82 Gap between the Ages
This is the first episode of the 4th season and so it starts with a recap of the series' premise and reviews the conclusion of the 3rd season's last episode up to Naraku's escape
The new action starts with Inuyasha, Miroku and Sango at Naraku's castle. Inuyasha is quietly cursing himself for letting Naraku slip through his fingers and escape. He was so close to destroying Naraku. Right now, he is finally stronger than Naraku and could destroy him if they met again. (The implications of this are enormous. Inuyasha can equal the strength of someone who holds most of the jewel all by his lonesome.) But no one can find any trace of him at all, anywhere. Sango is concerned about the disappearance of her brother, carried away by Naraku's detachment Kagura.
Kagome is not with them at the castle, though. She is at school in modern Tokyo. She feels safe here and guilty about leaving her friends behind, until her teacher says there is an important test in 2 days. Just 2 days! After school she talks her friends into letting her borrow their notes to make photocopies so that she can catch up without having to read the entire textbook before the test. It's cram time. The girls reluctantly agree provided she return the favor... The next thing we see is all of them in a booth at WacDnalds with a pile of burgers in the middle of the table and a rather distressed-looking Kagome snapping her purse closed.
As the girls sit there happily eating, they notice Kagome looks distracted. It never occurs to them that she may have the test and her considerably lighter purse to worry about. They immediately start quizzing her on her violent, jealous boyfriend. As they insist on new information, she lets slip that she met his older brother recently. Now everybody is asking about this new guy! Well, he is probably the stronger of the two; but they constantly fight. As Kagome sips her drink, her friends study her, each thinking about her violent boyfriend and his even more violent older brother. It is Kagome who finally breaks the silence by asking to copy their notes.
However, that isn't as easy as it sounds. The first place they go to has a line wrapped around the entire store, all waiting for a chance to use the copy machine. It is test week and everyone has the same idea. So they decide to try another place. The machine is broken. And another. It is closed. And yet another. Not only closed, but razed to the ground for new construction. This is bad for Kagome. Even worse, it is getting late and her friends leave for home to study, happily filled with burgers, abandoning Kagome right there.
Back in the feudal era, Inuyasha has grown extremely impatient. He is standing by the well fuming. Shippo tries to pacify him by saying that Kagome would be away at least 2 or 3 days this time. Even Miroku is there and he adds that patience is a virtue and Inuyasha should just wait a little longer. Sango adds that Inuyasha himself could use a rest after that last battle with Naraku. Inuyasha snaps back that he is not a weakling human. Battle does not make him tired. Miroku quickly replies that that is his problem. His companions are weak humans and they cannot keep up with him. (This is a rather kind Japanese custom of letting another off the hook for appearing weak by taking the blame oneself.) Inuyasha does not accept the gift gracefully, though. He rubs in the fact that he is OK and has to wait on the others. (The guy is still clueless.)
Elsewhere, even Kikyo cannot find a sign of Naraku. She has always been able to locate him before this, but now even her soul collectors cannot find the slightest sign. Kagura is carrying Kohaku back to where she will meet Naraku. She admires him for resisting the command to kill Rin and refusing to lift a hand against Sesshomaru, but admonishes him that he is flirting with death to defy Naraku like that. (Up to this point, it seems that Kanna is the only one not held in thrall by Naraku with a threat of death.0
Back at Kaede's hut, Sango worries about her brother Kohaku while sitting alone on the river bank. Miroku goes to comfort her. Kaede is in the hut with Shippo, and a bored-looking Inuyasha, as Shippo announces that Miroku has gone to court Sango and that Kagome told him that this is what Sango secretly wants. Miroku sits by Sango and tries to tell her he understands how she feels about her brother. However, Sango doesn't seem very talkative, giving him only one-word answers. Discouraged by her lack of responsiveness, he gets up to leave only to have Sango say that she is surprised he is leaving so quickly. She has learned what he is like and is surprised that after encouraging her, he didn't try anything lecherous. Miroku doesn't need a second invitation for that. He crouches down next to her and plops his hand right on her chest saying she should have mentioned it sooner if that is what she wanted.
The stars twinkle in the sky as the sound of Sango's slap and Miroku's cry of pain fill the night air of the village. In the hut, Kaede and Shippo remark about the sounds. Inuyasha has moved to the top of Kaede's hut and sits there in his dog crouch with a very irritated look on his face. He is nervously twitching and thinks to himself that everyone has gone crazy around him. Before he had friends, he would get lackadaisical when Kagome was away. Now he is barely contained and hyper energetic. He definitely misses her a lot and gets irritated at everybody's actions around him. It won't be long before he goes to bring her back.
