each side.
Sasuke leaves Konoha framed by the four: this is the escort the Konoha team will set out to chase.

Jirobo and Kidomaru: earth and web

Jirobo is the largest of the group and fights with the Arhat Fist (羅漢拳, Rakanken, C-rank), a style that exploits his brute strength through meticulous control of his weight and complex body movements meant to crush. He has, according to Naruto: One Decade, One Hundred Ninja, page 80, the most powerful arms in Otogakure. His Earth Release (Doton) serves him as much to hurl entire blocks, with the Earth Clod, as to drain chakra by contact or with his Earth Prison, whose walls repair themselves and thin out only on the side opposite to where he stands.

This strength has its limits: Sakon judges him the weakest of the quartet despite his physical power (chapter 191, page 23), and he is the only member with no personal summon in the manga. One detail paints him better than anything: his teammates unmask Shikamaru transformed into him because the fake Jirobo does not pull Tayuya up on her language, which the real one never fails to do (chapter 191, pages 18 to 20). Kidomaru, his neighbor to the East, has six arms and is the only one of the quartet to wear an Otogakure forehead protector, under which he hides a third eye.

That eye gives him such precision that he can measure a 15 cm gap at 50 meters. He spins his webs by charging his saliva and his sweat with chakra, and secretes a sticky gold that hardens in the air into a metal impervious to chakra, from which he draws his armor and his Spider War Bow. His Spider Rain, on the other hand, comes from his summon Kyodaigumo. Kabuto considers him the most intellectual of the four: he is the one who works out the blind spot of the Byakugan by watching the blows Neji does not dodge, before Neji sends his chakra back to him along the thread of the arrow.

In a dark tree, a dark-skinned character with spiky pale hair and a light headband around his forehead, wearing a white sleeveless tunic and a purple rope, draws a large ocher bow with a white string and an arrow of the same material; several extra arms hold other white threads stretched across the image.
Kidomaru draws, at the end of his six arms, the bow he makes from his sticky gold hardened in the air, in the middle of the threads with which he lines the ground.

Tayuya, Sakon and Ukon: the flute and the twins

Tayuya is the only one in the group to fight with sound. Her Demonic Flute (魔笛, Mateki) commands three Doki (怒鬼, "demons of rage"), giants with covered eyes and ears and mouths sewn shut, an explicit reference to the three wise monkeys. On the melody she calls her finale, these creatures release spirit worms made almost entirely of spiritual energy, which bite into their targets' physical energy. The same flute carries a very long-range sound genjutsu , able to strike without the opponent's exact position being known.

She calls herself second in the group, behind Sakon alone; Temari answers her with wind, scatters her sound waves and damages the flute, then her Decapitating Dance levels the forest and the severed trunks crush her. With the twins, everything starts from an unnamed kekkei genkai (chapter 203, episode 120) that lets them break down their bodies at the molecular level. Ukon usually sleeps inside Sakon and pushes arms and legs out of him: the first blow can be blocked, the next two arrive in the blind spot. Merged, they heal fast, but at the cost of a great deal of chakra.

Under level 2, they extend the merging to another's body with the Demon Parasite (寄生鬼壊の術, Kisei Kikai no Jutsu), which corrodes the host cell by cell: a pure assassination technique, according to the To no Sho, page 209. It has one flaw: the invader suffers the host's wounds, and Kiba, the only one to have dared it, stabs himself in the stomach to drive Ukon out. The names complete the portrait: 左 "left" in Sakon, 右 "right" in Ukon, a birth on June 20 that places them under the sign of Gemini, while Tayuya's comes from the vine Cayaponia tayuya.

On rocky ground under a blue sky, three giant muscular creatures lean forward: the first has its face hidden by a wide gray plate, the second wears a white band over its eyes and has its mouth sewn shut, the third is entirely wrapped in bandages; all wear a thick purple rope at the waist and long claws. Between them, tiny, a silhouette with very long light hair plays a transverse flute.
The three Doki that Tayuya commands with her Demonic Flute: eyes and ears covered, mouths sewn shut, in explicit reference to the three wise monkeys.

What the databooks and Kishimoto say about the quartet

The databooks give them a rigorously identical record: 46 official missions each, of which 20 D-rank, 15 C-rank, 8 B-rank, 2 A-rank and 1 S-rank. Chapter 202, page 16, lists instead the flaw that slows each of them down: Jirobo stops to eat, Kidomaru plays with opponents who interest him, Sakon flares up easily and likes to show off with needlessly powerful techniques, Tayuya refuses to lose.

