Shippo

Shippo is an orphaned young fox demon, age seven, who attempts to steal the Shikon Jewel from InuYasha and Kagome, wanting to become stronger and avenge his father's death. Though his plan fails, InuYasha and Kagome aid him after hearing his story, and he becomes their companion for the rest of the series.

Shippo normally appears to be a young boy with certain fox-like features: his legs, feet, ears, and tail. He can shape-shift, but his other forms (such as a large pink flying balloon) are temporary and often ineffective, usually given away by his lingering fox tailand and 2 5'' in height. He can also create illusory duplicates of himself, as well as weak fox-fire magic and toy-based tricks such as his giant spinning top attack. Naively observant, he often directs cheeky comments to InuYasha, earning a smack on the head. To Kagome, he is the child she would like to have. To Miroku and Sango, he is the friend they always needed. To Kirara, he is a playmate she likes to have. To Inuyasha, he is the little brother he never wanted in the first place. Because of his small size, Shippo often rides on Kirara or the shoulders of others. His actual age is never stated in the series; according to the official InuYasha guide by Rumiko Takahashi, his appearance is equivalent to that of a seven-year-old boy.^[1] He often bears crushes toward the little girls in the village and strives to protect and impress them, and usually works; Kagome believes Shippo has picked up some of Miroku's habits. Though he is the weakest member of InuYasha's group, Shippo gradually becomes braver during the series and is dedicated to his friends. Despite InuYasha's attempt to stop Shippo from joining their final battle against Naraku, Shippo goes anyway in hopes of helping his friends in the ways that he can. At the end of the Final Act, Shippo resides in Kaede's village, but often leaves to train and take the kitsune demon examination.

Sango

Sango is a demon slayer, aged sixteen, 5 9'' in height, who hails from a village of professional demon slayers. Of her broad repertoire of tools and tricks for fighting demons, Sango's most powerful weapon is the Hiraikotsu (飛来骨^?), a massive boomerang made of purified demon bones. Her other weapons include a concealed sword and poisons. She is accompanied by the demon cat Kirara, who accompanies Sango into battle.

Sango is first seen when she and her family and companions were on a mission to slay an evil demon, while another demon had actually possessed the lord of the castle. The demon possessing the lord ends up controlling Kohaku, Sango's younger brother, and causes him to slay all the demon slayers except Sango. Realizing a demon was possessing both the lord and Kohaku, Sango attempts to attack the lord, but she and Kohaku are shot by the lord's retainers and assumed to be dead and buried at the orders of the lord's son, Kagewaki Hitomi. Naraku later tricks Sango into killing InuYasha by deeming him responsible for her village's destruction. When the plot fails and Sango joins InuYasha's group, Naraku revives Kohaku, controlling him as a pawn to manipulate Sango's emotions. While Sango seeks revenge against Naraku, her primary goal is to rescue Kohaku from Naraku's influence and save his life.

Sango is often the victim of Miroku's lecherous tendencies and gives him a loud slap for it, though she eventually falls in love with him. While she accepts Miroku's proposal of marriage, she requests that Miroku stop his lecherous actions and not to flirt either. He gradually acquieses to her request, focusing his attention on her exclusively. At the end of series, when Miroku loses his Wind Tunnel, Sango marries Miroku, using the next three years with Miroku and form a family with a pair of twin girls and a baby boy. The two move into a larger home in Kaede's village.

Miroku

Miroku is a Bhikkhu Buddhist, lecherous monk, age eighteen, who travels the countryside performing spiritual services such as exorcisms and demon exterminations, although sometimes he deliberately falsifies these to earn comfortable rewards. He is 5 11'' in height. Miroku can attack enemies with his holy staff (used as a medium for barriers) and sutra scrolls, but his greatest weapon is the Wind Tunnel (風穴 Kazaana^?) embedded in the palm of his right hand - which is actually a hereditary curse originally inflicted upon his grandfather by Naraku. Though the Wind Tunnel is extremely powerful because it can suck in almost anything in its path, it grows larger over time and with continuous use; it will eventually consume Miroku, as it consumed his grandfather, Miyatsu, and his father. Miroku is able to seal up his wind tunnel with the prayer beads that are wound around his arm, but the curse can only be broken by killing Naraku. However, Naraku can also remove the curse to make a time when he's faked his death seem authentic, and place it back on, as seen in the second movie.

