Fruits Basket

• 1. Introduction

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  Fruits Basket is a Japanese manga by Natsuki Takaya, and its title comes from a circle game played by schoolchildren. In that game, a leader gives each seated child the name of a fruit. When the leader calls a child's fruit, that child jumps up and hunts for a new seat. Tohru Honda, the heroine, sits down to play it in kindergarten. Her classmates do not want her in the game, so they name her onigiri, a rice ball. Tohru thinks onigiri sound delicious and has no idea she is being shut out. Only when every other child has been called does she realize that a rice ball is not a fruit.

  That small, painful scene hangs over everything that follows. Years later, Tohru ends up under the roof of a family whose members are bound to the animals of the Chinese zodiac. What exactly ties them to those animals? Why does a girl who never fit in become the person who can reach them? And how did a story first printed in a girls' magazine keep finding new audiences on the page, on screen and on stage?

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• 2. A Tent in the Forest

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  Tohru Honda is a high school student when her mother dies in a car accident. Her grandfather takes her in. A few months later he decides to remodel his house and asks whether she can stay with a friend until the work is done. Tohru has two close friends, but she does not want to impose on either of them. Instead she buys a tent and pitches it in a forest near her school.

  One day, while exploring the woods, Tohru finds a house that belongs to her popular classmate Yuki Sohma. He lives there with his cousin Shigure. Soon afterwards a landslide flattens her tent, and the Sohmas invite her to move in. Yuki and Shigure are showing her to her new room when a third cousin, Kyo, crashes through the ceiling. He challenges Yuki to a fight on the spot.

  Tohru tries to stop the brawl and stumbles into Kyo by accident. He turns into a cat right in front of her. That is how she learns the family secret, and she promises to tell no one. The Sohmas let her stay, though Tohru cannot yet guess how much darker the matter is than a cat in a classmate's arms.

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• 3. The Zodiac Curse

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  Thirteen members of the Sohma family are possessed by animal spirits. Twelve of them carry the animals of the Chinese zodiac. The thirteenth is Kyo, who is possessed by the cat, the animal the zodiac left out. When a cursed Sohma is weak, stressed or embarrassed, the body changes into the animal form. The same happens if someone of the opposite gender who is not possessed hugs them.

  Kyo's place in the family is the harshest of all. Because his cat was shut out of the zodiac, the clan bullies and abuses him in the same way. His exclusion echoes Tohru's own childhood game, though the story lets the reader connect those two moments for themselves.

  At the head of the family sits Akito, who holds the position of God from the Chinese legend. Akito both holds the Sohmas together and chains them to their spirits. The zodiac spirits themselves are vengeful, and Tohru meets them as the story deepens. She sets out to break the curse, and her warmth toward the afflicted slowly becomes a positive force in their lives.

  The curse is bound up with something else Takaya planted in the family tree. Even the cursed members' names hide a code, one that runs back through an older Japanese calendar.

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• 4. Names and Belonging

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  Natsuki Takaya named most of the twelve zodiac-possessed Sohmas after archaic month names from the former Japanese lunisolar calendar. Each name matches the month associated with that person's animal. A few characters break the pattern. Kureno and Momiji have names that were swapped by mistake. Kyo, as the cat, sits outside the zodiac and so follows no such rule. Yuki's name was chosen before Takaya had settled on the system, so it does not fit either.

  The naming game has a counterpart in Tohru's heart. She comes to link the childhood game with the Sohma household, and she fears she fits among them no better than an onigiri fits in a basket of fruit. In volume 1, Yuki and Kyo bring her home from her grandfather's house. At that moment she begins to feel she truly belongs with the Sohmas.

  The manga marks the change with a quiet image. Tohru pictures herself as a child again, hearing the word onigiri called out in the game. This time the word no longer marks her as an outsider, because she has finally found her place. The way that scene lands on the page owes a great deal to Takaya's drawing.

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• 5. Shadow and Ink

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  Critics who wrote about Takaya's art often returned to one skill: she shows a character's mind without a single line of dialogue. One reviewer wrote that her real strength is not that the pages look good, but how well they communicate mood and emotion. Facial expressions do part of the work. Shading and shadow do the rest, marking the gap between Tohru's private feelings and her public front, and the punishing intensity of Kyo's feelings for Tohru.

  The story itself drew a mixed but admiring response. Reviewers called it intellectual. Even the light-hearted first volume hints at something darker behind it, which makes the reader question everything that happens. Some felt later volumes came close to overloading readers with angst. Others doubted the sheer number of bad parents. One reviewer joked that good parents are as common as penguins in the Sahara, since each one in the series is neglectful, smothering, unfeeling, abusive, misguided or dead.

  Jason Thompson, in Manga: The Complete Guide, gave the series three and a half out of four stars. He found it surprisingly sad and praised its well-defined characters. He also judged it neither particularly well drawn nor incredibly witty, yet called it a fascinating manga, like a sweet, melancholy dream.

  There is also a commercial footnote to its success in English-speaking countries. The books were sold in bookstores rather than comic book shops, which are considered a predominantly male domain.

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• 6. Bestseller Numbers

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  By December 2018, Fruits Basket had more than 30 million copies in circulation worldwide, and more than 18 million of those had sold in Japan. It first ran as 136 chapters in the magazine Hana to Yume, from July 1998 to November 2006. Hakusensha gathered them into 23 volumes, released between the 19th of January 1999 and the 19th of March 2007.