Speaking of whom, Kagome is trying to study & read the texts on her own, but it isn't long before she runs into something she doesn't understand. Frustrated, she calls a friend for an explanation and help. It's 8:46 when she starts the call. At 10:30, she finally hangs up, having totally forgotten what the call was about in the first place. Derailed by a friend, yet again! This cramming session has not gone well. The next morning, she is flustered and preparing for school in a rush. Even Sota can't talk to her for fear of making her forget everything she memorized this morning. However, there is a surprise guest waiting for her in the low-tabled living room. Inuyasha is here, playing with Buyo, and Kagome's concentration is about to evaporate. He came to take her back, but that is not gonna happen with a test scheduled for tomorrow. (There was nothing about any cramming in the manga, and Inuyasha showed up at night as she returned from school there; but if he did that in the anime, there would be no time for a lunch delivery.) 
As Kagome prepares to leave, she tells Inuyasha to say put in the house and wait for her to return. As she does so, he gives a bored yawn and petulantly says OK. As she turns her back on him to leave, he shoots an annoyed look in her direction and turns to go back in the house. As he does so, he runs into Mrs. Higurashi, who has a neatly tied up package. Kagome forgot to take the lunch she made for her. Would Inuyasha be so kind as to take it to Kagome? Inuyasha stares wide-eyed at this reprieve from Kagome's sentence of home confinement. The next thing we see is everybody staring at him as he crawls up the sidewalk on all fours sniffing for Kagome's scent. He intends to track her like a Bloodhound.
Suddenly there is a commotion behind him. A man carrying a satchel runs out of an alley followed by a policeman. He knocks over a trash can spilling its contents, including a banana peel, onto the street. The policeman slips on the peel and falls (oldest joke in the book), and everybody clears off the sidewalk to avoid the running man who yells threats at them. Only Inuyasha is left, now standing, calmly waiting for the running man to reach him. The man calls him a little punk and asks if he wants to die. With a hiss and a snarl, Inuyasha makes a fist and punches the man in the nose, knocking him out. As the two of them stand there for a second, we can see that Inuyasha is actually taller than the thug he just punched (making him quite tall indeed for having grown up in the 14th century, or the thug is just very short). As the thug falls backward, the satchel opens and lots of money comes flying out. It appears he just robbed a bank. As Inuyasha watches him lie there, he remarks that Kagome's world is a lot more dangerous than he first thought.
This is in sharp contrast to Kagome's thoughts in school the day before. She had been concerned that she was here studying in safety while her friends were facing demons and other dangers.
Within minutes, Inuyasha is chasing a fire engine with its siren blaring, leaping from rooftop to rooftop. It leads him to an apartment building with one apartment on fire. As he stands on the roof of a building across from it, he hears a little girl scream from inside the apartment. He leaps from the rooftop to one of the cars below and jumps from car to car, finally running up the fire engine ladder to the apartment. There are 2 firemen there spraying water through a window. He leaps over their heads and claws away the window, flying over the child's head and landing in the burning apartment. He then grabs the girl and jumps out the window to the street below holding her, but losing the cap that was hiding his ears in the process. The girl just stares at him and he stares back asking her what's the matter. Suddenly she smiles and giggles. She has seen his ears and grabs one of them as he lands and puts her down. He jumps back at this, yells stop, and growls before turning to continue on his journey. The girl just runs after him and says "Thank you doggy man".
Inuyasha thinks to himself that this place is just an unending series of disasters as he leaps from rooftop to rooftop diagonally crossing the street each time & receding into the distance. More than anything else, he resembles spider-man swinging from building to building as he travels through the city. Perhaps this shot was actually a cameo tribute to the spider-man cartoons that it so resembles. After all, they are two heroes protecting those in trouble in their city.
All this while, Kagome is in class, trying to catch up on everything she has missed while in the feudal era. Imagine her surprise as she glances sideways to see Inuyasha on the window ledge outside her classroom staring in. Her friend Eri is sitting behind her and asks why she is suddenly so upset. With the reply "Don't mind me", Kagome's mind starts racing. What is Inuyasha doing here? Having seen him, she is now extremely distracted and keeps glancing his way, hoping that no one else notices. As he nonchalantly scratches his ear with his foot, like a dog, Kagome is becoming riveted by his antics. Others are starting to notice her looking at the window, too, though. As another student starts to turn to see what she is looking at, she screams "Sit" and Inuyasha falls off the ledge to the pavement below.
