Ayame

is the granddaughter of the Northern Yoro Tribe leader, the Wolf elder (Chōrō) as well as Kōga's fiancée and eventual wife.

History
As a little girl, Ayame was once saved by Kōga from the Birds of Paradise and was promised marriage when she got older.

During the story
She later grows up and comes after Kōga, saying that her grandfather was going to marry her off to another wolf demon but she chose him since he promised, is very persistent, and tries to use force several times on him. When Kōga says that he will only marry a woman who can sense the Shikon Jewel shards (as a way to get rid of her), she announces that she will train herself to sense them like Kagome (though Miroku makes it clear that it is probably impossible).

Ayame appears again later when the northern wolf demon tribe is attacked and almost completely decimated by Kyōkotsu. She runs into Inuyasha and his group and tells them of the attack; she also mentions that the beast devouring demons is neither a human nor a demon.

Following the defeat of Naraku, Kōga moves on from Kagome, and ultimately keeps his promise to Ayame and they finally marry. Following this, Kōga became the chief of a now-unified Wolf Demon Tribe.

Personality
Ayame is a very dutiful and dedicated person, as shown by the fact that she trained in the Northern Mountains for a very long time while holding Kōga's promise to marry her close to her heart. She was understandably heartbroken when Kōga had apparently forgotten but still hoped that he would eventually live up to it.

Like many demons, she has a distaste for humans, judging by her initial hostility towards Kagome and belief that Kōga was above falling for a human. While she could be impulsive at times, Ayame was actually pretty smart and observant; she was able to quickly figure out that Kōga's love for Kagome was completely one-sided, something Kōga and Inuyasha had been unable to figure out for ages.

Physical description
Ayame has red hair that is always in pigtails and has green eyes. She wears an iris in her hair and a band that goes across her forehead. Her clothing consists of white wolf fur draped over her shoulders, a necklace, white fur skirt, insteps and arm guards, and red and blue armor.

Powers & Abilities

 * Whirlwind: Like Kōga's, Ayame can generate whirlwinds of air and green leaves and build it up until her whole body is engulfed in a cyclone.
 * Speed: Ayame had the ability to run at high speeds, but not as fast as Kōga.
 * Agility: Ayame is very light on her feet and can leap incredibly large distances.
 * Senses: Ayame can sense like other demons.
 * Whirlwind of Leaves: Ayame pounds the ground with her fist, summoning a multitude of green leaves that swirl around her and can knock back or kill demons.

Weapons

 * Iris: Ayame possesses a mystical iris blossom, a plant believed to have the power of purification and only used it to stab a discarded hair demon. She often wore it in her left pigtail.
 * Cutting Leaves: Ayame carries with her an unlimited supply of sharp green leaves. She uses them as shuriken, and are able to slice through demons.

Trivia

 * Ayame was originally a filler character in the anime, and though she does not appear in the manga, due to Rumiko Takahashi's fondness for the character, she was referenced by name in the manga, thus making her part of the manga's canon as well as the anime's.
 * A character of Inuyasha's subsequent manga series, Kyoukai no Rinne shares her name and is also in love with the character who serves as the protagonist's rival for the love of the deuteragonist.
 * Moreover, both appear in only one version of their story, one in the anime version only and one in the manga version only.
 * Ayame believes that her name and Kagome's name are too similar (in truth, it's just the last of their names; め, me); Kagome even points this fact out.
 * When she first meets Kōga, Ayame tells him she will train to use the Iris she is holding as a weapon, since she and the flower "have the same name." This is because the word ayame means "".
 * She is the only known wolf-demon who has special powers (the cutting leaves).
 * Her characteristics resembles San from . She was not nasty at her first appearance, but nevertheless had reservations about humans. But in her second appearance, she was nicer to humans.
 * A village in The Secret of the Cursed Mask is named Ayame.

Continuity inconsistencies
When Ayame is first introduced, her actions and explanations for them are rife with factual and continuity inconsistencies. When Koga encounters the tribal Elder later on, he explains that he wanted Koga to come and help defend the Northern Tribe's territory from the demons stirred up by the activities of Naraku in the north. However, Ayame claims that she was sent to bring Koga back so that she could marry him, even going so far as to attack him and order her wolves to do the same, despite the fact that Koga is the leader of the Wolf Tribes and outranks both Ayame and the Elder.