  In North America and the United Kingdom, Tokyopop held the English license, and Chuang Yi published it in Singapore. Madman Entertainment imported the Singapore edition to Australia and New Zealand. For Tokyopop, it became the best-selling manga series, with more than 2 million copies sold by 2006. Its Ultimate Editions, which combined two volumes into one hardcover, got mixed reviews. They reproduced the first two volumes exactly, with the changed page numbers and earlier errors left uncorrected. After Tokyopop stopped publishing, Yen Press took over the license and began releasing the Collector's Edition in June 2016.

  The English volumes broke records. Volume 15 rose to fifteenth place on the USA Today Top 150 Bestselling Books, the highest position any manga volume had ever reached in the United States. Volume 18 debuted at the top of the Nielsen BookScan list. In 2007, despite a slow market, it remained the second highest-selling manga series among the Bookscan companies. The final English volume spent 12 weeks on the New York Times manga bestseller list.

  The awards followed. The manga won the 2001 Kodansha Manga Award in the shōjo category, and the Best Manga prize at the 2007 American Anime Awards.

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• 7. Cranes and Reboots

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  The first anime adaptation premiered on TV Tokyo on the 5th of July 2001. Akitaro Daichi directed the 26 episodes at Studio Deen, and the final one aired on the 27th of December 2001. Some parts of the plot deviated from the manga, including the mannerisms of Momiji and Shigure. The themes were sung by Ritsuko Okazaki. King Records released the series on nine DVD volumes between the 29th of September 2001 and the 22nd of May 2002.

  Japanese audiences embraced it. It ranked third on Anihabara's list of top televised anime in February 2002. The June 2002 issue of Animage placed it first among the twenty best anime series in Japan. It won an Animage Anime Grand Prix award in 2001. Even in 2006, five years after it left the air, it placed 93rd on TV Asahi's list of Japan's 100 favorite animated TV series.

  Reviewers did not agree on the look of the show. Animerica critic Julie Davis found the characters superficially pretty and cut out like paper, with really gigantic eyes. Her fellow reviewer Urian Brown called the designs sleek, classy and refined.

  The story ended before the manga did. In April 2005, Funimation asked convention attendees to help fold 1,000 origami paper cranes. In Japanese folklore, folding 1,000 cranes grants a wish. Fans reached the goal by the end of the 2005 convention season, and Funimation sent the cranes with photographs to Studio Deen and Hakusensha to plead for a second season. That wish took more than thirteen years to come true.

  In November 2018, a new adaptation was announced. At Takaya's request it had a new cast and staff, with TMS Entertainment producing and Yoshihide Ibata directing. It set out to adapt the entire manga. The first season ran for 25 episodes from the 6th of April to the 21st of September 2019. The second ran from the 7th of April to the 22nd of September 2020. The third and final season, Fruits Basket: The Final, aired from the 6th of April to the 29th of June 2021.

  Broadcast schedules created odd delays. Episodes 9 and 10 were held back internationally because of French Open coverage in Japan. In March 2020, Funimation announced that the English SimulDub would be delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic, starting with episode 4 of season 2. After Sony acquired Crunchyroll, the series moved entirely under Crunchyroll.

  The 2019 version earned its own honors. At the Crunchyroll Anime Awards, its second season won Best Drama. In February 2022, The Final took three awards at the 8th Anime Trending Awards, including Anime of the Year.

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• 8. Sequels and Stages

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  On the 4th of September 2015, Takaya began Fruits Basket Another, a sequel series, in HanaLaLaOnline. In August 2017 it moved to Manga Park, and Yen Press announced its acquisition of the manga in November 2017. The sequel was first announced to end on the 3rd of December 2018. Then in March 2020 Takaya announced it would return with chapter 13, split into three parts. The final part appeared in September 2020 and was called tentatively the last. The series closed with its fourth volume on the 18th of February 2022.

  A shorter spin-off, The Three Musketeers Arc, ran for three chapters in Hana to Yume. They appeared on the 20th of April, the 5th of June and the 5th of July 2019. A second round began on the 20th of April 2020, with its final chapter on the 5th of August 2020. The chapters were collected in the fourth volume of Fruits Basket Another.

  The franchise spread into every format imaginable. In 1999 Hana to Yume issued a limited-run drama CD with a four-chapter original story and an entirely different voice cast. Takaya produced a 101-page art book published on the 16th of April 2004. She also produced two fan books, Cat and Banquet. The shelves filled with plushies of the zodiac animals, wall scrolls, keychains, figurines and school supplies. Score Entertainment published a collectible card game. In August 2022, a collaboration with Hello Kitty debuted.

  The theatre took it up too. In 2008 the all-male troupe Gekidan Studio Life announced a stage adaptation using only performers making their stage debuts. It ran for two weeks at the Galaxy Theater in Tokyo from the 25th of February 2009. A second production, Fruits Basket The Stage, ran from the 4th to the 13th of March 2022 at Nihonbashi Mitsui Hall, with a sequel in October 2023. Fruits Basket Stage: The Final is scheduled for the 18th to the 27th of October 2024 at Hulic Hall Tokyo.

  On the 18th of February 2022, the compilation film Fruits Basket: Prelude premiered in Japan. It recaps the 2019 series, adds a prequel episode about Tohru's parents, and includes an original story by Takaya set after the series ends. The theme song is Niji to Kite by Ohashi Trio. In the United States and Canada it ran for three days starting on the 25th of June 2022. In the United Kingdom it had a single-day screening of the English dub on the 20th of July 2022.

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