After class breaks, she meets Inuyasha on the roof of the school to yell at him for coming to the school when she told him to stay home. He crossly answers that it wasn't his idea, her mother asked him to come and he pulls her lunch box out from the folds of his robe and hands it to her. Sorry that she jumped to the wrong conclusion, she offers to share the lunch with him only to find that not only have the contents been mashed together, but some are missing. Inuyasha just sits there with a rather comical look on his face.
At the end of the school day, Kagome decides to study in the library because it will be impossible to concentrate at home. On the way there, she runs into Hojo, who presents her with a book of healthy recipes before taking his leave (another anime embellishment). After he goes, she suddenly realizes that he may have the notes she needs to study from and she chases him all the way down to the bike stand to try to get them. He is almost ready to leave when she catches up, but before she can catch her breath to ask for the notes, he interrupts with a second present, a baggie full of dried lizards and tells her to put them in the blender to extract their therapeutic effects. Kagome can only stand there in shock as he lectures her about living healthy, gets on his bike, and pedals away. Here is the best example why Hojo will never have a chance with Kagome. It is not his obsession with health that is most annoying, though that can get tiresome. It is his tendency to interrupt Kagome to express his own opinion without ever giving her a chance to get a word in edgewise. Now Kagome has no hope of getting any notes, and a bag of useless lizards to boot.
As she finally gets home that night, everyone is glued to the TV set where a strange white haired boy dressed in red is the main topic on the evening news. It seems this young man captured a bank robber and rescued a young girl from a fire earlier in the day. The girl even drew his likeness in crayon for the news crew. There, for everyone to see was the dog-eared, white haired, golden-eyed likeness of Inuyasha. Crudely drawn, but definitely him. As the camera pans back to the little girl, she is wearing his baseball hat and Inuyasha recognizes it. He then admires the strange box that showed it to him.
Kagome was right. She will not be able to concentrate on her studies at home tonight. As she tries to work on her math equations, Inuyasha keeps trying to see what she is doing and he pops up from every angle possible in the process. To stop him, she yells "Sit" and then calls Sota. Maybe he can keep Inuyasha company and out of her hair? Sota comes up with an idea. Inuyasha should join him while he takes his bath. So he grabs Inuyasha's hand and walks him out of Kagome's room. It isn't long before Kagome's concentration is broken yet again by loud screams. It seems that Inuyasha thinks the bath is too hot and has fled down the hall and into Kagome's room.
Naked.
Well, he still has some bubbles from the bath on him.
Sota is in tow, trying to coax him back into the bath to at least rinse off the suds. Kagome is totally freaked by now. She already saw everything Inuyasha has, not very long ago, when Jaken sabotaged the hot spring he and Miroku were using. But this is just too intrusive to put up with. So, she starts to throw things at Inuyasha to drive him back out of her room. Finally, the waste basket proves big enough, when it hits him on the head, to get the message across. However, the commotion has made her forget everything she just learned.
Back down in the living room, Sota is blow-drying Inuyasha's hair, which he actually seems to be enjoying, when Mrs. Higurashi enters to ask Inuyasha if he would like something to eat.
Kagome is still upstairs trying to study, but has gotten so used to the interruptions that she notices things have gotten very quiet. Now, the lack of noise has begun breaking her concentration. However, she noticed the quiet a little too soon because Inuyasha's scream fills the house just then. He once again bursts into her room with his tongue sticking out as he tries to talk around it. His face is flushed and he mumbles something about his ung being on fire. Mama Higurashi is behind him with a bowl. She has given him curry rice to eat, but maybe it was too spicy. All Inuyasha can do is mumble and whine with a comical wide-eyed look on his face. Kagome can only sit there and remark that she is surprised to get this from a guy who blows off a four inch hole in his chest as nothing. For some strange reason, the animator also drew his hakama as much tighter than normal, revealing more of him than was visible even when he ran out of the bath tub. Strange.
As the night wears on, Inuyasha has recovered from his battle with dinner and sits cross-legged on her bed as Kagome studies for tomorrow's test. However, his intense stare is something she can feel on her back as she tries to concentrate yet again. Finally she turns to him in the hope that he will either go to sleep or go downstairs and allow her to concentrate without feeling watched. When she suggests that he lie down, he crossly snaps back that he is being quiet this time and that she should continue with her studies. He insists that they are going home tomorrow and she should not give him any excuses. As she tries to work, she wonders if he will sit there all night to watch over her. It wouldn't be unexpected, he always has so much energy.
