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I second Red. The neccessity for a backstory in any ficlet really depends on the content, for example if you're using the canon arc for Inuyasha and taking a specific time or event in that canon timeline than you won't really need a backstory, since, the anime and manga, and everything else in between that's canonical tells that backstory.
If you however do go A/U and bring Kaggy and Sesshy together you'll need backstory if you bring them into an already established relationship, where they're together, have kids and so on. You'll need to tell your readers how that got together, so backstory is neccessary, since the reader won't know how that happened otherwise.
If you're doing A/U and are going to bring Sesshy and Kags into a relationship and say its set in the Feudal Era, follows the canon timeline but diverges with Sesshy and Kag's becoming romantically involved, than you might not need the backstory at all, if you're going to use the story as a stage or platform to show how they get into a relationship.
It probably depends on the intention of the author. To some extent you will need backstory to explain specific things to the reader that they won't neccessarily be familiar with. The size of the ficlet will also influence this, the setting, timeline, timezone, events, and whatnot. Oneshots will likely only need brief backstory, whereas novels will need more, drabbles could need a lot too.
It will also depend on the tense of the story, are we talking Feudal Era, Modern, or Futuristic for the setting. You'll need backstory to some degree for all three, and more for the basis of character relationships, especially of non-canonical pairings like Sesshy and Kagome.
In all honesty, it's really up to the author to decide how much information to provide, and their own intuition, and discretion to tell you all of the details or not. For example I've written one-shots that threw characters into a situation, hinted at backstory but didn't explain it, which I often do intentionally, since the oneshot is too short to do anything but 'hint' at backstory.
Again it depends on what the author decides to tell you as a reader, especially, how much or how little backstory the ficlet needs to explain things, or to keep you wondering.
~ Pyre
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