I'm reading a really fun manga by Rumiko Takahashi. It's a supernatural shounen romance starring a normal high-school girl and a white-haired boy who appears to be in his teens but is actually hundreds of years old.

The girl is from our time, but she goes through a portal to the past, which is how she meets the guy. From then on she alternates between our world, which is mostly magicless, and the past, where demons roam free and magic is commonplace. She starts out as a normal human, but as the series progresses she develops powerful magic and takes a more active role. The boy has a magic sword and the blood of a demon, and sometimes he will even transform into a demonic form. This gives him a more animalistic appearance and makes him go berserk.

Over the course of the series, the two go on adventures together, searching for magical items that are only loosely connected to the overarching plot and having monster-of-the-week type conflicts. They gradually fall in love, though neither will admit it to themself at first. But their relationship is complicated by the evil forces that keep targeting the girl—and by the boy's dark past. In particular, he is haunted by the memory of his first love, a beautiful woman who died long ago under tragic circumstances. The events surrounding her death long ago are at the heart of the story's present-day conflict. That fact, and being reminded of his lost love by her present-day lookalike and by other friends and enemies from his past, make it hard for the boy to fully move on.

The crazy thing is that the manga I'm reading is not Inuyasha. It's Mao.

I liked Inuyasha a lot, enough that I'll reread it from time to time, but I would ordinarily hold that lack of originality against a manga. I hold it against Mao, in fact—but this is mitigated by two things. First, I don't read Rumiko Takahashi mangas for their inventive plots or subversions of expectations. They are comfort food for me, which is not a bad thing.

Second, even though Mao is weaker than Inuyasha in some respects (aside from the lack of originality, I think the pacing is also a bit worse—both too regular and slightly too fast, rarely giving us enough time for tension or drama to build or, conversely, for us to relax and enjoy the scenery), I am enjoying it more overall. I could go into detail about everything I like about Mao, but listing all the similarities between it and Inuyasha already took more time than I had hoped to spend on this review. So I'll just share the big one:

The titular character of Mao is a lot less dysfunctional and a lot more likeable. Mao, unlike Inuyasha, isn't loud, violent, and angry—he's calm, intelligent, and kind. (He is known as "Dr. Mao" to many, and he uses his powers as an exorcist and his knowledge of medicine to heal the poor for free.) He's more levelheaded about the fact that his first love is dead and he needs to move on. He's not perfect, or anything, but my point is that a lot of the conflict in Inuyasha, and especially a lot of the slow progress in the romance subplot, was due to Inuyasha being a jerk and an idiot, and that's not the case here.

Overall, Mao feels like a more refined version of Inuyasha—a bit pared-down (hence my gripe about the pacing) and a bit less manic. In my book, that makes it pretty good.