Inuyasha

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Inuyasha is a Japanese manga series created by Rumiko Takahashi, and it begins with a betrayal. In 1496 Japan, a priestess named Kikyo and a half-demon she loves are tricked into turning against each other. He steals the sacred Shikon Jewel. She pins him to a tree with an arrow. Then, knowing she is dying, she orders her own body burned along with the jewel, erasing both from that age. Five hundred years later, a fifteen-year-old girl named Kagome Higurashi is dragged into a well on her family's shrine, lands in the Sengoku period, and changes everything. What compelled Rumiko Takahashi to build an eleven-year saga from that moment of ancient grief? Why does a story set in medieval Japan resonate with tens of millions of readers around the world? And what does it take to write a series whose final chapter still lands with full emotional force fifty-two volumes after it began?

• 2. Takahashi's Dark Turn

  ›

  Rumiko Takahashi launched Inuyasha directly after finishing Ranma 1/2, which ran from 1987 to 1996. Her previous body of work, including Urusei Yatsura (1978-1987) and Maison Ikkoku (1980-1987), was rooted in comedy. With Inuyasha she wanted to move toward darker territory, something thematically closer to her Mermaid Saga stories. To let violent themes breathe on the page without becoming gratuitous, she placed the story in the Sengoku period, when warfare was simply a fact of life. That historical setting gave her permission to show conflict and death while keeping the story from feeling gratuitous.

  Takahashi approached the Sengoku backdrop with deliberate informality. She later said she did no notable research on samurai designs or castle architecture because she considered those things common knowledge. Her focus was on character, not period authenticity. By June 2001, five years into the serialization, she still had not settled on how the relationship between Inuyasha and Kagome would end. She admitted this was not unusual for her: she had figured out the endings of her previous series as they were published, not before. That willingness to discover a story while telling it gave Inuyasha its loose, evolving quality, and it also left the series open to the emotional complexity that would eventually carry it to its conclusion.

• 3. Shards, Curses, Alliances

  ›

  Kagome arrives in 1546, fifty years after the Sengoku period began, and almost immediately shatters the Shikon Jewel into dozens of fragments with a stray arrow. That accident drives the entire series forward. Inuyasha and Kagome spend the bulk of the story recovering those shards before dangerous demons or humans can use them. Along the way they pick up three companions: Shippō, a young fox demon; Miroku, a monk whose hand was cursed by the villain Naraku to contain a wind tunnel that will eventually swallow him; and Sango, a demon slayer whose clan was massacred by Naraku and whose younger brother Kohaku was placed under Naraku's control.

  Naraku himself is a spider half-demon, and the source of most of the group's grief. He manipulated Inuyasha and Kikyo's original betrayal five centuries earlier. He killed Sango's clan. He cursed Miroku's family line. His presence behind nearly every tragedy makes him one of the more architecturally central villains in Takahashi's work. Inuyasha's primary weapon, a sword called Tessaiga, was inherited from his father, and improving it becomes a through-line for his growth as a fighter. The sword also creates the series' most complicated sibling dynamic: Inuyasha's full-demon older half-brother Sesshomaru covets the blade, and their antagonism slowly transforms into a wary alliance as Naraku's threat intensifies.

• 4. Love Across Five Centuries

  ›

  Kikyo's resurrection is among the more painful complications Takahashi builds into the romance at the center of the series. After being pinned to the tree by Kikyo's arrow in 1496, Inuyasha is freed by Kagome in 1546 and gradually falls in love with her. But Kikyo is later resurrected and exists as an undead figure sustained by the souls of the dead. Inuyasha still carries feeling for her. Kagome is Kikyo's reincarnation. The situation creates a triangle with unusually high emotional stakes because Inuyasha cannot simply choose: he is entangled with both women across a gap of five hundred years.

  The series closes this wound deliberately. Kikyo sacrifices herself to restore life to Kohaku, Sango's brother. Naraku, in the moment before his death, reveals that his true, unacknowledged desire was always for Kikyo, despite everything he did to destroy her. He uses his final wish on the restored Shikon Jewel to trap himself and Kagome inside it. The jewel, now revealed to be sentient, tries to manipulate Kagome into making a selfish wish that would lock her inside it forever. Instead, Kagome wishes for the jewel to disappear entirely. Three years pass. The Bone Eater's Well reopens. Kagome returns to the Sengoku period, marries Inuyasha, and begins training under the elder priestess Kaede.

