Personality Tohru is depicted as polite, optimistic, extremely kind, and selfless. Several other characters, including her friends Kyo,
Rin, and
Hanajima, tell her she needs to look out for her own interests and not shoulder everyone else's burdens. At the start of the series, she is living in a tent rather than staying with her friends,
Arisa Uotani and Saki Hanajima, to avoid being a burden to them, and she has an after-school job as an office janitor to pay her
tuition fees so that her grandfather does not have to. and when her mother told her the bedtime story of how the cat was
excluded from the Chinese zodiac, in sympathy she declared she wished to be born in the year of the cat. Tohru tends to be especially concerned for people with minor illnesses. This comes from the circumstances of her father's death, when Katsuya was originally diagnosed with a
fever but eventually died of
pneumonia. She was raised by her mother,
Kyoko, until Kyoko died in a car accident shortly after Tohru entered high school, a few months before the series starts. Tohru treasures her mother's photograph and vowed at her death to keep Kyoko the most important person in her life. Tohru is distressed whenever she feels she is being "unfaithful" to her mother, for example, when she gets failing marks on end-of-term exams, thus endangering her promise to graduate high school, or when she falls in love with Kyo. Tohru eventually realizes that her vow is an attempt to cling to the past, and that Kyoko would have wanted her to move on and fall in love with someone else.
Life with the Sohmas A few months before the series begins, Tohru's mother died in a car accident, leaving her an
orphan in the care of her grandfather. When his house needs remodeling, she moves into a tent on land that turns out to belong to the Sohmas. When her tent is buried in a landslide during a rainstorm, Shigure convinces her to move in with him and Yuki as housekeeper in exchange for room and board. As she settles in, Kyo Sohma arrives to challenge Yuki to a fight. In the confusion, Tohru accidentally embraces him and he transforms into a cat, and when she stumbles into Yuki and Shigure, they transform as well into a
Rat and
Dog, respectively. The Sohmas explain that their family is cursed, and they are possessed by spirits of the
Chinese zodiac plus the
cat legend says would have been included if it had not been tricked by the
Rat into missing the induction feast (see
Zodiac origin stories). Tohru promises to keep their secret, under the threat of having her memories of them erased—a compromise agreed to by Akito Sohma, the mysterious head of the family, who orders Kyo to live with Shigure as well.—and they in turn are slowly affected by her presence. Yuki is especially touched by Tohru's request that, if her memory is suppressed, he will remain her friend, which no one had asked him before. Kyo initially appears to dislike Tohru, but he, like Yuki, is "drawn" to her kind heart and gentle demeanor. However, his inability to express his feelings results in frequent impulsive angry comments to Tohru, for which he usually ends up apologizing. Gradually Tohru meets the other cursed members of the Sohma family, and through her kindness and sympathy is able to help
Hatori,
Ayame,
Kisa,
Hiro, and
Ritsu. Her encouragement to Kisa also helps Yuki face his own self-doubts and accept becoming president of the
student council; that she is the lost little girl he once led home, an act that showed him that he was not as unneeded by others as Akito claimed. Tohru becomes particularly close to Kyo after his foster-father
Kazuma Sohma forces him to reveal the monstrous "true form" of his curse; although initially repulsed, Tohru stays with him even after he violently tries to push her away. Both Yuki and Kyo fall in love with her, though neither tells her. As she learns more about the zodiac curse, Tohru becomes increasingly distressed by its cost to her friends—especially
Momiji Sohma's separation from his little sister, Momo, who does not even know (but suspects) they are siblings, and her friend Arisa's longing for
Kureno Sohma, who cannot see her because he is bound to Akito. When she learns that the feared Akito is the
"god" of the zodiac and of the bet he made with Kyo, which could result in the cat being confined for life, she resolves to break the curse.
Rin, She eventually receives encouragement and hints from Shigure, Meanwhile, Tohru's feelings for Kyo develop and she eventually admits he is the Sohma she wants the most to free, because she loves him. This, however, only distresses her further, as she feels she is being unfaithful to her mother's memory. As she follows him, she meets Akito, who believes that Tohru's kindness to and acceptance of the cursed zodiac members has made them unfaithful to her, weakening their "bond" to the point that Momiji and Hiro have been freed from the curse. As she angrily confronts her, however, Tohru realizes that she is trapped by the past as much as she herself has been, by clinging to her mother's memory, and she extends her hand in friendship to Akito and introduces herself as a new start. However, before Akito can accept, Tohru falls down a nearby cliff when the ground collapses in the rain. and also allows Akito to finally break away from the roles she has held for most of her life. Tohru survives the fall and is hospitalized. As she recovers, Akito accepts Tohru's friendship, and comes to accept both the person she is, instead of the god she has believed her father wished her to be, Meanwhile, Yuki, who has realized that what he wants from Tohru is an unconditional "motherly" love, not the love of a woman, breaks the zodiac curse and all the Sohmas are freed. ==Reception==