Miroku first meets InuYasha by stealing the Shikon Jewel, causing them to fight one another until Kagome leaps between them. After Miroku explains his situation, Kagome asks him to join her and InuYasha, given their mutual goal of wishing to destroy Naraku. He reluctantly complies, though he soon becomes one of InuYasha's most trusted companions. However, Miroku remains notorious for his recurring lechery, usually manifesting as shameless flattery, semi-surreptitious groping, and asking every woman he meets to bear him a child, except for Sango, who eventually does. While he learned these bad habits from the monk Mushin, who raised him after his father was engulfed into his own wind tunnel, Miroku also has the more serious motive of wanting an heir to follow him if he dies without defeating Naraku.

Over time, Miroku's feelings mature and he begins focusing his affections more exclusively on Sango. However, because of his love for her, he fears that he cannot love her as an ordinary woman and hopes that if his Wind Tunnel consumes him, she will not die alongside him. He later proposes to her (though in a bit unothodox manner), which she accepts, though their relationship takes longer to solidify since Miroku is still prone to flirting with other girls, but expresses jealousy when other men act the same way towards Sango. When Naraku is finally killed near the end of the series, Miroku's Wind Tunnel disappears, freeing him from the curse. In the end of the Final Act, Miroku marries Sango and has three children with her, twin girls and a boy. He supports his family financially by exorcising demons with InuYasha; however, according to Inuyasha, the payments he asks for a little more than what he deserves ("You were always greedy, but this is a whole new level."), but Miroku defends this as he has to provide for a family.

Kagome Higurashi

Kagome Higurashi is the female protagonist and narrator of the series. She is a kind and warm-hearted girl. She goes out of her way to help people, and teaches Inuyasha to display kindness. She invited Miroku, Shippo, Sango, and even Kagura to join her and Inuyasha on the quest to collect the jewel shards and defeat Naraku. She is extremely tolerant in dealing with Inuyasha's pettiness, though the two argue quite a bit. Her kind attitude resulted in some men (Koga, Hojo etc.) strongly falling romantically in love with her. Her heart is pure, although a speck of darkness is found later in the series that is caused by her jealousy of the priestess Kikyo, who Inuyasha loved more than Kagome at the time. Despite this, Kagome always saved and showed kindness to Kikyo when given the chance. She becomes much more strong and skilled in archery as the series progresses, and eventually learns to master her immensely strong spiritual powers.

Aged fifteen at the start of the series, she is a middle-school student born in the spring of 2002 in modern Japan. Kagome is 5 8'' in height. She is the reincarnation of the deceased (and later reawakened) priestess Kikyo. Kagome has the Sacred Jewel of Four Spirits unknowingly hidden inside her body until her fifteenth birthday, when a demon pulls her into the Bone Eater's Well at her family's shrine and takes her five hundred years back through time.

They emerge in the Feudal Era about fifty years after Kikyo's death, where the demon tears the Jewel from Kagome's body. She releases InuYasha from his seal, and he defeats the demon, but after the awakening murder, attempts to slaughter Kagome for the Jewel. Kaede, Kikyo's younger sister, uses her great spiritual power to force a necklace onto InuYasha, so InuYasha and Kagome are bound by the artifact. The Jewel's power proves to be a very strong lure for evil. When the Crow Demon seizes the Sacred Jewel, Kagome attempts to stop it with a longbow and arrow, but in doing so, accidentally shatters the jewel into numerous fragments that disperse throughout Japan. She agrees to help find them, as she can sense the presence of nearby shards, and InuYasha comes along as protector and companion (and, ostensibly, so he can steal the jewel from her when it's complete, though he makes no secret of this).

