Inuyasha Manga: 094 Birth of the Jewel

No, it doesn't have anything to do with a mommy and daddy jewel loving each other very much. That would be far too cliché. Also it would be kind of weird for Sango to give her new friends "the talk" for a multitude of wonky reasons. Although, from an audience standpoint, that would be comedy GOLD. Just imagine how Inuyasha and Kagome would react to ANYONE giving them a rundown on all the nasty shit they won't admit they want to do to each other. Hell, just imagine MIROKU, nodding along, even trying to correct Sango at some points because he's had more sex than my 29-year-old ass.

Someone draw a comic of this. Please and thank you.

Wow, Inuyasha is being awfully considerate carrying Sango. I thought he would have refused to do such a thing, considering in the last chapter he thought she should have been up-and-at-'em already.

Sango confirms that he and she are talking about the same thing, but as they approach the massive mummy lump in the back of the cave, she draws his attention to the fact that all the youkai were merged into one to increase their powers. Everything from dragons to spiders all formed one massive youkai in the mummified pile, and Sango says it was all to destroy one single human. Kagome repeats the human bit, encouraging Sango to go on, and she continues by stating that the human was eaten.

Miroku looks up at the desiccated person sticking out of the top of the formation, vindicated by Sango's assessment. He assumes by the age of the armor on it that this used to be an ancient general, but Sango corrects him on this.

Meh, I'll just keep on calling them priestesses. The reference seems like gratuitous foreign language to me.

Inuyasha doesn't act surprised by this, because it makes sense to him that a priestess would be a hundred times more effective an opponent to youkai than any samurai. Kagome's lost in her head, making comparisons between this woman's long past life fighting youkai and Kikyou's. She looks rather sad about this.

Sango says that the woman lived in a time when the central government of Japan was still intact, but there were still a ton of people who died in wars and famine. The corpses and near corpses of all the wretched humans were eaten by the youkai, increasing their already strong population.

Not having any eyes clearly did not get in the way of HER job.

With her immense spiritual power and handy sword, Sango explains that Midoriko could destroy up to 10 youkai at a time. Kagome asks if this was driving out their souls and purifying them, and Sango says Midoriko could do that with literally ANYTHING, not just youkai. She lists off the things in the world that had four souls Midoriko could purify; humans, animals, trees, and rocks. One of these things is not like the others, and it's confusing to my stupid Western brain. Kagome, however, is more alarmed at the fact that Sango said that there are four souls, or SHIKON.

Miroku begins to exposit on the Shinto mode of thought around "Shikon", which is made up of Ara-mitama, Nigi-mitama, Kushi-mitama, and Saki-mitama, coming together to form one whole spirit that lives in the heart. Sango, Kagome and Shippou were staring at Miroku before, but it's nothing to how Inuyasha is looking downright lost at Miroku in the next panel as he continues to drone on about what each of these "mitamas" mean. They are courage, kinship, wisdom, and love respectively, maintaining human nature between all of them.

Y'all for real right now? I'm surprised he even had to explain this, what with the culture being STEEPED in this kind of lore and everything.

Inuyasha leans toward Miroku expectantly, asking him to go on, and Miroku tells him simply that if one does evil, their shikon falls down into evil. Sweatdropping all over the place, Inuyasha is speechless for a moment, before exploding that Miroku should stop changing things around. Miroku calmly asks Inuyasha if he should start his explanation all over again, but Sango cuts him off to condense it into the statement that souls can become either good or evil, depending on one's actions.

Once Miroku concurs with this, bowing his head, Sango continues her story about super-priestess Midoriko, who exorcised shikon and had a LOT of experience transforming youkai powers to nothing. They, in turn were afraid of Midoriko, and started waiting around corners and in back alleys to shank her. Or trees to bite her eyeless face off. But they were never able to get the jump on her in any way, because they all ended up being purified.

So, they decided they needed a soul of massive evil in order to take on her gargantuan spiritual powers. Kagome understands at this point why the youkai fused, but asks how. Since they're sitting on the ground due to Sango's healing needs, Sango is able to lean forward and point out something on the bottom of the mummy that no one noticed before. One more feature that Kagome's eyes widen at.

Kagome asks if that is also a human over a close-up on the face, and Sango answers by telling her that there was a man who secretly loved Midoriko, and this weakness allowed the youkai to take possession of him. Using an evil human heart as an anchor is apparently the easiest way to allow the youkai to merge, so that's how it happened. Kagome has a revelatory look on her face, because she seems to have heard this story before. Inuyasha is speechless again, looking just as enlightened as she, but Miroku has a somewhat dark look as he says Inuyasha's name.

He's the one to say out loud that this story sounds a lot like that of Naraku, bearing a strong resemblance to the tale of the wild-thief Onigumo who submitted his body to youkai, allowing Naraku to rise in their place. This is news to Sango, and she begins to ask for more details on Naraku's story, but Inuyasha encourages her to go on, wanting to know if the priestess won or lost against these youkai. He's staring up at the shadowed face of the mummy.

