Anime Monster Reviews:
Favorite Ushio and Tora Yokai

Written by Jonathan Wojcik

We previously looked at a handful of the best monsters from Inuyasha, because Inuyasha was at one time practically "the" anime, but there are many who consider Ushio and Tora to be a superior version of basically the same core thrust, which is that an ancient malevolent furry (Tora) got impaled for centuries on a magical spear by a priest until the descendant of that priest (Ushio) had to free the furry to help fight other monsters, and they pretend to hate each other but steadily develop a deep and powerful bond over the course of a quest to save the world from an even ancienter, malevolenter furry.

It doesn't have the romance angle of Inuyasha (not "officially," anyway), but yeah, it's point-for-point the same elevator pitch, except that the furry in this case is a tiger guy, rather than a dog guy, significantly more bloodthirsty, and never fully loses that delightful "I wish I could be eating your pathetic human flesh and I totally will if I get the chance, honest, I'm really gonna this time, I really do hate you all" edge to his character. That, and as dismissive as I may have sounded by boiling him down to "a furry," an anime cat-person has literally no business looking this goddamn awesome.

Genuinely, I dare you to name for me a single anime protagonist at all that looks sicker and radder than this insane Todd Mcfarlane Go Nagai looking hair metal demon, which, as a tiger-themed Japanese monster, is of course also capable of generating and controlling lightning.

With all due respect to Rumiko Takahashi - who started Inuyasha a full four years after this series was published, mind you - I can much more easily accept that Tora has actually killed and eaten people than I can Inuyasha, and that Tora could probably also eat Inuyasha, and probably also most other characters you can think of provided they are made of any remotely edible material. Look at him. This is what an electric guitar riff looks like as a person. If you wondered how cool a humanoid mammal has to be for me to care as much as I do about any humanoid or nonhumanoid snail, here you go.

And yes, the series secondary monsters still get even better.

CRITTER SPIRITS

When Tora's prison is unsealed, his awakening attracts a swarm of minor yokai he refers to as the spirits of "bug creatures" and "fish," which certainly do look like both! They come in a lovely variety of mostly eel-shaped entities with various fins, spines, fangs and eyeballs. A couple designs also have arthropod-like limbs, and I'm fond of the one outlier that just looks like a sea urchin flying around with long hairs trailing behind it.

Eventually, the little critter yokais all merge together into one huge, blobby conglomerate that takes on a sort of seahorse-dragon shape, with a pair of reptilian, green eyes and a very unique mouth design: it has long, thin sawtoothed lizard jaws, but the upper jaw also ends in an additional smaller, rounder fanged mouth with a purple tongue, and there's a couple of other tubular outgrowths from the skull sporting more of these smaller maws.

You'll notice I'm using screenshots from the 1990's OVA here, however. In the updated 2010's anime, these spirits have only one or two designs and are depicted in stiff CGI, near-transparent to hide their poor quality. It sucks so much in comparison, I don't have the energy to get you a screenshot to compare with.

STONE EATER

This is the first "monster of the week" villain encountered in the second episode, appearing at first to be just a stone statue of a samurai. But not only can it move, and not only can it sprout fangs, but strange tentacles are able to emerge from its interior, and many pairs of cute, glowing orange eyes are briefly seen in the statue's eye socket! It, too, also looks better in the old OVA, but enough about that, since most of the rest of the things we'll be referring unfortunately appear only in the manga, the newer series or both.

Later, the monster also extends some thicker, armor-plated tentacles ending in clamp-like jaws, with even more eyes inside them! Its signature ability is to turn people to stone with a bite from these appendages, and as the name implies, that's also what it eats! In both the Japanese and English dialog, Stone Eater brags about how it can't wait to enjoy the "crispy and crunchy sounds" as it devours its next victims. So what IS this entity?!

When the statue is destroyed, a pair of absolutely gigantic centipede-like monsters emerge from the building ruins, which...still doesn't answer our question! None of Stone Eater's tentacles are visible here, nor are the many tinier "bugs" implied to inhabit the sculpture. Are those all nested inside of the big myriapods? Are they all just part of the same collective mind? Are they just flexible shape-shifters that can morph whatever rocky and buggy anatomy they need? Tora talks as if he's fairly familiar with this yokai, and still refers to it as a singular being rather than some sort of swarm.

