Let's start with the basic story, just so we all know that we're on the same page. Ok, fifty years before the actual start of the Inuyasha series, Kikyo, a miko and guardian of the Shikon no Tama (Jewel of Four Souls), falls in love with a hanyou, Inuyasha. She masterminds a plan where Inuyasha will use the magic of the Jewel to become human, and therefore they'll be able to live out their life together. Happy ending, blah, blah, blah. Not so fast, life is never that easy in a Takahashi series.

Enter Onigumo, a thief who is very very severely burned, so burned in fact that he kinda can't move and is being tended to by Kikyo and her little sister, Kaede. Onigumo has this little, ahem, shall we say, _thing_, for Kikyo. I believe it's something along the lines of wanting a mobile body so he can rid her of her purity or something. Ain't that a shame?

He gets it into his head that he'll let demons come eat him in exchange for a new body... Uh-huh, things like this must happen a lot in feudal Japan, I guess. Anyway, to make a long story short, they accept his invitation. To sum up so far...

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Understand so far? You'd better because I'm not going back over it. So the naked man up there is Naraku, the main baddy of the series, and here's where it gets convoluted. Kikyo and Inuyasha had set a date for when he'd use the jewel. Kikyo was at the meeting place when suddenly she was attacked by Inuyasha. At this same time, Inuyasha was on his way to the meeting place when Kikyo attacked him... Wait, wait, wait... So was it Kikyo who attacked Inuyasha or Inuyasha who attacked Kikyo?

The answer is simply enough, neither one. Naraku just happens to be a shape-shifter, most likely a result of his being made up of several different creatures. He took on Inuyasha's form, and then Kikyo's to cause strife between the lovers. And so the story ends tragically with the real Inuyasha attacking the village and stealing the Shikon no Tama, and then the real Kikyo, wounded from her fight with Naraku, showing up and shooting Inuyasha with a magical arrow, sealing him to the Goshinboku tree for fifty years. Inuyasha is sealed until Kagome falls through the well and releases him, and Kikyo is, in a word, dead. Case closed, right? Nope.

We can thank (or blame, whichever you prefer) an ogress named Urasue for Kikyo's being... well, sort of alive again. Urasue steals Kikyo's bones and captures Kagome, using part of her soul to animate Kikyo's clay and mud body. So from then on, Kikyo runs around, stealing souls of dead women, yet helping those who are alive stay alive. An interesting situation.

Kikyo's main goal seems to be to kill Kagome or at least get her out of the way somehow, and drag Inuyasha with her to hell. Fun. Another twist occurs though when Naraku calls Kikyo to his palace because he is "sick." He recognizes her, but she naturally knows nothing of him. Eventually, she does find out and wants to send him to hell too. Double fun.

And if that's not enough, Naraku at one point throws the part of him that is Onigumo out of his body, giving him his own. Naraku apparently can split off into different people. His parties must be fun, he can _make_ all the guests out of his own body. Anyway, back to Onigumo. Onigumo doesn't remember who he is and on top of that... well, he sort of doesn't have a face since it kinda got burned off back when he was alive. So he decides he's going to steal faces until he finds one he likes, and so he adopts the name (and the face) of a monk named Musou.

Musou slowly begins to remember things after an encounter with the Inuyasha-tachi and is determined to find Kikyo. He never actually does since he gets reabsorbed into Naraku, but I doubt we've seen the last of this Onigumo reborn.

Confused yet? I'm glad. At least, you should have the general story line down and the names and faces of the (mostly) living men who obsess over Kikyo.