As the series progresses, she begins to deeply fall in love with InuYasha, and finds herself competing with the revived Kikyo for his romantic love and affections, on top of finding herself trapped in the middle of a very decision that could make or break the world that she knows and love, with just one final wish, along with the help of Inuyasha by her side, Kagome wishes away the jewel saving the world around and is sent back to her own time. Three years later, eighteen-year old Kagome returns to the Feudal Era after completing her High School years and meets up with InuYasha once again. As a result of that, she marries InuYasha.

Inuyasha

Inuyasha is the male protagonist of the series. His exact age is unknown, but in the third movie, Swords of an Honorable Ruler, it is revealed that he is over 200 years old, despite having the appearance of a teenager. Born to a dog-demon father and a human mother, Inuyasha is a dog demon/human hybrid who initially wanted to use the enormous power of the Sacred Jewel of Four Souls to become a full-fledged demon, like his older half-brother, Sesshomaru. Inuyasha is 5 11'' in height. Fifty years prior to the main era of the storyline, though, Inuyasha fell in love with the priestess Kikyo, who was given the task to protect the jewel. Inuyasha changed his mind and instead, wanted to use the Jewel of Four Souls to become a human so that he could live with her, but, Naraku (an evil half demon) manipulated the both of them into believing they had been betrayed by one another. Being a shape-shifter, he used Inuyasha's appearance to deceive and attack kikyo. Before Kikyo died, however, she shot the real Inuyasha with a sealing arrow that sealed him to the Sacred Tree of Ages. Inuyasha remained there for fifty years, until Kagome Higurashi (Kikyo's modern-day reincarnation) pulled out the arrow and broke the seal (something she did only as a last resort to save some villagers from a demon centipede).

A few days later, in an attempt to stop a crow demon who escaped with the Sacred Jewel (which had previously been embedded in Kagome's body), Kagome shot an arrow at it and accidentally shattered the Jewel into thousands of fragments that scattered across Feudal Japan. Inuyasha and Kagome then travel together to retrieve its shards. At first, he is hostile and uncooperative but Kikyo's younger sister, Kaede, the priestess of the village, gives Kagome a necklace that restrains Inuyasha from trying to steal the Sacred Jewel. Whenever Kagome gives the simple command "Sit!", Inuyasha is forcibly pulled face-first to the ground due to the strong spiritual power the unbreakable necklace contains. In the beginning, Inuyasha was cold and aloof towards Kagome, merely seeing her as means of recollecting the jewel fragments. As the story progressed, however, he begins to fall in love with Kagome, and yet is strained by the unexpected reawakening of Kikyo by another demon. Throughout the series, his feelings for Kagome become undeniable (also obvious to his friends and enemies who often point this out), but at the same time he can't get over Kikyo, causing some indecisive behaviour from him.

He is constantly rude and prone to bursts of violence in retaliation to the slightest thing that upsets him. He gets along with his fellow companions Shippo, Miroku, and Sango; however, he yells at Shippo, for his naive comments, and Miroku, for his lecherous tendencies. He has a great hatred for Naraku because of the trap he ensnared him and Kikyo in, wishing to kill him and avenge her. Due to the beads of subjegation, Inuyasha fears Kagome's anger, which will cause her to give possibly several "Sit" commands.

Eventually, Kikyo finally passes away (despite Kagome's best efforts to save her) and ascends to Nirvana. During this scene Inuyasha cries over her and kisses her as a last farewell. As the series progresses, InuYasha falls completely in love with Kagome, realizing that she is the reason he is no longer lonely. In the anime adaptation, they share a kiss. After Kagome wishes the jewel away with him at her side, they are separated for three years. However, Inuyasha and Kagome are eventually reunited, and later married.

The name Inuyasha means "Dog Yaksha". Historical Japanese figures featured names ending in "yasha" (夜叉), a non-native term (Chinese characters meaning here is phonetic and gibberish) borrowed from Chinese in turn phonetically borrowed from Sanskrit.