The Girls of Inuyasha: Yura of the Hair

Actually, her full title is Yura of the Demon Hair, and she's quite the little tart. She's one of the few girls in this story who shows more skin than Kagome, and she's pretty cute. If only she didn't take such delight in killing people...

Yura looks to be in her mid-twenties, but she's much older than that. She has been around long enough to make a comment about how long it's been since the magic jewel was around. It was gone for fifty years, so she's at least that old and probably a good bit older than that. Still, she looks good with her short hair and her sleeveless, short-skirted dress, with its plunging neckline.

She has the ability to spread strong, almost invisible, hairs to great lengths. She uses it to ensnare and even to kill her opponents. She can also string up her victims and control them, much the way a puppeteer controls his puppets. When she wants to she can send more hair, in thick locks to bind and manipulate, and she lives in a great ball of hair, surrounded by the skulls of her victims. She collects the heads of the people she kills, and the hair that they have, and she is fascinated by Inuyasha's "pretty, silver hair".

She is quite a challenge for Inuyasha and Kagome. She comes along at a point when they're just getting to know each other. Kagome has just decided that it's not worth the effort to put up with Inuyasha's rudeness and she decides to go home. She has a confrontation with Yura at the well and falls in while trying not to be decapitated by Yura. She does, of course, get home this way and would have had to stay there, but Inuyasha brings her back and together they defeat Yura.

They confront Yura at her lair and, while Yura is distracted with trying to take Inuyasha's head, Kagome finds the key to Yura's destruction. It turns out that Yura was just a hair comb after all. Once the comb was destroyed, Yura vanished and all was well in the world again. Inuyasha has learned that he needs Kagome and Kagome has learned that there is great evil in this feudal-era Japan that she can help to overcome. She stays and helps Inuyasha find the shards of the jewel and, even though she is often angry with him, she begins to see through his veil of toughness and insensitivity.

This is not the last time that Kagome will go home in a huff, but it may be the most important, as far as the story is concerned. Being a half-demon, Inuyasha has a very long life and he might well have gone on to find the shards of the jewel without Kagome's help. That is, until he met up with the main bad guy. This is a demon who is very powerful and Inuyasha might not have been able to survive the conflict without Kagome's help. Yura has played an important part in bringing these two together, in a way that would not have happened without her.