Inuyasha Manga: 309 Choice

I'm personally feeling a little better about my choices nowadays. For a while there, it looked like I would have to hold my nose and take a bite of a shit-sandwich to avoid my home being flooded with toxic waste again, but now I'm a little more optimistic. Sure, the shit-sandwich has been swapped out for a questionable Kraft mac n' cheese, but at least it seems edible. I'm even kind of looking forward to it, in a weird way. There's a lot to like about it, despite its shortcomings, and the youth is really enthused, so you can't go wrong with that. I would be a little more happy if the mac n' cheese weren't a fucking COP, but if I've learned anything in this life, it's that you should count you're blessings when you're not forced to eat a shit-sandwich.

Totes not talking about anything in particular, by the way...

She's looking real damp right now. I hope her glaze isn't cracked.

The child shikigami reiterate the event immediately following the collapse of Mt. Hakurei, when Kikyou's chest was pierced by Naraku's poisonous tentacles, and she was shoved off the cliff into a river of miasma. According to them, it was specifically BECAUSE her body is made from holy bones and burial soil that it didn't dissolve in the miasma, but the miasma permeated her body through the wounds inflicted by Naraku's tentacles, and it continues to decay as her wounds remain open. An illustration of her in the pool, but with miasma pouring from a deep crack in her chest and shoulder, is shown, though that seems to be giving a visual element to something that was invisible in the previous panels. 

Dispassionately, the shikigami tell Kagome that the only one who can save Kikyou is her.

This is even weirder when you remember that they share a soul, essentially.

Kagome thinks she understands now why the shikigami children asked her to choose, and so she haltingly asks how she should go about saving Kikyou. Oddly, the kiddos are speechless for a moment, one of them asking for confirmation that this means Kagome is agreeing to save Kikyou. Kagome stutters that this should be obvious - if it's the case that only she can save Kikyou, she's ready to do it. The shikigami children say that Kagome's touch alone is enough to purify the miasma, so Kagome takes off her backpack to set it aside with an affirmation, and lowers her legs into the pool. She's immediately struck by how PAINFUL the water is. That... can't be good.

The second thing she notices is that on closer inspection, she can see miasma leaking out from under Kikyou's collar. As she moves to touch the place where it's seeping into the surrounding water, Kagome is pitched into the water with Kikyou. 

This pool seems a lot deeper than it did a moment ago. And that's not all - Kagome looks around and finds that a dark, oily substance has saturated the water around them, and Kagome thinks this might be miasma dissolved in the pool. This is exactly the reason why pools are chlorinated these days. Kagome is in a little disbelief that all of this could have come from Kikyou's body. Looking back at Kikyou and seeing the trickle of miasma still leaking out from under her collar, Kagome mentally apologizes to her before pushing aside the cloth to get a better look at the damage. 

You think the pity is why Kikyou might have been a little hesitant to ask for help directly?

They appear to be sinking even further into what is starting to strike me as a hammer-space of a pool, because it's completely dark in the next panel. It's this darkness that appears to allow Kagome to see the sparkle of something light above them and look up, reaching out a hand in confusion for an advancing cloud of something descending through the water toward her. She catches it in her hand, and before she can guess what it is for herself, the shikigami on the edge of the pool explain that this is Kikyou's burial soil, and Kagome's hand has at this moment purified it. Must have been fairly mica-rich soil in order to be sparkling that way before it touched Kagome, then...

Kagome has been holding her breath for an AWFULLY long time, hasn't she??

Anyway, the Shikigami, somehow communicating perfectly clearly through the water at Kagome, instruct her to press the purified soil into the wound in Kikyou's chest. Kagome affirms her understanding of this command and proceeds to push the clump of soil in her hand into Kikyou's cracked flesh. It's not as easy as it sounds.

Encountering a little resistance there.

Kagome notes that the miasma in Kikyou's body is being pushed out by the burial soil she's cramming in the wound, but she squeezes her eyes shut, experiencing some more pain herself. She opens her eyes again to find, to her surprise somehow, that the wound she was filling with soil has almost closed up as the miasma continues to be forced out of Kikyou's unconscious form. This visible result of her efforts inspires Kagome to push all the harder, encouraging herself to go for it, until there is no more poison or wound to heal. 

With the knowledge that the water is cleaned and the miasma purified, Kagome thanks goodness before literally PASSING OUT in the pool, still underwater. Luckily for her, this is the moment Kikyou opens HER eyes, and she doesn't have the burden of lungs in this situation. 

