Fruits Basket crushes your emotions under the tip of its fingers.
Creative Staff:
Story/Art: Natsuki Takaya
Translation: Sheldon Drzka
Lettering: Lys Blakeslee
What They Say:
How did it all begin? What experiences make and break us into the people are today? Yuki’s abusive childhood and Kyoko Honda’s rocky young adulthood take center stage as these longstanding questions are answered at last…And speaking of the stage! The culture festival arrives, and that means one thing—time for a play! The crazy casting makes this topsy-turvy Cinderella almost unrecognizable. Will hidden feelings come to light as the gang ad-libs their lines?!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Surrounding Tohru’s class’s play at the school festival, Cinderella-ish, is a load of some of the heaviest Fruits Basket material to date. A good portion of it is flashback too, but it never feels too out of place. And even when it does, it’s gripping.
The first flashback focuses on Yuki as he regales his vice president of the student council of his childhood. Yuki has been holding in all his emotions and baggage from his childhood from everyone, not really able to share it with his brother, who he’s not that close to, or Shigure, who he probably just doesn’t trust, and certainly not his parents, who put him in the situation in the first place. He’s been holding it all in, but releasing these thoughts out into the open is therapeutic. He realizes his own shortcomings having said it out loud. He realizes what he has to do, but more importantly what he WANTS to do to try and get over these psychological barriers in his life.
The second is of Tohru’s mother, Kyoko. She was a delinquent, the Red Butterfly, feared by most and hated by the rest. But she was changed by a flighty teacher in junior high that…kind of fell in love with her.
There are obvious problems with this storyline, like the fact that he’s probably about 22 or 23 at the oldest and she’s somewhere between 14 and 16. Also he’s a teacher and she’s a junior high school student, not to mention one of his students, even if she never shows up to class. But these stories are never really ok…It’s just something I have to gloss over for what is a greater narrative on the whole.
The story itself is telling of Kyoko, always denied her own existence by her parents and those around her, and who turned to rebellion as a way of attention, finally getting the love she deserved as another human being. It just so happens to be by her teacher.
Another moment in this story, which is better because they’re not teacher-student anymore but still ugh, is after Katsuya passes away and Kyoko is left without purpose for herself. Her purpose up to this point was getting attention from a world that was ignoring her, then to live with Katsuya and their daughter, Tohru. But after his death, she’s left listless. She has several wake up calls, longing after him and almost jumping off a bridge in a fit of delusion before a child cries out for their mother. Kyoko remembers her own purpose of caring for Tohru, who she’s neglected up until that point.
There’s also the other story of how Yuki and Tohru first met, neither knowing the other was going to change their lives in the future. Yuki, going through all this trauma from his parents, the Sohma family, and especially Akito, flees the Sohma house and finds Kyoko in a frenzy over Tohru being missing to a few cops. Yuki sees this, is terrified, but remembers a girl with that description on his way there. He runs back to find Tohru, who starts chasing after the only other human she can see, and is safely returned home thanks to Yuki, who has Kyo’s hat for a variety of circumstances. The connection between the three goes beyond this house, though they had no idea until recently.
Also, they did a play in between somewhere called Cinderella-ish. It was Cinderella-ish.
In Summary:
This is Fruits Basket moving toward a conclusion for at least its main characters, who we’ve of course spent the most time with. Yuki is away from the loneliness that’s consumed him his entire life up until now thanks to Tohru and the student council. And Tohru is there every step of the way with words of encouragement.
Content Grade: A
Art Grade: A-
Packaging Grade: A
Text/Translation Grade: A
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Yen Press
Release Date: December 16, 2016
MSRP: $20.00