Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto, it belongs to Japan. I am not Japanese. Naruto is the brain-child of Japanese manga artist, Kishimoto Masashi. All rights belong to him and the various publishers or animation studios in charged. I own nothing, except the writing presented here. This is why this story is called a fanfiction.

AN: It's been a while since I have written anything fictional. I thought I would ease back into writing via fanfiction. I had this idea, not sure if it would work, but here it is. A self-insert Naruto story. How very original. Please note that all names would appear in the order of surname first to be compliant with north-eastern Asian traditions. Also note that self-inserted character is essentially an O.C. It is based on the "self", but once it has entered into the realm of written words, it will inevitably deviate from this "self". Thank you for clicking in.

i. twenty-two, minus eleven

Here is a personal account of the series of events that spans the timeline from the reinstatement of the Third Hokage to the peaceful reign of the Seventh Hokage. This is by no means an official report. This writing is meant to be private and privy to a select few permitted by the owner of this account, which brings everything back to the you reading this and the me writing this.

I would like to say, for the record, that my name is Yamanaka Inomi. That would be true to a certain extent. Certainly anyone that knows me would tell you that I am indeed who I said I was, and if there are still any doubts, one could always check up with my family or consult my birth certificate. They would all agree that the second child born to parents Yamanaka Inoichi and Shiori at the General Konoha Hospital on March 21st is indeed named Yamanaka Inomi. All of this would be accurate and official, but not completely honest.

I want to be honest. It's important that I be honest if I want to begin this narrative at all. Let us come off the record for a moment; let me tell you a secret.

A small disclaimer:

I had not always been Yamanaka Inomi.

This body was not always mine.

This was the problem in the very beginning, an existential crisis that was too material.

One moment I was a twenty-two year old with a mind filled with Dickens and Foucault and whatever a M.A. in Anglo-American literature would entail; one moment I was in Taipei, Taiwan with the sunshine raining in droplets of perspiration off my back; one moment I was squinting at the chipped brick building of the Liberal Arts College with sleep deprived panda-eyes. That was the culmination of my existence at twenty-two: academic success and caffeinated insomnia. Then I must have missed a step somewhere, or fallen off the edge of a reality. The next moment I was shoved into the body and life of an one year old infant, staring blearily at a strange new world.

The new body problem.

The first few months were a blur. Imagine pressing your face against the cold glass pane of a window, your eyes glued to the rain pelting against the glass, watching the tendrils of water and dirt distort whatever scenic view there is out there into an abstract painting of lights and colors. That is what it feels like to try and recall the messy process of meshing the mind of an adult with the unwieldy body of a baby.

It would have been hard to recall, except for the fact that it was exactly that: a blurry kaleidoscope, a world of pulsating outlines of objects that glowed with different color lights. Had I been a recreational drug user I would probably not have been surprised; I was not, therefore "surprised" was an understatement. Everything would come to light (no pun intended) eventually, but in the meantime...

I must have been a difficult baby.

A baby's body was extremely sensitive. The smallest feelings of discomfort, the tiniest twinges of fear, the scrawniest slivers of unease, would set off the waterworks. I could not count nor remember the number of times I've flooded the Yamanaka household with my emotional outbursts. The memories of a twenty-two year old persisted, raged, rationalized, sifting through science, philosophy, religion, and other bodies of knowledge in its search to come to terms with this new state of being. This state of not knowing where the hell I was and what in heavens I had become. The body of the baby just bawled. And pooped. It was miserable time for everyone involved.

On the plus side, I got to sleep a lot. My busy mind appreciated that. So did my parents. It was only when I slept and was quiet could my parents go to calm the other toddler in the house, a certain blonde little girl who I would get to know as my "sister", my blood.

Down the rabbit hole to Narnia?

There were signs and hints. They would blink at me and I would blink at them, but the facts did not compute until much later.

There were things that I found odd in my daily crawl around the house. The appliances in the household were an incongruent mixture of modern and traditional. The language being spoken sounded suspiciously like Japanese. Sometimes, like a huge crow, a human-shape shadow would fleet across the windows, even though it was on the second floor. There were strange gears lying around the house, shelves of strange scrolls, boxes of metal projectiles, and the swords on the living room wall seemed more lethal than ornamental. The most telling of all was probably the headband that "dad" would sometimes wear on his forehead: a metal plate with a leaf in the shape of a spiral.

I was wary of the people around me. They were strangers that took personal space for granted; I was scared. The first time the blonde man with a ponytail tried to pick me up, I had bitten him with my hardly-there teeth and proceeded to scream his ears off. I had cried hysterically when a soft-spoken woman tried to tickle me on my podgy belly. When a toddler with a toothy smile tried to cuddle with me, I swatted her with my small angry fists. I was a two-feet tyrant of terror.

Later I would learn that these were good people. Crossing the language barrier certainly helped. The learning skills of a baby coupled with the mind of a language major made learning a less daunting task. Otousan, okasan, and oneechan translated easily enough into dad, mom, and older sister. Or baba, mama, and jiejie in my mother tongue. They were family, but they were not my family, at least not yet. It would take a little more time for that to happen.

I was starting to piece together all the signs.

The final piece came to me in the form of a great mountain. I gazed at the dazzling sight in front of me from within the shades of the stroller. A gigantic mountain was framed against an iridescent blue sky. Four faces were carved out of the sun-baked yellow rock, stern, ageless faces that gazed impassively at the village spread out below them. This was no Mount Rushmore. This was something impossible.

We're not in Kansas anymore.

"Mommy, what that?" My sister dear was asking, one hand tugging at the hem of mother's skirt and the other pointing.

Mom bent down and smiled at my sister. A gentle wind ruffled her brown curls and sent her comforting flowery scent to my senses. A single leaf drifted into my eyeline and fell out of sight.

"Those are great people, Ino-chan. They are the leaders of this village. We call them Hokage. They are here to protect us all, to make sure that bad people don't get you or little Inomi."

Something clicked. Something, reality perhaps, fell apart.

God help me, I had somehow landed myself into a supposedly fictional world of ninja and violence.

AN: Hello again. If you are still reading by this point, I want to thank you for giving this piece of writing a chance. This is a pilot chapter. I have every intention of continuing this story, but I want to test the water in this community. I may edit this first chapter and then post more now that the academic year had ended. Please leave a review if you happen to see anything that may tickle your fancy. Tickle, tickle. I am also open to constructive criticism, feel free to tickle me.