First off, a couple of annoying but easily fixable problems with this
that I'd strongly advise you to do something about:
1) Lack of line wrapping. You've got each paragraph in one long line,
without a hard line break every 70-80 characters as there should be.
(Any decent email client can be set to do this automatically.) To do
line-by-line comments on something formatted this way, so that people
could tell which lines were original story and which comments, I'd need
manually add line breaks and ">" markers for every group of lines on
which I have comments, which is why you're not getting line-by-line
comments.
2) Gratuitous Japanese. You're writing for an audience that understands
the connotations and subtleties of English. So don't use Japanese when
there are perfectly good ways to express what you want to say without
it.
Beyond that... while I think the treatment of IY's character makes
sense, what would help its presentation is to make it less abstract,
more concrete and specific. It's a lot easier for readers to grasp what
you're trying to get across if we have specifics to get ahold of. The
abstracted explanations can also make the character seem too self-aware
or too analytical, as they may require a greater degree of understanding
of his own emotions than he'd be expected to have.
For example, we're told that Kikyo's influence, and later Kagome's, have
softened Inu-Yasha's behavior. Think about how you could illustrate this
via his memory of some specific event. We may not need a whole scene,
but a few well-chosen details would give us a much better idea of
exactly how she was influencing him.
Just my two yen on this one. Hope it's helpful, and good luck with this
and future fics.
Gary Kleppe
http://www.garykleppe.org/comics.html
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