Sasori (サソリ, Sasori), renowned as Sasori of the Red Sand (赤砂のサソリ, Akasuna no Sasori), was an S-rank missing-nin from Sunagakure’s Puppet Brigade and a member of Akatsuki, where he was partnered with Orochimaru and later Deidara.

When Sasori was young, his father and mother were killed by Sakumo Hatake in battle, leaving him in the care of his grandmother, Chiyo. When Chiyo attempted to cheer him up by teaching him puppetry, Sasori’s innate aptitude for the art became apparent, and he even began to devise masterful ways of eliminating a puppet master’s weaknesses in battle. His skills even allowed him to create two puppets in the image of his parents in an attempt to discard the terrible loneliness he felt. However, as the puppets were unable to give him the real parental love that he desired, Sasori lost interest in them, and they later fell into Chiyo’s possession. Sasori created many other ingenious puppets, including Kuroari, Karasu, and Sanshōuo.

During the Third Shinobi World War, the effectiveness of his puppets in spilling his enemies’ blood on the sand gave rise to Sasori’s moniker “Sasori of the Red Sand“. However, motivated by his desire to make works that last forever, Sasori began experimenting to create puppets out of people. In the anime, his only friend, Komushi, lost his right arm during his border control duty, so Sasori gave him a new puppet arm as a prosthetic limb. After Komushi perished, having accidentally ingested some of Sasori’s poison, Sasori proceeded to turn him into one of his first human puppets. Twenty years before his introduction in the series, Sasori left Sunagakure; it was around this time he converted his body into a puppet with his core of living flesh remaining as his only human part, thus appearing to maintain the youth of the time of his departure. Over ten years before his own death, Sasori secretly assassinated the Third Kazekage and made him into one of his human puppets. Despite this, Sasori noted the Third Kazekage did not die without giving Sasori a struggle.