• 5. Serialization and Scale

  ›

  The first chapter of Inuyasha appeared in Weekly Shōnen Sunday on the 13th of November 1996. The series ran for exactly 11 years and seven months, publishing its final chapter on the 18th of June 2008. Shogakukan collected the 558 chapters into 56 tankōbon volumes, the last of which arrived on the 18th of February 2009. A 30-volume wide-ban edition followed, released from January 2013 to June 2015. On the 6th of February 2013, Takahashi also contributed a special epilogue chapter to the "Heroes Come Back" anthology, a fundraising collection of short stories produced in response to the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. That chapter was folded into the final volume of the wide-ban edition in 2015.

  In North America, Viz Media began publishing English editions in April 1997, initially in an American comic book format. The orientation of the pages shifted with the 38th volume, released on the 14th of July 2009, when Viz switched from left-to-right to the original right-to-left layout. They completed the North American release with the 56th volume on the 11th of January 2011. By February 2010, the series had over 45 million copies in circulation worldwide. By September 2020 that figure had crossed 50 million, placing Inuyasha among the best-selling manga series ever published. In 2002, the manga won the 47th Shogakukan Manga Award in the shonen category.

• 6. Anime, Film, and Beyond

  ›

  The first anime adaptation, produced by Sunrise, began airing on the 16th of October 2000 on Yomiuri TV and Nippon Television. It ran for 167 episodes before ending on the 13th of September 2004, before the manga itself had concluded. A second series, Inuyasha: The Final Act, was announced in July 2009 and broadcast 26 episodes from the 4th of October 2009 to the 30th of March 2010, covering the final volumes of the manga with the original cast and crew. Both series aired in the United States on Adult Swim and later its revived Toonami block from 2002 to 2015.

  Four theatrical films followed, each with original storylines written by Katsuyuki Sumisawa, the writer for the anime series. All four were released in Japan in December of their respective years, from 2001 to 2004, and together they earned over US$20 million at Japanese box offices. An original video animation was presented on the 30th of July 2008 at a "It's a Rumic World" exhibit at the Matsuya Ginza department store in Tokyo and released on home video on the 20th of October 2010. In May 2020, a new anime sequel was announced: Yashahime: Princess Half-Demon, following the daughters of Inuyasha, Kagome, Sesshomaru, and Rin. It premiered on the 3rd of October 2020 and ran for two seasons through March 2022. Separately, a live-action stage play ran at the Akasaka ACT Theater in Tokyo in April and May 2000, with a second run from January through February 2001.

• 7. Critical Standing

  ›

  Reviewers who followed Inuyasha over its long run noted that the series maintained its momentum across dozens of volumes. A review of volume 23 for Anime News Network declared that twenty-three volumes in the series still packed a serious punch, praising the balance of action, conversation, and what the reviewer called reflection. A reviewer for Manga Life, approaching volume 52 after not having read the series since around volume six, wrote that Takahashi's genius lay in endless improvisations on standard elements, describing how new enemies and monsters continually forced the characters to grow. The same reviewer noted that the art kept background detail sparse, keeping attention on the characters themselves and their emotional states.

  A review of volume two at Ex.org described Inuyasha as combining the best of Takahashi's established strengths: fast-paced action, imaginative fantasy, touches of horror, and her signature humor. That reviewer praised Kagome as undeniably intelligent and observant, calling the characterization refreshing. On TV Asahi's 2021 Manga Sosenkyo poll, in which 150,000 people voted for their top 100 manga series, Inuyasha ranked 28th. The series was also recognized at the fifth and 12th installments of the Japan Media Arts Festival, in 2001 and 2008. A collectible card game created by Score Entertainment arrived in North America on the 20th of October 2004, and an English-language original RPG for the Nintendo DS, Inuyasha: Secret of the Divine Jewel, was released on the 23rd of January 2007, marking how broadly the franchise extended into interactive media.