The Girls of Inuyasha: Kaede

We meet Kaede at the very beginning, just after her older sister, Kikyo. She has a bandage over one eye, but it's not clear whether this is from an injury sustained during Inuyasha's attack of the village in his attempt to steal the Jewel of the Four Souls, or if there was some other cause. We do know that it's not a minor injury though, because the next time we see her she is much older and she wears a patch over this eye.

In the introductory chapter, she is very young, maybe ten years old or maybe less. We see her as a child only a couple of times after that, in flashbacks. For most of the series she is an older woman, at or near sixty years. In feudal Japan this was old indeed. With dozens of warlords constantly attacking each other in hopes of expanding their own territories there were battles raging constantly. People died as a direct result of being in combat, but also just from being too close to the action, or from disease and famine that often accompanies warfare. To have escaped death for so long was quite remarkable. But then, Kaede is a remarkable woman.

She had apparently studied under her sister and became the village priestess sometime after Kikyo died. She holds that post when we see her again, fifty years later. She has learned much about the world and its denizens, both demon and human, and has a good bit of common sense about her. If she holds any grudge towards Inuyasha she hides it well. It is her knowledge and assistance that is often the answer to some dilemma, and she doesn't withhold it. She is frequently the nurse for one or another of our heroes, including Inuyasha himself.

She is accomplished in the mystic arts, though maybe not as strong in them as her sister was, and she is an archer. She is not afraid to go on long journeys into danger, if she feels that her skills are needed, though she will often ride a horse, rather than try to walk as most people do. She is able to see things that normal people don't see, just as Kiyko and Kagome can, and she is able to guess correctly at some things that even she cannot see. Most villages that we see have a leader, a headman, in charge and all of the villagers defer to him. The village Kaede lives in doesn't seem to have one, so I believe that she takes this role in her village. Being a priestess, she is the spiritual leader, so maybe she is the leader in other ways as well.

We never get to see what it was like for her as a young woman. She might have been in love once and raised a family, but we don't know. She is a young girl and then an old woman and we never see her as anything in between. At any rate, she never mentions any family except Kikyo, so it's possible that she never allowed herself the luxury of falling in love. Maybe it was the supposed betrayal of Kikyo by Inuyasha that kept her from allowing anyone into her heart, or maybe there was someone and she lost him in the war that raged all around her and the memory is too painful for her to speak of it.

I believe that the former possibility that is the more likely because Kaede seems to be a no nonsense type of person. She can be brutally honest when she is talking to Inuyasha and the others, if she feels that it is the best way to get her point across, and she doesn't shy away from speaking of her sister, or her sister's death, an event which apparently left her to grow up as an orphan. I don't think she would have avoided speaking of anyone else dear to her, if such a person had ever existed.

I have to say that I like Kaede. In fact, I like her more than I like her sister. Even though we never see her as a pretty woman, there is compassion and a selflessness to her that makes her very worthy of friendship and respect.