The Essentials

Name: Fruits Basket
Genre: Comedy, Drama, Romance
Tankoubon: 23
Serialized In: Hana to Yume
Released: July 1998 – November 2006
Story & Art: Natsuki Takaya
Published By (Japan): Hakusensha
Published By (US): TokyoPop

Scores

Story: 9/10 (x 3 = 27 pts)
Art: 8/10 (x 3 = 24 pts)
Gut Score: 10/10 (x 4 = 40 pts)

Total: 91/100 (91%)

Review

Fruits Basket is about a girl, Tohru Honda, who happens to be living in a tent after her mother died.  However, 2 members of the Sohma family, Yuki and Shigure, find Tohru one afternoon (she’s was camping on Sohma family property), and they end up having her live in their house after Tohru’s tent is buried in a landslide.  Soon after, another boy, Kyo Sohma, suddenly busts through the roof to challenge Yuki to a fight.  However, as Tohru tries to stop Kyo, she accidentally bumps into Kyo, Yuki, and Shigure, turning them into a cat, rat, and dog, respectively.  The three has to explain that certain members of the Sohma family are afflicted with a curse where they are possessed by a spirit of one of the animals of the Chinese zodiac (plus the cat), an they transform into their respective animals if they hug or bump into someone of the opposite sex or get weak.  However, Kyo, being possessed by the cat, who was tricked by the rat out of attending the zodiac banquet in the zodiac origin story, hates Yuki, who is possessed by the rat and continuously vows to eventually defeat him someday.

However, Tohru also sometimes has problems of her own, but she is often able to work through them with the aid of her two unusual, overprotective, but very good friends at school: Arisa Uotani, an ex-gang member who was “saved” from her gang life by Tohru and her mother, and Saki Hanajima, who was easily accepted by Tohru despite her ability to sense and send out psychic waves.

At first, Tohru is just living with Kyo, Yuki, and Shigure, as well as meeting other members of the zodiac, with the curse being more of a curiosity more than anything else.  However, over time, Tohru slowly uncovers the disturbing tale of what the curse of the zodiac actually is, as well as what will eventually happen to those who are cursed, in particular Kyo the cat, whom Tohru takes an immediate liking to (even if she doesn’t realize it herself).  Despite not knowing how, Tohru vows that she wants to break the zodiac curse once and for all.

Fruits Basket can probably be described as a romance comedy to start with, which slowly progresses more into a darker and mysterious story as the series progresses as Tohru learns more about the Sohma family and the curse, though the story continues a certain level of humor all the way through.  The reader is also always reminded about the curse which, even if it isn’t the topic of the story at any particular moment, is always festering just beneath the surface.

The story is also largely character driven, which many of the characters having quite a bit of depth.  With each layer that is exposed about each character, another layer always seemed to lie underneath it.  If there is one thing I didn’t necessarily like about the character background stories, it’s that many of them were so similar.  For the family background stories for the Sohma family members, that wasn’t necessarily a problem, but many of the other characters also seemed to have somewhat similar family problems as well, to the point that it made one wonder whether anyone but Tohru actually was raised in a non-dysfunctional home.  However, this problem isn’t really something that harms the story too much, I don’t think.

The art seemed to be pretty much OK to me.  I haven’t read enough manga to really know what I should consider to be “good” or “bad” art quality necessarily, but I thought it did a sufficient job at helping portray the attitude of a particular scene.  The main complaint I have here is that many of the later character designs often either looked similar to each other or similar to earlier characters.  The early characters didn’t really have this problem.  It should be noted that the mangaka did have surgery on her drawing hand and arm in the middle of making this manga, so whether that had anything to do with it, I’m not sure.  However, there were times when I wasn’t exactly sure what character I was looking at.  Also, and I’m not sure whether this is a problem with the dialouge bubbles or with how the translation was handled, but I think it was occasionally difficult to figure out who exactly was saying what, though that was more of a minor problem.

Overall, Fruits Basket was a very entertaining and satisfying manga series to read (if not rather dense, in the sense that it typically took me a full hour to read one volume, which is unusually long for me).  It is somewhat long at 23 volumes, but if you’re not intimidated by the length, and you aren’t put off by a shojo series, then I would definitely recommend giving Fruits Basket a try.

First Read: December 2005 – August 2009
Do I Own: Yes
Do I Recommend: Yes