She works a little more and turns to see if he is still staring at her to find a big surprise. He is curled up on her bed, fast asleep. As she stands there wondering what is wrong with him since he has been bothering her all day and now just suddenly nods off, she suddenly realizes that she has never before seen him asleep so soundly and with such a peaceful look on his face. He lies there making small snoring sounds, more soundly asleep than he has possibly ever been. She softens. He is probably more tired than anyone else and has always been too proud to either admit it or give in to it. This is the first time he has ever relaxed. She wishes him a good sleep, if only for this one night.
The next day is the big test; but Kagome is barely awake for it. She has been up all night.
Afterwards, they return to the past with Inuyasha carrying Kagome's sack, filled to overflowing. As Shippo and Miroku greet them, Inuyasha is looking chipper and refreshed, but Kagome is totally worn out. She got no sleep and her test was a killer. She may be back, but she is not happy this morning. Even Shippo can't come up with anything to cheer her up.
Although regarded as primarily a comedy episode, this shows a surprising amount of relationship development. Miroku goes to woo Sango with rather honorable intentions this time. He wants to reassure her about her brother, give her an opportunity to vent about her worries, and to let her know he sympathizes with her mood. He even tries to leave when he feels she is not ready to be responsive. It is only when she expresses surprise at his good behavior that he sees it as an invitation and reverts to form, with comical results.
Inuyasha’s usual depression at Kagome’s absence has morphed into irritation and more than his usual impatience for her return. The opening sequence at Naraku’s castle gives a clue to his issues. He is upset and frustrated that he couldn’t finish Naraku off. As he said long ago, Kagome’s presence calms him and she is not here to do that at the moment.
On the other hand, Shippo has a knack for making him feel worse by echoing the same sentiments that are upsetting him and then looking to him for comfort. Since he can’t cope with his own emotions to begin with, he feels even worse after Shippo augments them and then gets angry with Shippo for doing it.
The fact that he is all alone without Kagome while everyone around him is sharing companionship gets him even more irritated.
He is the only one who can cross over into Kagome’s world and so he goes into that world he does not understand to be with the one person who can help him sort out his emotions by her very presence. Imagine his dismay at finding out she is not available once he arrives.
Even as a stranger in a strange land, he cannot help but act the hero. Since he actually feels more accepted in Kagome’s world than in his own, he is not so reluctant to do good deeds and help others. Besides, it gives him something to do and a chance to blow off steam while waiting for Kagome.
His main goal is to be near Kagome and to get as much of her attention as possible. He needs her presence to calm down and relax; but he isn’t getting it. Like a dog, he follows her around and makes a pest of himself as he hovers over her. He also overreacts to things he doesn’t like, looking for her to comfort him. His childish reactions to both the bath and the curry are at odds with his usual tough guy behavior and it is only after Kagome remarks on this that he starts to behave more reasonably.
Once he knows that Kagome sees through his little ploys, he reverts to his stoic behavior of quietly watching her. They have finally come to terms with each other. If he allows her to complete her task, she will become available.
In the process of saving strangers, he has realized that Kagome’s world is not as safe as he imagined it, and he has expended even more energy here in addition to what he used in his battle with Naraku. But Kagome has no problem coping with the dangers here because she knows how to deal with them. So, now as he calms down in her presence, his pride gives way to his fatigue and he finally falls deeply asleep. Despite the day’s adventures, he knows that he really is safe here and can afford to relax completely. These moments come to him very rarely and this is the first time Kagome has seen him in one.
Kagome’s plight in all this is treated with a lot of humor, but at its core it is dead serious. She is under a great deal of pressure to keep up with her studies while trying to save the world in the feudal era. No one is giving her any sympathy or help. It is starting to show, too. She is beginning to crack under the strain of trying to play catch up with her studies while the fight with Naraku is filling so much of her time. Everyone pays lip service to helping her, but no one actually does. Even Hojo, with his crush on her, is more interested in pushing his own agenda than finding out what she really needs.
The one person who would do anything to help her is in no position to do anything but stay out of her way. And so, it is the "selfish" Inuyasha who realizes that his antics are hurting her and who decides to put her duty to study before his need for attention. Of course, he covers it up with the excuse that they need to return to hunt for Naraku, but he stays quiet to let her study and does not relax until she gives him “permission” to do so.
Kagome, too, sees that his endurance is just a front he puts up and finds his final relaxation endearing. Without knowing it, they have both drawn closer and Inuyasha has taken another step toward opening himself up to her.
I forgot to mention that this was one of the rare occasions where a single manga chapter became an entire episode. Sunrise just added the "Taking Karome's lunch to her" sequence to round it out to 22 minutes of story time.
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