Cut to a view of treetops and sky from the ground, and Kagomer blearily opening her eyes, groaning. She's lying supine in the dirt, a short distance from her backpack, dazed. She recovers her wits enough to prop herself on her elbows and look around, to see Kikyou standing with her back turned, between her little shikigami. Kagome calls out to her, and she looks over her shoulder.

Lol, wut?

Kagome has a similar reaction to the question, asking hesitantly if KIKYOU wasn't the one who lead her here. She's giving her double the benefit of the doubt here, assuming that Kikyou somehow thinks she just stumbled across her and has some unfathomable motivations for curing her. Kikyou admits indirectly that she DID indeed summon Kagome, but says that Kagome should have made a choice herself whether to help her or not. I wouldn't call that a choice so much as a moral test... In lieu of a response from Kagome, Kikyou says she won't thank Kagome, since it was entirely her own choice.

Understandably, this increases Kagome's confusion, and adds to it a hefty amount of indignity. Fuming and already done with this shit, Kagome thinks that Kikyou has already regained her characteristic "directness". Yeah, she's got LOADS of direct ways to make you feel like garbage, clearly.

Kikyou announces that Inuyasha will be arriving soon, looking for Kagome, then starts walking off to yet another confused noise from Kagome. Kagome regains her tongue again to demand to know where Kikyou is headed, asking if she's not going to meet with Inuyasha. Kikyou says that she's going to stay in hiding for just a bit longer, given she has to build back up her power. Odd that this is a requirement before meeting with Inuyasha, isn't it? All Kagome can think is that Inuyasha wants to meet with Kikyou regardless, and how annoying that is. 

Meanwhile, as she and her shikigami amble off, Kikyou muses on how there was no doubt at all in Kagome's heart, knowing that because the crack in her body would not have been mended if doubt had been present. 

Can Kikyou produce her own body heat? Or is she perpetually cold, being ceramic in composition?

So, what did I think of this chapter overall? It's really a wonder Kagome didn't drown being under water as long as she was, and nasty toxic water to boot. But I'm willing to chalk that up to magic, given that the pool seemed to vary in depth - it rather struck me as more of a different dimension that slowed the worsening of Kikyou's condition. It looked as though it kept her in a sort of stasis and immobile so she wasn't overtaxing her injured body.

Which again just makes me conscious of the total lack of discussion on HOW MUCH power these stunts require. If the twin shikigami are relatively low-energy magics, which Joseph pointed out on the previous chapter's recap and review (go and check out that short discussion in the comments if you've got a moment), creating a stasis pool for oneself HAS to be a bit more complex. Kikyou expresses the need to build up her power again at the end of the chapter, so perhaps she burned through her reserves fairly quickly in order to sustain herself until help arrived, but I'm not entirely sure how viable that hypothesis is. We just don't have a good idea how much power anything Kikyou does takes. 

Speaking of the help Kikyou was waiting for, way to bite the hand that feeds you, girl! Kikyou's mild hostility is frustrating here, because she could have asked a much more relevant question about what led Kagome to be so sure of helping her, considering her thoughts on the last page. She could have asked instead about why Kagome had no doubt. As we have discussed on the blog before, the current entity that we call "Kikyou" is actually the collection of negative and hateful feelings she had for Inuyasha at the moment of her death. She tries to get beyond those, but her development in that regard is limited, given that time does not have an effect on her, either physically or mentally. To some extent, it's expected that she would have a hard time understanding Kagome's sense of compassion and empathy for her, because she just... DOESN'T feel those things and CAN'T.

But focusing on this "choice" aspect doesn't give that impression. Kikyou refusing to thank Kagome because of her "choice" to help just makes Kikyou seem petulant and aggrieved rather than genuinely perplexed about the motivations behind her rescue. It makes the whole thing little more than a play on this "love triangle" angle that seems to play well with the audience rather than the more nuanced and interesting conversation that COULD be had between these characters about their experiences or motivations. 

At least Kikyou bowing out before Inuyasha arrives makes a bit of sense to me. Again, Kikyou's emotions regarding Inuyasha are very negative, though she has awareness that Naraku is really to blame for her death. Her instinct WOULD be to hide away and grow her power before confronting someone that she will always, to some degree, be suspicious of. She's still trying to play that long game, even if she necessarily views an ally as an enemy in a lot of respects.

It's just a shame that Kagome has to be left standing there feeling like shit on all sides at the end of this.