Okay, I'm a bit behind on my manga reading, and I somehow managed to miss the fact, when I bought it, that volume 56 was the last volume of Inu-Yasha. I've been reading this manga for *years*!
It's sort of a shonen manga, in that there's a lot of fighting and powering up, etc. But there are the shoujo aspects of the love story and the emotions.
The basic set up is that a girl from modern day Tokyo gets sucked through a well into ancient Japan. There, she meets a half-demon named Inu-Yasha. Inu-Yasha was cursed, fifty years before by the woman that he loved. Kagome winds up bringing a very powerful demonic object back with her into the ancient time, and this jewel, the Shikon jewel, sets off a series of demon wars. All of it leading up to a battle with the major villain named Naraku. It's all fairly typical shonen stuff. Fight, fight, get more power, yadda.
The thing that I love is the relationships. All of the characters are very human, even the ones that are demons. You have Inu-Yasha, who is half human but who has rejected his humanity in order to try and find a place and survive amongst the demons. But of course neither the humans nor the demons will fully accept him and so he is always alone. Kagome, a fairly normal middle school student who is thrust into a time and place she doesn't understand, trapped with a boy who hates her (Inu-Yasha). There's Miroku, a Buddhist monk who seems to only be a perv, but in reality is under a terrible curse and so lives his life as if there's no tomorrow.
Sango, a woman who comes from a demon hunting clan. She has to live with the fact that her younger brother murdered their entire family as she hunts the demon that she blames for it all.
Sesshomaru, Inu-Yasha's full demon older half-brother, who hates all humans and is driven to claim what their father left for Inu-Yasha, since as the oldest and only legitimate son, the inheritance should be his.
I'll admit that I love Sesshomaru the best. His journey, to me, is the most interesting. He goes from being a fairly one dimensional guy who's there to beat up his baby brother because daddy loved Inu-chan best to slowly finding his own heart because of a single act of kindness shown to him by a little girl who had nothing.
I'm going to miss this manga!
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