Inuyasha Manga: 055 Pocket Oni

Oni that can fit into your pocket, eh? Do they come in card form too? Or did Kagome bring her favorite hand-held Nintendo system so she could catch the little guys in the Fuedal Era? Is she trading them with the local villagers and training them in gyms? I'd mention the stops where she can pick up their little prison spheres too, but since this chapter came out LONG before the "GO" installment of the game, I'm fairly certain we can avoid making that comparison.

Not that this could be any sort of reference at ALL to Pokemon or anything.

I don't know, Kagome, it's hard to imagine that it could have taken you more than 560 chapters to collect and destroy the Shikon no Tama, regardless of who was working with whom.

Inuyasha leaps ahead, shouting that he smells ink, and ends up causing someone to shriek for help. He's gripping a struggling messenger by his collar with one hand while he sniffs at the letter that messenger was trying to deliver with the other, identifying it as the source of the smell. When Kagome catches up, she tells Inuyasha to sit, who asks what she's doing. She reprimands him for attacking an ordinary person, looking over her shoulder to apologize to the already fleeing messenger, trailing his unfurled letter in his wake.

Kagome turns back to Inuyasha, asking him what his hurry is, and Inuyasha shouts that she should already know. The rampaging youkai had not only left behind corpses with empty chest cavities, but also the scent of ink, and Inuyasha complains that if they're careless, Miroku will get away with all the Shikon fragments this case will yield. After a short pause, Kagome asks if Inuyasha hates Miroku THAT much, and Inuyasha answers with another question about whether she actually LIKES the lecherous bastard. Completely straight-faced, Kagome states simply that she LOVES Miroku.

Inuyasha gapes at Kagome a moment, who follows this comment up with the reveal that she was very obviously joking. Still, Inuyasha is freaking out over her statement, trembling as he wonders if it's really and truly like THAT. She shouts at him that he should listen to her all the way to the END of her punchlines next time.

Speak of the devil...

Dammit Miroku, what lowlife piece-of-garbage thing did you do now??

Oh, they're not referring to him. They're talking about some guy they're kicking at on the ground, calling him nasty for peeking at the princess who has covered her head with a kimono AND a parasol, attended by two others huddling around her protectively. Sheesh, does she really need that much shelter from some guy's EYES? I mean, yeah, being leered at is no fun, but it's not like it's going to ruin her or something.

The guy himself stutters that he only looked because the princess is so very beautiful. Does he really deserve to be beaten up for looking at someone he finds attractive? I mean, really? The villagers all gather around to handily identify this guy as a foreign painter called Koutatsu, who came to them from the capital. Miroku peers at this painter and it seems to him that Koutatsu has been driven mad by some obsession. How do you figure? Is he doing anything mad right now? All I see is a dude getting beaten up for looking at somebody, which seems to me like the actual madness, but what do I know?

We get a closeup on the princess this whole issue stems from, peering from under her hood and asking the villagers to stop being so cruel to the poor guy. Miroku stares.

Oh, I get it, she's just really sick. THAT explains all the sheltering measures they're taking.

Miroku looks down at the guy who was beaten up for daring to look at her royal highness, who's staggering to his feet. His attention is drawn back to the princess when she coughs and one of her attendants asks if she's alright. Miroku decides it's more important to help out the girl first, despite the fact that the painter guy could use some more immediate assistance. But, hey, what do you expect? Miroku's decisions on which problems deserve more attention are dictated by the dowsing rod that is his boner.

Koutatsu slinks out of the village on a lonely road, cursing the jerks who dared to damage his drawing. He silently calls them idiots, saying that they don't know anything. He brings out his drawing from beneath his collar to view, which is a pretty accurate view of the princess from many a different angle. What was described as just LOOKING earlier seems a bit more like STALKING here when he says that the princess is beautiful in the daylight as well. Now I'm beginning to see what those dudes beating Koutatsu up were so upset about. Koutatsu rounds out his creepy statement by stating that the princess will be all his soon.

You no longer have my sympathy, man.

He's seized by the back of his collar by a quite familiar hand wearing a bell sleeve.

He sounds an awful lot like a teacher who caught a kid vandalizing the side of the school...

Kagome is riding up, saying that Inuyasha is at this interrogation shtick yet again. Koutatsu asks Inuyasha what it is he wants, because he's just a painter. Inuyasha makes a sound like he doesn't quite believe THAT, because he smells ink, yes, but there's also something else. He tells Koutatsu that he reeks of blood and guts, which makes Koutatsu gape before he shoves Inuyasha and tells him to get away.

