Inuyasha

What it is

Kagome Higurashi, fifteen, is pulled down the well in her family’s shrine by a centipede woman and climbs out five hundred years earlier, in the warring-states Japan of the 1500s, carrying inside her the jewel that every yokai wants. She frees the half-demon Inuyasha from the tree where a priestess pinned him, the jewel shatters, and the fifty-six volumes are the hunt for its shards: a fox child, a monk with a cursed hand, a demon-slayer with a fire-cat, and behind every betrayal the spider-born Naraku. Takahashi Rumiko drew it for Weekly Shōnen Sunday for twelve years, and the television series carried it round the world. Its subtitle calls it a feudal fairy tale, and that is what it is.

Yokai that appear

• Ōmukade 大百足 — Mistress Centipede, the six-armed woman who drags Kagome down the well in the first chapter.
• Kitsune 狐 — Shippō, the orphaned fox child with fox-fire, part of the main cast from volume 3.
• Nekomata 猫又 — Kirara, the demon-slayer's two-tailed cat who becomes a fire-cat mount, from volume 10.
• Bake-danuki 化け狸 — Hachiemon, the cowardly tanuki who flies the monk about, from volume 6.
• Raijū 雷獣 — The Thunder Brothers Hiten and Manten, called raijū, who killed Shippō's father (volume 4).
• Oni 鬼 — A loose class of demons: the ogress Urasue who raises the dead, and Goshinki, Naraku's mind-reading spawn.

How far from the record

“Yokai” here is a class of demons in a fantasy Sengoku, and most of the cast are kinds the records do not know: dog demons with a lordly lineage, a wolf tribe, moth and bat and panther clans. Where a recorded name is used, the creature is remade. The two-tailed fire-cat Kirara is a nekomata without the old cat’s grudges; the Thunder Brothers are called raijū but are swordsmen on clouds, not the small beast that falls with the lightning; Shippō is a fox child with fox-fire and poor transformations, the kitsune of the tales reduced to a mascot. The author’s stated source for the priestess, her betrayal and her return is Ueda Akinari’s 1776 tale of the Kibitsu cauldron, literary ghost story rather than village record, and she has said that once the series began she went looking for pictures of demons and goblins to draw from. The history is real and so is the geography; the yokai are the author’s.

Where to read it

English

Inuyasha (external link) — VIZ Media, 18 VIZBIG omnibus volumes (3-in-1), complete; the earlier 56 single volumes are out of print

Spanish

Inuyasha (external link) — Planeta Cómic, 30 hardcover volumes from 2023, ongoing. An earlier 56-volume edition by Glénat España is out of print

Indonesian

Inuyasha (external link) — Elex Media Komputindo, 56 volumes, published in the 2000s and reissued from 2016; currently out of print