inuyasha

InuYasha (犬夜叉?), full title InuYasha, a Feudal Fairy Tale (戦国御伽草子 犬夜叉, Sengoku Otogizōshi InuYasha?, lit. "Warring-States Fairy-Tale Book: InuYasha") (romanized as INUYASHA), is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Rumiko Takahashi. It premiered in Weekly Shōnen Sunday on November 13, 1996 and concluded on June 18, 2008. The series follows a time-traveling high school student, a half-demon, a lecherous monk, a fox demon, a demon slayer, and a nekomata during the Sengoku period as they seek to find all the fragments of the Jewel of Four Souls and to keep them out of the hands of evildoers, especially Naraku.

The manga was adapted into a 167 episode anime series produced by Sunrise. Masashi Ikeda directed the first forty-four episodes, while Yasunao Aoki directed the remainder of the series. InuYasha premiered on Yomiuri TV in Japan on October 16, 2000 and ran until September 13, 2004. The television run of the anime ceased without a conclusion to the story. In 2009, the producers announced that a second anime series was in production to animate the ending of the manga series. In 2002, the manga won the Shogakukan Manga Award for best shōnen title of the year.[1] InuYasha was ranked twenty by TV Asahi of the 100 best anime series in 2006 (based on an online survey in the country.)



Written by Rumiko Takahashi, InuYasha premiered in Japan in Shōnen Sunday on November 13, 1996 and concluded June 18, 2008. The chapters are also being published by Shogakukan in 56 collected volumes, with the first volume released in May 1997, and the last released in February 2009.

Viz Media licensed the series for an English translated release in North America. The first volume was released in March 1998. At the time, manga was normally published "flipped"--that is, printed in exact reverse order-- to conform to the American convention of reading books from left to right. This resulted in the individual pages being mirrored from the original, so the images seen are also mirrored leaving right-handed characters appearing to be left-handed. Though Viz has since stopped flipping their manga releases, as InuYasha was already well into printing by the time this change was made, it continues to be released in the flipped format. New volumes of the series are released monthly, and as of July 14, 2009, 38 volumes have been released in North America.

Viz Media is also releasing a separate series of "manga" volumes, called "ani-manga", which are derived from the anime episodes using colored frames from colored frames. These volumes are slightly smaller than the regular manga volumes, are oriented in the Japanese tradition of right to left, feature new covers with higher quality pages, and a higher price point versus the regular volumes. Each ani-manga volume is arranged into chapters that correspond to the anime episodes rather than the manga.