EPIC. Can you draw out THIS manga RT? I would really like to see this whole situation fleshed out in more detail. It's so BOSS.

Midoriko looks like she's being impaled by a tentacle, and where have we seen that noise before, as Sango says it seemed like Midoriko's own soul was absorbed. At the moment that happened, Midoriko gathered the last of her power and seized the soul of the youkai. Her own soul was taken into the mix and forced from her body, killing both her and the youkai with a blast from both her front and back.

Her heart popped out of there too?

Metal.

Sango says that even though both bodies were destroyed and abandoned, the battle between Midoriko and the youkai in the jewel continues. Kagome looks bewildered by this, but Sango goes on, telling her that it seems the person who holds the jewel tends to get better or worse depending upon their own soul, purified if good, corrupted even more if evil. Hundreds of years later, the jewel has passed between numerous humans and youkai on several occasions, and her grandfather managed to bring it back to the exterminator's village. Kagome repeats the words "brought back" like a question, and Sango elaborates that he got it on an extermination mission, and died from the wounds he got in the fight soon after.

By the time it got to him and the village, though, it was already corrupted badly. Inuyasha automatically makes the connection to how Kikyou came by the jewel to purify it. Kagome seems to have come to the same conclusion, and taken it a step further by suggesting tentatively that because Kikyou purified the jewel, Naraku was born. Miroku agrees with this, stating that Naraku wanted the jewel corrupted, and wanted to corrupt Kikyou's heart with hatred so he could suck up malicious blood with the Shikon no Tama. Sango says that would mean the cycle starts all over again.

Kagome thinks about how Kikyou died holding the Shikon no Tama, going to her funeral pyre with it, and that SHOULD have ended the cycle entirely. Keyword "should". She looks somewhat guilty when she realizes that it managed to make it's way back in time with her.

Inuyasha ain't nobody's patsy, you hear???

So, what did I think of this chapter overall? First let me express how difficult it was to choose certain panels to feature in this review. This whole chapter was downright BEAUTIFUL. There were a couple I could have left out, but for the most part I really had to hold myself back from putting nearly every single page on here without so much interjection. Not just the art, either, but the way the story was told was so natural and believable - this is a legend passed down from generation to generation, and it showed. From the little detail about how long the battle took to, well, what I have to jump to next.

I made fun of Midoriko not having eyes here, but in reality, it serves the tone of the story as Sango tells it very well. This was so long before our current tale that no one in that cave could know what Midoriko looked like, and so her most identifiable features, those windows to the soul so to speak, aren't filled in. They are as vague as the scant information that makes up her legend, and seeing this nondescript individual battling a giant monster in such a legendary sense adds a sort of mystery and awe to the whole thing. Not to mention all the creative ways RT came up with to avoid showing key features of Midoriko is to be applauded. Well done.

I'm side-eyeing Miroku's explanation of Shikon, though. Not because it's so prevalent throughout Japanese culture, mind you, because my culture has a lot of Christianity built into it and I couldn't tell you anything specific about the Bible, so that's not all that unbelievable to me. The unbelievable part is that Inuyasha, Kagome and Shippou were so confused by it. It's actually not that difficult of a concept to understand; four attributes to a spirit that can fluctuate and depending on their balance affect the whole state of the soul doesn't take a lot of brain power to absorb. I'm not sure who RT was trying to appeal to with this assurance that it's okay if you don't get it, because your favorite characters don't either, but it's a little on the strange side of pandering.

What I'M struggling to understand is the definition of good and evil here. We begin with a simple base idea that, depending on the balance of the four essential souls, a spirit can become good or evil. According to Sango's story, youkai are subject to this as well, because this is how Midoriko vanquished them, by changing up the balance of these souls, right? But the same thing wouldn't vanquish a human; purifying them just makes them better people instead of destroying them altogether. Why? Because youkai are born of suffering and all those negative nasty things surrounding humans? But we know that's not true, because Shippou appears to have been born like any human would have, and he's also not a monster hungry for blood. But because he's a youkai, he would be disappeared as well? Because youkai are just naturally in a state of evil no matter what good characteristics they exhibit? Like that man who secretly loved Midoriko. Was it the love itself that was weak/evil or was he taking it too far; obsessed with this woman to an extent that he would hurt others in order to be with her? What do these terms of good and evil mean if they're only tied to action or actor when it's convenient?

There's something inherently unfair to this weird little system that I'm having trouble wrapping my brain around, and I'll probably have even more of that trouble when I reach a certain very popular arc in the future. Stay tuned for that huge nuclear meltdown.

For now, I'll just focus on Inuyasha's little declaration at the end as another really solid point to this chapter. However the mechanics of the Shikon no Tama function, it really comes down to the fact that the jewel has the effect of magnifying the basic nature of a person, and that leads to it recreating the circumstances of conflict under which it was manifested. I love how Inuyasha interprets that as conscious manipulation and because he's so hard-headed and contrary, he refuses to play along with it. I can think of no other thing that's more "Inuyasha" than trying to stick it to someone or something telling him what to do.

Fuck you, Shikon no Tama! You're not Inuyasha's REAL dad!