Inuyasha realizes his wrongness when he remembers that it was actually KIKYOU who sealed him away, not Kagome. Then he sits up abruptly, sweating, on the branch he was sleeping on. It was only a dream, but the fact that he should remember that infernal event in his nightmares annoys him. He hops down from his perch to where Kagome and Shippou are still sound asleep in her sleeping bag, peering at the former.
He admits that they do look awfully similar, though Kikyou is dead and gone.
A shuffling noise draws their attention to the side.
Morning rolls around, and Inuyasha is leaping toward Kaede's village, with Kagome riding on her bike behind him and questioning why they're heading back suddenly. He tells her to shut up, as per usual. Inside the village, a man with a bandage around his head identifies Inuyasha right away, just as Kaede wanders into their midst in a sling and a bandage too, against the advice of another village woman. Kagome is shocked, asking Kaede what happened, while Inuyasha pauses. He walks up to Kaede, looking somewhat sour as he judges her to be alive after all.
Kaede seems surprised to see Inuyasha there, but as they're walking up the long set of steps to the shrine she keeps, she learns that Inuyasha smelled her blood on the youkai who paid them a visit the previous night. Inuyasha stalks up the stairs behind her, annoyed that she just stumbles from one injury into another. Kagome looks over her shoulder at him and has taken to interpreting Inuyasha's salty attitude too, because she translates this and his eagerness to get back to the village as him being worried about Kaede.
Meanwhile, Kaede is talking about how her powers were insufficient to protect IT. What is IT, you ask?
I kid, the real target was actually the small broken shrine at the edge of it. Kaede says this was her sister Kikyou's grave, which has Kagome gaping and Inuyasha glaring over his shoulder at them, all over an image of Kikyou burning in her funeral pyre.
Kaede flashes back to when the youkai who did this was making the crater in front of the shrine with a powerful swipe of her scythe. She identified herself as Urasue, a witch who was there to steal Kikyou's holy bones, evidently in the small urn she was holding up. Kagome continues to gape at Kaede, repeating "Kikyou's bones" like a question. Kaede says that given the immense spiritual power her sister had, she hates to think what horrible misuse a youkai would put her remains to.
She begins to address Inuyasha, but he's already refusing. He reminds Kaede that Kikyou and he were enemies, eliciting a pause from Kagome and Kaede, the former of which is giving him a pained expression. Kaede hangs her head, mumbling that she guesses that really is how it was.
Later, when Inuyasha is sitting by a tree, he calls out to Myouga, because he's pretty sure the flea is there. Myouga emerges from Inuyasha's hair, telling him that he didn't really want to get involved in this. Too bad; Inuyasha asks him if he knows anything about this Urasue character. Myouga doesn't know much other than the fact Urasue is an oni who uses oni-arts. Inuyasha is pretty worried, because he smelled the contents of Urasue's basket, which weren't just bones, but the damp earth around the shrine too.
THIS seems to have Myouga concerned, and Inuyasha asks if he knows something based on the information. Myouga claims to have never heard of such a thing as Kagome steps up to them. She smiles and asks Inuyasha if they're going to get hopping over there. Inuyasha rests his chin on the heel of his hand and mutters a question about where. Kagome sits down next to Inuyasha and says it's a real shame those bones were taken, and besides that, Kikyou's been dead a long time despite how much Inuyasha hated her. His eyes widen slightly while he's glaring off to the side. She tries to continue despite him avoiding looking at her, saying that whatever happened between him and Kikyou, it's already over.
Inuyasha keeps his face turned away, and after a pause, Kagome gets angry and tugs on one of his forelocks to force his gaze around. Inuyasha wants to know what the big idea is, and Kagome shouts that he's been avoiding looking at her since yesterday. She gets right up in his grill and yells all her assumptions about how he thinks her face is terrible because it's like Kikyou's and how he hates her. He grabs her hand.
Either way, he doesn't answer her panicked question about what he was just doing. She has a hand over her heart, which is hammering yet again, as she wonders what was just going on. Her freaking is interrupted by her sight of Kaede mounted on a horse with a village man whining about how she's going even while she's in her injured state. Kaede asks him to take care of the village while she's gone.
Kaede, who are you kidding? This nobody ain't got NOTHING on you when it comes to taking care of business.
Kagome stares while Inuyasha sits back up and looks over his shoulder at Kaede too. Kaede begins to ride away, thinking it's her job as Kikyou's successor to recover her remains. Kagome catches up to her on her bike, saying she's tagging along, with Shippou on the back too. Kaede says Kagome's name, but doesn't protest her assertion.
Blushing, Kagome looks down at her handlebars for a moment, before stuttering out a question to Kaede about whether Inuyasha and Kikyou were REALLY just enemies. Inuyasha hops out of nowhere onto the back of Kaede's horse, asking Kagome if she's implying there was anything else between him and Kikyou. Kaede eyes him out of her periphery, saying it's kind of strange for him to be coming too. Inuyasha scoffs and holds his nose in the air.
Kagome thinks that Inuyasha is hiding something, because of the strange way he was looking at her before. That can't be the ONLY thing tipping her off, because he's being awfully nonchalant about her pushing him when he would have been bawling about it like a damn baby before.
Meanwhile, in some jagged mountains...
So, what did I think of this chapter overall? This has been 45 chapters coming. When you see Inuyasha and Kikyou interact at the beginning of the chapter, there's no real context. All the details that lead to Inuyasha's sealing and Kikyou's death are obscured, but Kikyou at least reveals in her request to have her body and the Shikon no Tama burned that she doesn't want any other evil hands to get on that jewel.
However, when Inuyasha is revived, he very quickly falls short of this image of "evil" that Kikyou mentioned before she died. He reveals himself as more and more domicile; prickly, certainly, but also helpful and empathetic to a degree. He's not exactly cuddly, but he's also not an irredeemable horror that has no sense of morality.
Something doesn't add up, and it hasn't added up since Inuyasha was brought back. Anyone who reads this manga was able to see that there was some background information that they haven't been let in on yet, and it's one of the driving factors that kept me reading my first go around. Now, readers are getting a very obvious nudge in the ribs from RT that this is the information they've been waiting for. This is the information that will reconcile the Inuyasha we saw in the first few pages of the manga with the Inuyasha we've become somewhat familiar with over the past 44 chapters.
It's brilliantly done, because by this point, we've been shown what looks like two contradictory views of the same guy, one of which was personally experienced through a set of adventures. How could Kikyou have seen him so differently than Kagome has learned to? It's a great lesson in how to hold onto information to pique reader interest, as well as how to build questions into a narrative.
What's NOT such a great example of that? Myouga looking like a lightbulb went off over his head at the mention of the graveyard soil, and then saying he's never heard of anything like it. Spoiler alert: he's not even in the rest of the arc, so I don't know why such a significant expression would have been included to begin with.
No comments:
Post a Comment