It's such an interesting concept, with so much personality, I kind of wish they had stuck around. Couldn't ONE more evil man-eating monster joined the cast?

FUSUMA

EXQUISITELY terrifying!! This man-eating giant has a humanlike face with sharp teeth and owl-eyes, the top of the head extends into an unpleasantly floppy sausage-like shape and the whole being is made of veiny, translucent, rubbery green flesh so soft and stretchy, he can spread his limbs into massive membranous sheets of jelly to wrap around and suffocate his victims. All pretty bizarre, but what makes him one of the scariest things in the series is the simple fact that he lives in the sky.

Really think about that for a second. It would be frightening no matter his design, yes, but if he looked like a majestic dragon or a giant killer bird or an otherworldly sky-jellyfish he would at least make more logical sense. Instead there's just this massive, gelatinous, distorted old man just...drifting?? Hundreds of feet in the air?! Billowing like a hideous windsock in the freezing, roaring, lonely winds of the upper atmosphere? And every so often, I guess, he gets hungry enough to descend upon some isolated human victim, drag them up into the heavens and just chow down on their flesh like an entire rotisserie chicken. At least, that's what we must presume he did before the invention of aircraft, which evidently now deliver entire buffets to his proverbial doorstep in easy-open pressurized cans. Could a yokai ever possibly be worse?!

KYOUMA

...Viscerally, no. Emotionally, yes. Having all your skin eaten off by a flying jello ghoul is terrible, obviously, but you get more psychological wounds from Kyouma, a pervert yokai born from the soul of a man who resented beautiful women. Traveling through mirrors, we see him manifest a long, stretchy, gooey, reptilian E.T. sort of face to kidnap his chosen target, though his true face can be seen peeking from the folds of this form's putty-like flesh: a bulbous, rubbery yellow head with a huge, circular, blister-like pink eyeball bulging above a toothless, cartoonish black gash of a smile and dozens of wormlike hollow tubes instead of "hair." It's a charmingly goofy, alien sort of design, but the creator fully intended it to faintly evoke reproductive organs without really, totally, explicitly resembling any particular reproductive organs, and I have to say he fully achieved that goal, because I could easily believe this is what some kind of martian monster's dingledongle might very well look like.

It gets worse than that in two ways, also. The first is that, after stripping all her clothes off, he cocoons his captive in the outer layers of his own skin. The second is that, once he's under attack, he defends himself by spewing a swarm of little symbiotic buddies from his various hoses. These are fanged, one-eyed, creamy white, and tadpole-shaped.

Kyouma is defeated fairly quickly, yes, but I feel like there are no winners in this battle. You already lose by having to fight this one at all.

NODOKA

...Which can, possibly, also be said for this briefly encountered creep. Apparently a toad-related yokai, Nodoka takes the form of an old man who looks an awful lot like a more decrepit and miserable Albert Einstein, with unblinking eyes rolled so far back in their sockets that they almost seem devoid of pupils. His hair and his mustache are in tentacle-like greasy locks, we never see if he has any teeth, and he has an extremely long, slimy tongue that never fully retracts into his mouth. He uses this, of course, as a tentacle he wraps around his human prey, and we never see him do it, but he's apparently a brain sucker.

HAKUMEN

This is actually the big bad boss villain for most of the series, but we'll have to talk about her early on to make sense of some of the rest! Hakumen is a horrendously merciless nine tailed fox that seeks to exterminate all other yokai and subjugate all remaining life on Earth. Defeated once before in the ancient past, he unfortunately lives on in multiple pieces, most notably his severed tails, which have taken on a pretty wide range of forms from inanimate objects to other terrifying monsters.

Hakumen also has possibly the coolest design for a fox yokai I've ever seen. His oversized, sharply pointed head is modeled more like the face of a shark, with a bit of a beaky eagle-like quality to it as well. His intensely yellow eyes, with their blood red irises and deep black sockets, are also almost always in a pained or mournful looking expression, making him look far, far more frightening than he ever needed to be.

