Another Fruits Basket?? Wait…
Creative Staff:
Story/Art: Natsuki Takaya
Translation: Alethea and Athena Nibley
Lettering: Lys Blakeslee
What They Say:
Sawa Mitoma, a nervous, skittish girl who prefers minimal human interaction, has just started high school, and it’s already not going well…
…until she meets the “it” boys—the “prince-like” Mutsuki and the sharp-tongued Hajime. But little does she know, they’re Sohmas?! It’s Fruits Basket…again!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
So we’re back in the world of Fruits Basket, now with fewer zodiac curses and just as many flummoxed protagonists. I reviewed every volume of the new releases of Fruits Basket that Yen Press put out, and revisiting that series was a boon to reading this manga and understanding (or at least Googling to remind myself) some of the more minor cameos, or those—and sometimes kids of those—that wasn’t in the anime.
This first volume was…solid. I think that’s the highest praise I can give to the volume on whole, though I did enjoy reading it. But there were also some flaws to it that I don’t think will be resolved simply by reading more chapters and volumes.
Hajime (Tohru and Kyo’s kid) and Mutsuki (Yuki and Machi’s kid) are great compliments to their parents, providing a look back on who Tohru, Kyo, Yuki, and Machi were in high school without directly recreating their characters. Hajime is much more tempered than Kyo was. Mutsuki seems to have inherited his parents’ organization skills, as well as his uncle’s flamboyance, of all things.
Other Sohmas, at least in this first volume, are Riku and Sora Sohma (Hatsuharu and Rin’s kids, though that’s apparently not confirmed, but really who else’s kids are they gonna be?), and Kinu Sohma (whose relation is not revealed in this volume, and I couldn’t figure it out without Googling it). So there are Sohma’s all over the place. There are also some cameos by the former class president, now teacher, Takei Makoto. Saki’s little brother, now also a teacher, Megumi Hanajima. Yuki’s niece (as in Machi’s brother’s kid), Michi Manabe. And the former Yuki fan club member’s kid, Ruriko Kageyama. She now runs the Sohma fan club at the school. I forgot how ridiculous this manga can get so quickly.
And yes that last paragraph was basically a reference for me later.
But this volume isn’t all fun nostalgia. Where Harry Potter and the Cursed Child succeeded, Fruits Basket Another fails. Look, the characters from Fruits Basket fell in love, had some kids, and now I want to see their kids do stuff. Seeing Harry and Draco’s kid running around in Slytherin was fun, even if it wasn’t that great. What I really wanted out of Fruits Basket Another was Mutsuki and Hajime running the student council with secondary and tertiary characters supporting them.
What I got is Sawa Mitoma, ostensibly the main character who I have not mentioned until the seventh paragraph in this review. She’s, as I referenced before, flummoxed and seems to have an inferiority complex because of some weirdly traumatic experience in her childhood by who seem to be terrible kids. And by the end of the first volume, we don’t really know why any of that happened, just that she’s finally trying to get over it with, of course, the help of the outreached hand of the Sohmas. She adds mystery where there doesn’t really need to be any.
The best part of this volume was a younger Mutsuki and Hajime talking about when their parents first told them about the curse, which provides insight into how Tohru, Kyo, Yuki, and Machi parent and how their kids react to the news of this fantastic curse that once plagued generations of their family. That’s the good stuff.
In Summary:
I’m left underwhelmed, but not disappointed, by this first volume. I think it has a chance to be a solid high school comedy/drama manga, but I don’t think this is exactly what I’m looking for in a Fruits Basket follow up. I’ll keep reading, and I want to keep reading because I want to see the story Takaya has laid out for Mitoma. But the draw has suddenly and unexpectedly become largely moot.
Content Grade: C+
Art Grade: A-
Packaging Grade: B+
Text/Translation Grade: A
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Yen Press
Release Date: July 24, 2018
MSRP: $15.00
