Inuyasha Manga: 080 Box Garden

Like those planting boxes that you put on tiers to grow your veggies and such in an enclosure? That would certainly be a handy thing for a hermit to have, especially one that needs a bite of fruit to avoid heartburn every once and a while. If you want to avoid contact with icky sticky society except to eat your fill of humans to lengthen your life, there's no better way to subsist. Except, of course, for the eating humans part. That's kind of douchey.

And apparently humans don't produce a particularly LEAN meat, the way Inuyasha tells it.

Inuyasha shouts that the Peach Man won't get away as he leaps forward, swinging Tessaiga's blade across the Peach Man's chest. It slices over the fur vest the Peach Man is wearing, and is repelled, forcing a shocked Inuyasha back. Though the Peach Man mutters in pain, he doesn't have any wound from the sword. Inuyasha gapes in confusion at the fact that the Tessaiga bounced right off the guy.

The Peach Man calls Inuyasha a moron for thinking he could possibly defeat a hermit like him, never mind what kind of youkai Inuyasha happens to be. Brandishing his leafy staff, the Peach Man produces a flowery atmosphere that assaults a bewildered Inuyasha with petals. Inuyasha demands to know if these flowers are supposed to blind him, and the Peach Man suggests that he take a closer look at them.

This is the story you tell the kiddies when they ask you where their Inuyasha figurines come from.

The Peach Man tells Inuyasha that HE'S the one who's gotten smaller, grinning wickedly at the tiny hanyou in his hand before tossing him into his mouth like a potato chip. Inuyasha curses as the Peach Man's tongue undulates and he's thrown into the throat. The Tessaiga lays hissing in its reverted form next to the Peach Man while he gulps down Inuyasha. He'll probably need extra fruit to counteract Inuyasha's acidic attitude in his stomach.

But fruit won't help much to guard against the backup floating to the winded rescue. Kagome assures Shippou that it's only a little further to the top while Miroku marvels at Shippou's unexpected powers. Internally, Kagome frets about how she was so careless as to forget that Inuyasha will lose his powers tonight on the new moon, making him human. She seriously looks freaked about this, almost like she's going to burst into tears at any second.

A sweating balloon!Shippou mutters that he's sorry, prompting an uncertain expression on Miroku, and an annoyed one on Kagome. They all plummet down the cliff, Shippou screaming that he's sorry and Kagome just screaming. Miroku seizes her around the waist with an arm and leaps toward the cliff from balloon!Shippou, intending to get off before going splat. He and Kagome land in a bush growing out the side of the cliff as Shippou transforms back into a kid, and to their surprise they slide right through a tunnel dug into the rock beneath it.

After a moment of pain in her backside from landing so hard (this is becoming a habit for her, I can see), she blinks in confusion at something sitting beyond the mouth of the tunnel.

This looks a little more like a model train environment than a garden, but okay chapter.

Miroku speculates that this must be the Peach Man's den, but Kagome is focused entirely on the miniature garden in front of her. She slowly approaches, at first asking what it is, and then saying that it looks like a box garden. Congratulations on naming the chapter, Kagome! I would wish you many blessings for doing so, but I happen to know for a fact that your chapter-naming is not going offer you any advantages in the hardships to come.

Looking closer at the miniature garden, Kagome is astounded to find a miniature man walking around inside too, slouching along a path and oblivious to the giant girl staring from the sky. Shippou and Miroku join her in peering into the box, Shippou noting that there are more people than just the one crowded under the trees. Miroku suggests that these might be people captured by the Peach Man, those in need of saving like the old man's head talked about.

Kagome feels a tug toward the miniature land below and falls forward in shock. Shippou shouts that the box is getting bigger and Miroku warns them not to look too long at it, but it's a bit too late.

At least everything is to scale. If Joe Johnston had directed this chapter, you would be trying to ride a bee out of your jungle of a backyard.

Kagome reaches up and feels the vicinity of her collar bone, alarmed, then turns to Miroku to inform him that her piece of the Shikon no Tama has disappeared. Miroku looks dumbfounded, and she wonders aloud what she should do, because she was so sure she had it around her neck.

It was the only thing on her that didn't shrink, apparently, dropping to the floor outside the box. The Peach Man chooses this time to walk in, straight for a giant jar in the corner. He asks himself if he should drink some of the medicine inside, because eating Inuyasha caused him some heartburn. I told you he would cause some serious stomach problems. Before the Peach Man scoops up a drink of the stuff, he sees Kagome's Shikon fragment glinting next to the box.

He identifies it as the huge shard it is, eyes alight, and pulls open his robe so his jiggling belly is exposed. There's a smaller shard already sticking out of this belly button, which allowed it to repel the blow from a sword. He shoves the larger fragment into his belly button as with the first, saying that it'll surely make his body like steel. Then, the Peach Man lifts the huge jar of medicine that he was contemplating earlier, pouring it down his gullet while guffawing about how useful his new shard is.

Inuyasha, meanwhile, is clawing his way up the Peach Man's insides, swearing that he'll kill the scummy guy when he gets out of there.

That flash flood could have used a warning for sure.

Inuyasha holds a hand up to his nose, cringing at the scent of medicine in the liquid pooled around him. He looks over to find that the bone he nearly smashed against before is rapidly dissolving in the corrosive substance and narrows his eyes in exasperation, because this place isn't what you'd call comfortable. It's somebody's stomach, boy. What did you expect?

Raising his claws and cracking his knuckles, Inuyasha resolves to just tear his way out of there. But, when he sinks his hand into what looks like the soft tissue in the wall of the stomach, he bounces back just like his sword did, splashing back into the medicine. Inuyasha complains that this guy is super flabby, inside and out. Geez Inuyasha, do you REALLY need to keep harping on about the guy's weight? Maybe he has a thyroid problem, or human flesh is a lot more fatty than anyone figured. In the case of the latter, surely you can think of something ELSE to criticize the Peach Man for.

Suddenly, a pulse overtakes Inuyasha.

See? You have your own body issues - no need to get all indignant about anyone else's.

It's best not to ask me, man. I would probably have been dead by now if I were you.

So, what did I think of this chapter overall? There wasn't any character development for the main characters this time around. While the previous chapter was somewhat dark and horrific, I find the tone has shifted rather dramatically to humor in this one. The Peach Man strikes me as quite dense in the way he operates, and his actions are somewhat comedic. I kind of get the impression he's supposed to be kind of guy who never met a problem he couldn't eat; someone whose whole life revolves around food and consuming, without giving much back.

Which actually makes a measure of sense when you consider his confrontation with the man running away from his cliff-side house in the last chapter. The Peach Man is who people apparently come to when they're tired of being part of a society that uses them up without giving anything in return, and the Peach Man seems to embody a flipping of that script - the INDIVIDUAL who takes what life has to give him and doesn't have to answer to or care about a rule of law. In this instance, the hermit represents someone who is free from life's expectations and obligations, being free as a bird to take anything that he wants. He's so simple because of how little he needs to think of others and their needs, only thinking about what's good for him.

And THAT probably explains why he didn't give a single thought to WHY the big chunk of the jewel he found was in his house. In his hermit isolation, he never has to think or worry about people breaking into his shit, so in childlike glee, he just snatches up something he found on the ground, without dedicating a single note to the fact that it might belong to someone else, or that that someone else might be somewhere in his house. He doesn't give a crap; all he cares about is the sudden good luck he just game into.

Ah, to be so oblivious...