Inuyasha declares that Koutatsu won't escape as Koutatsu seizes both sides of his collar to pull open his shirt.

Kagome skids to a stop on her bike, the brakes squealing. Inuyasha has leaped out of the way of the arm, and now faces a huge body attached to it, an oni holding a crescent-bladed staff and looking like something straight out of a painting.

Koutatsu has used this distraction to run over to a nearby boat in a river and hop inside. Inuyasha notices this and shouts at him to hold up. Kagome looks at Koutatsu in disbelief, questioning what's going on and if he's actually a youkai. As Koutatsu pushes off from the bank and away, Kagome thinks he has to be human. Meanwhile, Inuyasha is still dealing with the sudden oni appearance, dodging another of its blows from the crescent blade this time.

From a gaping Kagome's shoulder, Shippou cheers Inuyasha's direct hit. Inuyasha smirks, scoffing about how the enemy just had a big bod. Said enemy collapses in a shower of blood, catching Inuyasha off guard and burying him in it. Kagome and Shippou stare, Shippou surprised to see that this blood is BLACK. Well, on this side of the manga, ALL the blood is black, unless the pages are colored, so forgive me if I don't really see the difference.

Inuyasha sits in a giant pool of the stuff, spitting curses and the black blood that managed to make its way into his mouth.This is why you shouldn't be shouting your head off when you're slicing up enemies, bro. He stares at his hand covered in the stuff, haltingly identifying it as ink mixed with blood and guts. Then he collapses in a dead faint, causing Kagome some surprise. She runs to him, asking what's wrong and lifting Inuyasha up out of the muck. His eyes are swirling in his disorientation, and Shippou says it's because his nose is too sensitive, the stench getting to him.

We rejoin Miroku at the castle, asking the princess about the horrible dreams she's been having at night. He sits in front of her and who I assume to be her father looking at her in concern, and tells her to recount what's in these nightmares. She says that they start with demons coming to the castle to take her away to an unfamiliar mansion. She's put in a room all by herself, but she can feel someone else watching nearby. The man sitting next to her says she's being steadily worn out by these dreams, and wonders if she's being haunted by a youkai.

Miroku strokes his chin as he gives his professional opinion that this is indeed the case. He asks the lord of the castle to leave him and the princess alone for a while. By the next panel, the lord has unwisely left his princess with the priest, who scoots real close to her as he bids her not to worry, assuring her that he will definitely save her with his houriki powers. He has a proposition for her in return, and while she clearly doesn't see where this is going, we all do.

Goodness, this joke is already getting old, even to the established characters.

Inuyasha asks if Kagome is REALLY going to trust the lecherous asshole, and Kagome answers that it's only because Inuyasha was all out of wack from the oni's blood earlier. Miroku tells them that it was awfully clever of Inuyasha and company to find him there. The princess wonders who all these new people are.

Hey, where did that stalker guy who had the oni in his pocket get to?

He's been COLLECTING the guts. Man, he really IS nasty.

So, what did I think of this chapter overall? The beginning was a little obscure in the details. It makes sense that Koutatsu would be beaten for his stalking habits after he himself explains what they did to his painting shortly thereafter, but it wasn't clear while it was happening, which makes Miroku's conclusions a little out-of-nowhere. If the princess's attendants had been shown damaging Koutatsu's drawing THEN, rather than us just hearing about it second-hand from Koutatsu, then not only would Miroku's diagnosis of him have been justified, but we would have seen first hand what they were beating him for. It was a very clumsy introduction for an author I KNOW could have done so much better.

That said, I'm still pretty impressed by Koutatsu as an antagonist. His humanity and frailty is set up early on, which makes him that much more repulsive. He's just a regular guy who's let his distant admiration of a woman turn into outright obsession, with which he justifies TERRIBLE things. There's really nothing scarier than a human being letting themselves be consumed with their more selfish urges to the point of hurting the very people they want contact with the most.

I'd also like to mention how great it is that RT didn't have Inuyasha and Miroku working together right off the bat. It makes sense that these two characters would clash at first, and would need to ease into being outright allies in the beginning, especially since they started out as antagonistic forces at first. It's more realistic to have them make it into a competition to start out, and then eventually come together in the interest of expediency.