Character · Fruits Basket
Akito Sohma
The head of the Sohma family is a sickly young person in a dark room who everyone in the house is terrified of, including the adults.
In Otakana the clue reads: Head of the cursed family everyone fears
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Fruits Basket
- Letters
- 5 · Normal
Akito Sohma runs the family that carries the zodiac curse, and the cursed members do not experience that as an ordinary chain of command. The bond they share is described as a bond to God, and Akito holds that position. They feel a pull they cannot argue with, and obedience arrives before anyone has decided anything. It is a family hierarchy built out of a supernatural one, which is the trouble.
The cruelty is small and constant rather than theatrical. Akito reminds each cursed member of the thing they most fear about themselves, keeps them close, and makes leaving feel unthinkable. Yuki spent years of his childhood shut in a room on Akito's word. Fruits Basket gets filed as a gentle series about a kind girl, and Akito is the reason it is not, because every warm scene in that house happens under a threat.
Natsuki Takaya serialized the manga in Hana to Yume from 1998 to 2006, and it sold over thirty million copies, which puts it among the best-selling shojo series ever printed. Studio Deen animated part of it in 2001 and TMS restarted it from chapter one in 2019, running the whole way to the end. The later volumes do something with Akito that the 2001 anime stopped short of reaching.
Spelling AKITO
Five letters, AKITO, and the game wants the given name; the family name Sohma is shared by half the cast anyway. Nothing is doubled and no vowel is long, so the plain reading holds: a-ki-to. The trap is the neighbours. AKIRA, AKITA and AKIHITO all feel plausible on a five-tile row, and only one of them ends in KITO.