Furthermore, Ayame tells a story about how she and Koga first met, during which time Koga saves her from the Birds of Paradise and then makes a spontaneous and impromptu marriage proposal. However, this story has a number of inconsistencies; for one, Koga does not remember this encounter at all. Considering that he is the Wolf Tribe's new leader, it seems implausible that he would forget rescuing the daughter of his predecessor from their bitter foes.

Furthermore, Ayame claimed that she was collecting an iris before leaving with her grandfather to train in the mountains; yet, Ginta and Hakkaku mention that the Elder retired from his position to go into the mountains, and the conflict between the Birds of Paradise is what prompted Koga to seek out shards of the Sacred Jewel and seize power as the new leader to replace the elder. Considering that Koga only rose to replace the Elder a few months prior, a demon like Ayame could not have reached adulthood during her short time spent with the Elder, since Koga only recently replaced him after he went into exile, nor does it seem likely that Koga and the Birds of Paradise would have been at war for decades, long before he ever decided to do anything about it.

Lastly, Ayame further claims that, despite her original assertion that she wants to marry Koga because of his earlier, alleged promise, her grandfather also wants this marriage to take place in order to pacify the infighting Wolf Tribe factions&mdash;however, the Wolf Tribes already co-exist under Koga's unified leadership, and the Northern and Eastern Tribes were almost entirely destroyed by Kagura; therefore it would be impossible for the Northern and Eastern Wolf Tribes to be in a civil war with one another when Koga and Ayame are two of the few survivors left. Her claim that her grandfather thought Koga would make a good leader and that their political marriage would help cement an inter-Tribe union is made moot by the fact that Koga already used the Jewel Shards to seize control over the Wolf Demon Tribe.

To what extent these inconsistencies are a result of the anime staff failing to maintain continuity with the manga, or because Ayame was deliberately lying to coerce Koga into marrying her, is unclear. If the Elder and Ayame truly were in exile in the northern mountains, it is possible they didn't know Koga was already the leader, though that would not explain how they could claim knowledge of an alleged civil war, while also not realizing who the leader of the Wolf Tribe even was. Her grandfather never mentions any of these things when Koga meets him later. However, the fact that Koga, even in the anime, is unable to recall this experience on his own, shows that, even to the anime staff, Ayame's story was not completely ironclad. It is only after Kagome specifically insists that Koga remember a night where he saw a lunar rainbow that he starts to believe that the event in question might have happened, though he publicly maintains he does not remember. Due to Kagome's heavy-handed suggestion, this could have triggered a similar to the. Inuyasha even later expresses his own skepticism that lunar rainbows even exist, to which Kagome replies, starry-eyed, that they do to people "who believe in them", leaving the impression that she herself had suspended her own disbelief out of a sense of romantic idealism.

The one series of events that would reconcile all of Ayame's incongruous statements would be if the Birds of Paradise had been battling the Wolf Demon Tribe intermittently over many years, and there was a long gap after the Elder retired in which the Wolf Tribes did not have a common leader. Koga good-naturedly promised to marry Ayame as a way to lift her spirits before heading into exile, then forgot about his promise over the ensuing decades, before the conflict with the Birds of Paradise escalated to the point he sought out the Jewel Shards and unified the Tribe. Ayame and her grandfather, returning from exile and training due to disturbances caused by Naraku, are unaware that Koga has unified the tribes, and mistakenly believe the Tribes are fighting amongst each other, when in actuality they have suffered a virtual genocide at the hand of Kagura and Naraku. However, such a series of events is not completely supported by the events in the manga, nor even other events mentioned in the anime, such as Jaken's claim that up until a few decades ago, he was at war with Bikuni, who led the demons of the Eastern Mountains, while Shippō also explains that the Wolf Tribe's sudden acquisition of territory in the Eastern Mountains, as they competed and warred with the Birds of Paradise, was relatively recent.