Their favorite mottos, also recorded by the databooks, each fit into a single formula. Jirobo has "Sobriety and honesty" (謹厳実直), Kidomaru "Game over", Sakon "Unique and without equal" (唯一無二) and Ukon "Wise elder brother, foolish younger brother" (賢兄愚弟). Tayuya's, "I alone am venerable" (唯我独尊), is the short form of a formula attributed to the Buddha at his birth, which became in Japanese a common expression for describing an arrogant person.

On the design side, the Art Collection: Uzumaki gives on page 128 the order of creation. Masashi Kishimoto draws Kidomaru first, then Tayuya because he wanted a lone girl in the middle of a group of boys, then Jirobo to bring in a giant different from the others, and Sakon last. Ukon was born only from a staging problem: not knowing whom to pit against Sakon, the author opted for a two-on-two against Kiba and Akamaru, and lodged a second brother inside the body of the first.

The return through Edo Tensei and Yomi Tenshin

Three years after their death, the anime brings them back. During the Fourth Great Ninja War, Kabuto Yakushi brings them back with the Edo Tensei (Reanimation Jutsu) by making them believe that Orochimaru is granting a wish and offering them the chance to avenge their own deaths (episode 303). His real reasons are otherwise: testing the behavior of a curse mark in a reincarnated body and buying time while he prepares his trump card. The manga, for its part, does not reincarnate the four.

Each finds his or her original opponent again, loses again, then launches the Space-Time Ritual: Journey to Hell (時空術式・黄泉転身, Yomi Tenshin). The souls of the casters and of the targets are torn from their bodies and shut inside a barrier that neither sensors nor the Byakugan can perceive; the bodies remain in suspended survival, alive but with the chakra flow stopped, and they have to be touched with chakra to bring a soul back into them, which Inoichi Yamanaka compares to dispelling a genjutsu. The technique normally kills its casters: their reincarnated state spares them.

The barrier does have a flaw, however, since it does not hold in the malice of those who raised it. Shikamaru therefore stokes the hatred of the four until Naruto locates the prison and breaks it, sending their souls back to the Pure Land (episode 305). Only one element of this period is manga canon: by assimilating the DNA of the Sound Five, Kabuto took over the twins' kekkei genkai, which lets him make each of them emerge from his umbilical snake (chapter 585) — and, by shaping a bone flute with Kimimaro's Shikotsumyaku, use Tayuya's sound genjutsu.

Overhead view of rocky ground strewn with rubble, where a wide circle of orange seals made of concentric rings covered in characters glows; inside it are a large white dog with its head down, a body lying face down in a light tunic belted with a purple rope, and a ninja standing seen from behind, arms hanging and knees bent.
The Space-Time Ritual: Journey to Hell tears out the souls of the casters as well as those of their targets; here Sakon and Ukon against Kiba and Akamaru, whose bodies stay where they are, alive but with the chakra flow stopped.

Summary Table

Aspect Details
Members Jirobo, Kidomaru, Tayuya, Sakon & Ukon (= 1 member); de facto leader: Kimimaro
Employer Orochimaru's elite guard, from Otogakure (Hidden Sound Village)
In common All bearers of a Curse Mark (weaker than the Curse Mark of Heaven)
Key roles Barrier during the invasion of Konoha; transport of Sasuke in a barrel
Outcome Choji > Jirobo, Neji > Kidomaru, Kankuro > Sakon & Ukon, Temari > Tayuya; all perish

FAQ

  • How many are they really, four or five?
    The group is called "the Four" but includes five people: Jirobo, Kidomaru, Tayuya, and the Sakon & Ukon pair (two brothers sharing one body). With Kimimaro, they formed the "Sound Five".
  • Who is the leader of the group?
    Kimimaro, the fifth member and the strongest: he had beaten the other four on his own. Sidelined by illness, he leaves behind a group of four in which Sakon and Ukon act as leaders.
  • Do they have the same Curse Mark as Sasuke?
    No. Each member bears his or her own Curse Mark, held to be weaker than Sasuke's Curse Mark of Heaven or Kimimaro's Curse Mark of Earth.
  • Who fights whom during the retrieval of Sasuke?
    Choji kills Jirobo, Neji kills Kidomaru, Kankuro finishes off Sakon and Ukon, Temari kills Tayuya, and Gaara saves Rock Lee from Kimimaro, who dies of his illness. All perish, but Sasuke reaches Orochimaru.
  • Do they come back after Part 1?
    Only Kimimaro is reanimated, through Kabuto's Edo Tensei, during the Fourth Great Ninja War. The other four are not brought back; Kabuto exploits only their DNA and their kekkei genkai.

In summary

Fanatical and formidable, the members of the Sound Four embody the best — and the worst — of Orochimaru's experiments: living weapons ready to die to deliver Sasuke to him.

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