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Name: Muso, Musou, The Faceless Man
Age: Less than 1 year
Race: yokai
Weapons: mutable body
Muso (Muso "peerless") is a character in the manga and anime series InuYasha. He was released from Naraku's body as a re-embodiment of the thief Onigumo, the human many yokai (demons) consumed and fused with to become Naraku. Interestingly enough, he is voiced in the English dub by Brian Dobson, brother of Paul Dobson who plays Naraku.
While most of Onigumo was consumed by the yokai, his human heart remained. After the miko (shrine priestess) known as Kikyo (whom Naraku had slain 50 years previous) was revived, she began causing problems and plotting Naraku's defeat. However, due to Onigumo's human heart which still lived inside Naraku, he was unable to slay Kikyo because Onigumo's feelings of desire for Kikyo remained.
In an attempt to rid himself of Onigumo and his inability to slay Kikyo, Naraku created a detachment very different from Kagura and Kan'na. He was discarded as if an abortion.
Muso took the form of a faceless man with a scar in the shape of a spider on his back. Muso slays various people in search of a face, eventually settling on the attractive visage of a monk, whose name (Muso) he also adopts. Satisfied with his new face, he proceeds to slaughter many other people, stealing things like clothes, weapons, and horses as he pillages several villages. A feeling of unease remains, however, and he begins making his way toward Kikyo's former village, though he does not know why at the time.
It is here he comes across InuYasha and his friends. He is immune from even the most powerful blows from InuYasha's sword, the Tessaiga, and repeatedly reforms after being torn into pieces. After a few conflicts with the group, during which Muso recovers his memories of Kikyo and his love for her, Naraku appears, having determined he cannot yet survive as a single person without Onigumo to hold his composite yokai together. Muso is ultimately re-absorbed into Naraku's body, effectively dying.
After a considerable length of time, Naraku decided to again release his human heart away from his main body. He separated it into two parts: the human soul (kokoro) of Onigumo he left at Hakurei-Zan, turning Naraku from a han'yo (half-demon) into a full yokai. His physical heart (shinzo) was manifested in Akago. In some ways Akago is a successor to Muso, although the two beings do not really resemble each other much at all. Akago would later become involved in the origins of Hakudoshi and Moryomaru. It currently appears that has Naraku reabsorbed his own heart once again, both the physical aspect from Akago and Onigumo's soul from the ruins of Mount Hakurei, the latter to avoid being purified by Kikyo.
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