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SOJ The Manga · The Letter of November 2023
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What endings has Togashi planned for Hunter x Hunter?

Three he rated but would not describe, and a fourth he discarded and described completely, in case he dies before finishing.

Spoiler note, and it is a reassuring one: the only ending described in full on this page is the one Togashi himself discarded. He revealed it precisely so that reading it cannot spoil anything.

In November 2023, Togashi answered questions from readers in a handwritten letter, sent to the idol Yumiko Seki and read out on TV Asahi's variety show Iwakura to Yoshizumi no Bangumi on November 21, 2023, with the ending material following in the program's second part the week after. In the letter he laid out his contingency planning in his own terms. Broadly speaking, he has prepared three possible ending patterns, A, B and C. He also named a fourth, pattern D, the one that slipped through the cracks, and asked for leniency: if he dies with the work unfinished, readers should assume D was how it was meant to end. He apologized in advance for that case.

A, B AND C

Rated by their author, not described
Pattern A: the safe ending
Togashi estimates reader reaction at 80 percent positive to 20 percent negative. He is careful about what that means: not a judgment of the ending's quality, but his view that it is a safe development unlikely to draw much criticism.
Pattern B: the split ending
An even split, positive to negative. No further detail was given, for B any more than for A: Togashi described the shapes of the reactions, not the stories that would cause them.
Pattern C: his preference
Around 10 percent positive to 90 percent negative, and the one he keeps as an option, in his words, simply because it is his personal preference. The ending most readers would reject is the one its author likes best.
The ending he actually wants
None of the three, if he can help it. His stated ideal is to come up with an ending so interesting that none of these three patterns are necessary. A, B and C are plans. The goal is to outwrite them.

PATTERN D, IN FULL

The discarded ending, as he told it

Years later, on Whale Island, a girl sits motionless by a lake, holding a fishing rod. Her name is Gin. The rod bends sharply and she hauls up the master of the swamp, the same catch her grandfather once had to make. She holds it up to her mother and declares: 'I caught one as promised! Mom!!' Then, in a small voice: 'So don't ever tell me to become a hunter again...!'

Her parents talk it over beside her. She wants nothing more than to run the store her whole life and never leave the island, and her father says to respect that. Her mother is not satisfied: 'But Grandpa Gon was a famous hunter...! Someday that girl will surely...' From deep in the woods, unseen, Gin shouts back: 'No means no!!!!'

The scene moves to the store, open since Mito's time, where Gin carves up the master of the swamp and thinks it through. Whenever Grandpa Gon happily recounted his hunter days, Grandma would quietly slip away; Noko, who became Gon's wife in this telling, spent those years waiting, and Gin refuses both halves of that bargain: having to wait for someone's return for months or years while her heart felt squeezed, and making someone wait for her. A plump young boy comes in carrying wild vegetables, and the two of them cook the catch together, smiling, to serve to everyone on the island. Gin's last thought in the scenario: forever, she just wants to be with the person she wants to be with.

Then the ending lifts away. A bird takes flight from the island, over a town and its people: somebody's son, somebody's daughter, somebody's grandchild, living in different places, exchanging smiles, maybe the child or grandchild of that character. The bird flies into the distance, and from behind, a figure watches it go. The End.

One honest note on the text: the full translation of the letter carried by Anime Corner renders the granddaughter's name as Gin, which is the spelling this page follows; some English reports render it Jin. The scene itself, beat for beat, is the same in every reliable report opened for this page.

THE FIRST VOLUME

Hunter x Hunter, in print
Hunter x Hunter volume 1 Japanese cover, Gon Freecss on a frog
Hunter x Hunter · Volume 1 · Japan
Gon on a frog on the first Japanese volume, the start of the series whose possible endings Togashi put in writing.
Why the hiatuses happenHow he draws it nowBack to the Library
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THE FIRST WORD

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