HIYO

I LOVE these! There are seemingly hundreds if not thousands of them, but their entire "species" is collectively an avatar of Hakumen's fifth and sixth tails. Hiyo mostly consist of many floating, tailed eyeballs with humanlike ears and mouths, but another type of Hiyo resembles a worm with three bladelike "jaws" surrounding an eye, while other Hiyo are seen in still other bizarre shapes, mostly the result of multiple Hiyo fusing with one another. The largest collective blob we see is TRULY grotesque: it resembles a massive head made from veiny, pulsing knots of grey tissue, with dozens of tongue-like tentacles pouring from distended lips, thick black hair and loads of irregularly sized eyeballs. We also see a smaller cluster resembling a sharp-toothed eyeball-head with spider legs:

They don't just meld with one another, either. In fact, the main gimmick of the Hiyo seems to be that they can merge with anything at all, entering living hosts to sicken or manipulate them and even taking control of machines or objects! They're so versatile!

KURAGI

Hakumen's second tail unfortunately never gets to do a whole lot before it's defeated, but its form is basically that of a titanic flying cave cricket with the white fox tail trailing behind...and the upper body of a giant naked human woman embedded in its underside, eyes hidden behind the insect's jaws if there are any eyes at all. Incredibly badass and beautiful design, no notes.

AYAKASHI

Multiple mythological phenomena share this name, including both giant sea monsters and seafaring "ghost lights" that lead ships astray. This one is a little of both! Originally Hakumen's fourth tail, it appears on the outside as a humongous, eyeless eel with a mouth like a whale and many short, barnacle-like tubes sprouting from its skin. On the inside, however, there's a mass of ghostly faces fused together into one big fanged, eyeless head, still large enough to swallow a ship whole, and inside that is a single naked eyeball on a stalk made of more ghost faces. Very Abadox of you, Ayakashi!

Ayakashi's stomach is even home to these slime-covered, long-tailed humanoid ghouls whose empty eye-holes really gives them a "digested" feel, like these are the vengeful ghosts or yokai of people it's eaten, now getting by as intestinal parasites!

THE FRAGMENT

Hakumen's power level is further emphasized when a whole episode's antagonist is just a teeny, tiny little tissue sample that grows into a monster. It resembles a jagged, rocky splinter with Hakumen's eyes, several crablike legs, and an ability to not only absorb other yokai but re-manifest their forms and powers from its surface! It also comes out looking a whole lot like a bulette from Dungeons and Dragons.

GI AND BO

We're getting into some manga-only friends before we continue with those that were ever animated, and these two are pretty unique! Bo is a serpentine creature with four humanlike arms radiating from behind his giant, jagged-jawed bear trap of a head, with cute buggy eyeballs on the sides. Kind of a more ghoulish Trapinch, honestly. Its friend, Gi, is harder to describe as it just consists of several independently floating, gnarled wooden-looking shapes and one humanlike floating head. Gi somehow "rides" Bo by having its fork-shaped piece hooked onto him, and directs Bo on where to go. They apparently used to just live in a dark hole somewhere, eating anyone who fell in!

ANASAN

This monster is supposedly the bakemono of a toad, but doesn't really actually look like a toad at all. It looks more like a lumpy, misshapen human torso with no head, just a very large gaping mouth in its upper chest with long, thick, sharp teeth, flanked by two fishy eyeballs. Its bulbous, muscular arms wither into thin little twiggy wrists before they end in large human hands, and he's covered in acorn barnacles...even on his teeth! See, those are saltwater animals, and toads are freshwater! Then again, maybe that's how this toad died and became a yokai to begin with?? Maybe this toad was "set free" at the beach by, say, some well-meaning mangaka who didn't know toads needed fresh water.

IKKAKU

This is SUCH a good one. It's criminal that this isn't in any of the anime adaptations. This is a young punk fish yokai who loves to go fast, possesses a motorcycle, and even turns bikers into zombie slaves! Hell yeah!! And the design just plain kicks ass! A long scaly fish with shrimp legs, an eyeball hovering in its gaping mouth, and a long bladelike snout with ANOTHER eyeball on the end! I love Ikkaku! Don't bully him! Maybe all those particular bikers are just jerks?! Did you think of that??!

