Character · Fruits Basket
Tohru Honda
She was living in a tent when the family that owned the land found her, and her first instinct was to apologise for the inconvenience.
In Otakana the clue reads: Orphan living in a tent who moves in with a cursed family
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Fruits Basket
- Letters
- 5 · Normal
Tohru Honda lost her father young and her mother recently. Rather than burden her grandfather while his house was being rebuilt, she pitched a tent on a hillside and told nobody. The hillside belonged to the Sohma family. They took her in, and she immediately started paying her way as their housekeeper while keeping her part-time job and her school attendance intact, because accepting anything for free is beyond her.
The secret she walks into is that thirteen members of the family turn into zodiac animals when hugged by someone of the opposite sex, or when their bodies are under enough strain. Anyone who learns it normally has the memory wiped. Tohru is allowed to keep hers, and she spends the series being the first person to treat each cursed Sohma as someone rather than something.
What keeps her from being sugar is that the story treats her relentless positivity as a symptom. She is frightened of being left behind, so she makes herself useful, and the people around her slowly notice the cost of that. Natsuki Takaya began the manga in Hana to Yume in 1998, and Fruits Basket sold over thirty million copies before a complete anime adaptation finally arrived in 2019.
Spelling TOHRU
Five letters, and the H is the whole puzzle: TOHRU. The name is read with a long O, so it romanizes as Toru with a bar over the vowel, or as Tooru in stricter systems. The official English spelling marks that long vowel with an H instead, a convention Japanese passports also use. TORU is four letters and will not fill the row.