Inuyasha Manga: 057 A Painter's Dream

This probably doesn't reference the MODERN painter's dream, which would be better described as work being featured in a high-class gallery and making money from their craft WITHOUT catching a ton of flak for not having a REAL job. Yeah, sure, you're famous enough to get tons of requests to see more of your art on various websites, but when you produce prints for people to buy you're suddenly under scrutiny for e-begging and leeching. You're great as long as the product of weeks of effort is on display for FREE and a labor of love. If there's ever a price tag on it, you're a HACK! A HACK I SAY!

Ahem...

No, THIS dream has more to do with a love of hell scenes and gore. Man, if you had been born a few centuries later...

The painter's flashback now features a little inkpot he filled with the stuff he brought home, as well as some of the ink that was supposed to be there anyway, which he used to paint an oni. The oni rose from the paper miraculously, a moment that the painter describes as wonderful. Terrifying would be my first word-choice, but then again I've read "The Art of Jacob Emory". As the oni was rising from its painting, it demanded more blood and guts, which the painter was only too happy to provide.

He goes straight to describing how his frequent experimentation led to him finding out that fresh guts worked to sate his oni's hunger best. Didn't have even a LITTLE bit of a moral crisis? Okay. He assaulted a servant, a person passing by, killing them with a hatchet. Eventually he had killed too many people to remain safely in the capital, so he skipped town.

Yeah dude, she just APPEARED in front of you out of thin air. No wonder he doesn't give a shit that he's killing her with his nightly kidnappings; it just doesn't occur to him that she's a PERSON who needs sleep rather than a mere apparition.

He laments the fact that he could only have watched her from afar and never acted on his "love" for her as the person he was before, but having a life-giving brush means he can make a princess all his own. Which will demand blood and guts in exchange for sex. And he's SURPRISED that his paintings of the princess continually come out with her looking like a demon prostitute?

The painter has convinced himself that no one will get in the way of this dream; producing a sex robot that will feed on the human entrails he brings to it! He's prepared to defend it, scrolls lying unfurled around him as he stares out the window at the intruders on his solitary house.

You remember what happened the last time you cut into one of those painting onis, right? No time for reminiscence it seems, though, because Kagome notes a steady stream of the creatures pouring out of the house. She insists Inuyasha chopping them all down is getting them nowhere, but Inuyasha is also insistent that he do so. Kagome screams when Inuyasha makes a rough landing next to a sea of ink and blood he just made, glaring ahead.

Kagome says his name like a question, JUST before he collapses in another dead faint. There's no shouting him out of it either, and with so many of the ink-demons around, she doesn't know what to do. Kagome turns around as one of them is about to slice her with a sword.

Inuyasha doesn't have a moment to complain, because Miroku rips the beads off his glove to open his Kazaana, pointing it at the cloud of youkai. They feel the pull of it immediately.

The painter is flabbergasted by his oni being sucked up, and Kagome is amazed by the rear view of Miroku's Kazaana in action. I'm sure she's totally NOT looking at dat ass, though it would be so ironic if she was.

Miroku groans and cuts off the flow with his magic beads, sweat at his temple. He kneels in the grass, hunched and panting while Kagome calls his name in concern. Miroku says that his first time sucking up so much evil at once has been unexpectedly tiring. So much for the automatic assumption that Miroku is largely unaffected by his suckiness and he will be able to suck indefinitely.

Inuyasha is silently sulking that he was saved by Miroku, but is interrupted by a creaking and shaking coming from the house. Kagome wonders what's going on now.

Kagome and Miroku gape at the fleeing painter, but Inuyasha leaps after him, much to Kagome's confusion. She asks if he's okay, and Inuyasha looks over his shoulder to ask her in turn where the Shikon shard is so he can take it from the moron. She takes a moment to look, and finds that there's a familiar glow coming from the bamboo pipe hanging from the painter's right hip. She alerts Inuyasha, who jumps into action now that he knows where to aim.

He lands on the back of the snake creature, then glares down to where Miroku and Kagome stand, helpless. He yells at Miroku not to think he's the only one who can be super cool or anything. Kagome allows a small pause before she apologizes to Miroku for Inuyasha's rudeness and translates it as a thanks and "I'll take it from here" in reality. Miroku flatly says that it didn't sound at all like her sparkly interpretation. No, seriously, she's surrounded with sparkles as she says it, which I assume is supposed to indicate her genuinely being impressed by SOMETHING about Inuyasha here. Can't say for sure what.

The painter unfurls another of his scrolls with more onis painted on it, and they pop off the paper at a glaring Inuyasha. He is so far beyond caring about these inky fuckers at this point. Miroku comments that there's more like he's saying it looks like rain, but Kagome panics about how Inuyasha can't cut them or he'll be done in by the smell. Turns out, she's got nothing to worry about.

Come on, Miroku, surely you've seen someone swinging their fists before. The only surprise should be that it was so effective, because...

If only Inuyasha knew how blockheaded the guy he's insisting give up really is.

So, what did I think of this chapter overall? It was interesting to have access to the villain's head for a time at the beginning of the chapter. Learning the course of events that led him to this current situation is illuminating not only in a chronological sense, but also a motivational sense. This is a man who has always been fascinated with Hell-scapes and gore, and with dead subjects rather than living ones. The irony of producing life from the depiction and propagation of death allows the painter a sense of power over his surroundings where he didn't have that power before. Not only could he commit murder as justified by feeding his creations, but he could also create MORE that would follow his orders and serve him like the god he was to them.

His treatment of the princess is also better understood, because not being used to dealing with live subjects, he's really inept at actually handling it. The painter not only dehumanizes her in his description of simply "appearing" before him like she's not even real, but has difficulty depicting her in a way that doesn't make her look demonic. It's not totally clear whether it's the jewel shard's evil that is producing this effect, or if it's just his artistic habits that are difficult to break, but it's interesting how his struggle leads to him continuing to contribute to the princess's illness. His lack of care would have ended up killing her if Inuyasha and company hadn't come along, bringing his propagation of death in service to his obsession full circle.

It's really too bad that it had to be communicated in such a clumsy way. It wasn't as bad as it could have been, granted, because it did flow into the content following it, and putting it at the beginning of the chapter made it less of a story-interruption. I also can't see how it might have been woven more discretely through the rest of the narrative, so you could also argue this was the best of all possible iterations.

As far as flashbacks go, it wasn't BAD, but it wasn't the BEST either.