A new Sohma appears!
Creative Staff:
Story/Art: Natsuki Takaya
Translation: Alethea and Athena Nibley
Lettering: Lys Blakeslee
What They Say:
School’s no longer an endless put of anxiety and solitary lunches for Sawa thanks to the Sohmas. She’s joined the student council and made new friends who don’t abandon her no matter how painfully awkward or useless she is.
They don’t even get angry when she screws up or starts blabbering gibberish! Though social interactions are still daunting, people don’t seem as scary anymore—at least, until another Sohma appears!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
I was a bit lukewarm on the first volume of Fruits Basket Another, beyond it being a continuation of Fruits Basket, a manga I love. But this volume has really grown on me. Getting further into Mitoma’s story and knowing the circumstances that surround her living situation, mother, and entire psyche makes this a much more interesting manga than it was before.
Mitoma’s mother does…not seem like the nicest woman. She doesn’t seem to physically abuse Mitoma, a plus! But she is hella mentally abusive, throwing every sort of insult and controlling action she can. It’s not a great way to live and, this time around, it’s the Sohma’s turn to heal someone else’s heart and life.
I love the way Takaya does this. The characters are just allowed to be, gushing their hearts out to each other not forcible, but because they are maybe—just maybe—starting to feel comfortable around each other. And in Mitoma’s case, comfortable around people at all. I don’t often read the backs of manga volumes, but I do read the ones I review, and it takes a frightening amount of abusive upbringing to get to the point where your immediate assumption when you make friends is that they will be annoyed by you, or straight up spiteful of you, just because of how you act. But that’s what her mother has done to Mitoma, and it’s very easy to see that even in the few scenes that’s shown with them.
There are, of course, new Sohmas introduced in this volume. Most notably, Shiki Sohma (Akito and Shigure’s kid, mentioned via saying that Shiki is the son of the head of the Sohma family), but also: Chizuru and Hibika (Ayame and Misa’s elder daughter and younger son, respectively); Rio Mosca (Hana’s son, and apparently Hana married a foreigner! That family is constantly shrouded in some mystery…); and Mina Sohma (whose parent is not textually apparent, even if they are heavily physically apparent; I googled it to confirm myself). The Sohma family yet grows, and figuring out which of these new characters is the child of which character from the original Fruits Basket is its own kind of fun sleuthing.
In Summary:
I’ll admit that I was wrong about Fruits Basket Another from just the first volume. Some manga take a while to get the ball really rolling, and this is one of them. Fortunately, the ball is now fully rolling by the end of the second volume as we delve further and deeper into these characters, specifically Mitoma, instead of just being a who’s who’s kid of the Sohma family.
I also quite like how they haven’t yet shown any of the parents of the Sohmas yet, thus definitively setting this series apart from the original. They can yet appear in cameos, but that’s all I’d want of them. This series is about Mitoma, Hajime, Mutsuki, and the other Sohmas. Let it be.
Content Grade: B
Art Grade: B-
Packaging Grade: B+
Text/Translation Grade: A
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Yen Press
Release Date: November 13th, 2018
MSRP: $15.00