OYAU KAMUI

This character normally just resembles a very old humanoid yokai, but he can morph into a huge flying serpent with a bug-eyed, bird-beaked head at each end and nine pairs of blade-like wings. His original humanoid hands can also still be seen, one dangling behind each of the heads, because each end of the serpent is apparently one of his arms.

MIKON JIKI

Short lived, but gorgeously weird! This sea monster has a fishlike head with a huge gaping lower jaw, but there's a weird baby-like face where its eyes would be. This face has a little vestigial arm of its own, its right eye is just a small hole, and its left eye is a much larger lidless eyeball. Further to the left of this face is another of these eyeballs, and what seems to be a human nose, giving this whole monster a complete face on only one side of its head. Flatfish style! It also seems to have a huge, long, prehensile tongue, but its lower teeth impale straight through this tongue as if it's semi-fluid, at least from this one and only clear view we ever get?

It's a monster that also feeds on its victims very, very slowly, keeping the crew of a whole ship imprisoned to consume at its leisure.

SHIBUMORI

This is one of the most interesting takes on a "hydra" or "orochi" style monster that I've possibly ever seen. Instead of a serpent with multiple complete heads, it has a single head that *splits* into a bunch of "slices" that still function! That is COOL!!! There isn't much else we can say about this character, but you needed to see this concept.

KAZUCHI

....HOW CUTE ARE THESE THINGS?!?! They're only explained as "barrier-generating yokai." Each one just kinda looks like a big rocky bell-shaped green shield with a huge hole near the top and a split straight down the middle, so like a big curves armor plate with a giant keyhole-shaped aperture in it. There's a pair of little pinkish faces on the front, but those might be nothing but ornamentation. At the center of the big hole is a little yellow eyeball, suspended in its cavity by a network of thick fleshy pink roots! They're so simple, but so abstract, a little barnacle-like in appearance. They don't speak, but they can fly, and just as described, they exist to generate invisible barriers! They can even completely imprison things!

TOWAKO

Back to yokai that made it into the animated arc, Towako is the third tail of Hakumen, taking the form of an almost human lady. Like, except for her grey skin and her huge long silvery fox tail. And Hakumen's same big haunting baleful eyes. And her sharp claws that tear you into pieces because she's so, extremely strong, and very tall, like nine or ten feet tall. And a mouth that can stretch huge to show off all her deadly gleaming rows of long, sharp teeth. She doesn't wear any clothes and did I mention she's real tall yet? And strong?

What was I talking about. Uh. She can breathe fire, but mostly the threat is the big and strong part coupled with the remorseless, violent sadism. Really bad! Super strong, super bad, big giant strong naked sharp toothed deadly killer monster woman. That's pretty scary!!! If she was gonna get you, there's nothing you could do about it! She'd get you and do real evil things I bet! Ahhhh!!!

...But, for real, this is actually the cruelest villain on this page, because she spends years raising another character, Kirio, from infancy to young adulthood for purely villainous story spoiler reasons. The entire time, she flawlessly acted in the role of a loving, caring foster mother, always kind, always making sure Kirio was happy and healthy and felt genuinely loved and supported, when it was all just a ruse! Towako was even the one who stole Kirio as a baby! And never really loved him, or loved anyone, because she's just that bad! Because she was a sick, evil, demented monster all along and that's terrible! Who does she think she is!!! Grr!!!

...I mean, it is, it really is, don't get me wrong, I do sympathize with Kirio's plight completely. REALLY tough break kid! I'm sorry your mommy I mean mother I mean mommy was really such an awful, just horrible saw-toothed towering raven haired mistress of darkness with such hideously big strong arms that could rip you in half as easily as they could carry you off into the sunset wwwhiiich is of course NOT GOOD!!!

Why, the absolute NERVE of this wicked amoral beast woman and eyes that gleam like fiery moonlight! I was going to continue this article into the dozens of fantastic unnamed background creatures that crop up in this series, but now I'll have to do that later because I'm like, just SO distraught over this nefarious fiend's barbaric manner, I can't even seem to think about anything else all the sudden!!! Ugh! You've RUINED this article, Towako!!!