Inuyasha Review

Kagome Higurashi falls through the well at her family's shrine into Sengoku Japan, where an old priestess takes her for the reincarnation of Kikyo, who died guarding the Shikon Jewel fifty years earlier, and where the half demon who tried to steal it, Inuyasha, is still pinned to a tree by Kikyo's arrow. Soon Kagome has freed him and shattered the jewel, and the series becomes a hunt for its shards across a countryside thick with yokai.

Takahashi's line is clean and quick, her action reads at a glance, and her comedy, honed on Urusei Yatsura and Ranma 1/2, gives the bickering pair real warmth. The party she assembles, the lecherous monk Miroku, the demon slayer Sango with her cat Kirara, and Inuyasha's icy half brother Sesshomaru at its edge, is one of the great ensembles of shonen, and Naraku, a villain stitched together from a bandit's resentment and a horde of demons, is patient and properly vile.

The weakness is the shape. For most of the run the story repeats one pattern, a new shard, a new demon and another partial defeat for Naraku, and the triangle between Inuyasha, Kagome and the resurrected Kikyo is held in place for years. The repetition is real, but the cast carries it: the final volumes close every thread still open, and it won the Shogakukan Manga Award in 2002.