Helen: These days nearly every one of TokyoPop’s well-known series has been license rescued (and then some). The most glaring exception is Fruits Basket, which was wildly popular and my catalyst for becoming a manga fan. Although maybe its wild popularity is why: The fact that there still are so many volumes on the second-hand market is why no one wants to re-license the series (even digitally), but without it being in the public eye with a publisher push I’m afraid not as many newer fans are finding it.
Muse: I first encountered Fruits Basket during that preteen phase of my life where I’d just discovered manga and wanted to read everything that I could get my hands on, and I’m pretty sure that it was the second or third manga series that I ever read. The local library only stocked the first few volumes and didn’t seem to have grasped the fact that manga were sequential, not stand alone books, so it was also my first experience at being frustrated for not being up to date and then much later being frustrated at following a currently-published series and not knowing how it was going to end.
Helen: I actually found it a few different ways: First at a big, non-bookstore here in the US (I believe a Target), then a girl at my camp told me all about it, and then finally I discovered that a friend in high school was buying it — it really was everywhere!
Muse: Fruits Basket was also the first series I’d followed since Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh that found its way to mainstream popularity outside of the animanga fanbase; I remember it being on the bestseller list years before graphic novels got their own listing. News stories about “this strange animanga phenomenon” used Fruits Basket as an example. And for a lot of people, it was their gateway series into this hobby. However, despite the fact that it was so huge and means a lot to a certain generation of fans, I agree that it feels like the newer set of fans don’t know it at all, and that’s a real shame since this is such a fantastic series.
Helen: The premise probably doesn’t come off as different and exciting for manga fans who grew up with more series than we had. Tohru is an optimistic, peppy shoujo heroine who ends up on her own after a hardship and stumbles into living with a family of attractive young men, some of whom clearly have romantic feelings for her almost from the get-go. But there’s a supernatural twist to this situation as well: The Sohma family has an ancestral curse where various members transform into the creatures of the Chinese zodiac when embraced by someone of the opposite gender. Author Natsuki Takaya milks for all of the humor and sadness you could imagine.
Muse: At the time, it really felt like it was a no-brainer that it was popular — the series was equal parts cute and funny while still being able to cover some dark themes without giving the readers thematic whiplash. It would go to shocking and unexpected places, but it never felt like the series was trying to be “dark and edgy” just to be taken seriously. Even with the supernatural premise, Fruits Basket touches on themes and issues that are just as serious in the real world as they’re treated in the story, ranging from the topic of creating and maintaining relationships with loved ones to the severity of coping with emotional and physical abuse. I remember thinking several times that everyone in this manga needed a hug… and then remembered that over half the cast wouldn’t be able (let alone willing) to return one. This series puts your emotions through the wringer.
Helen: I’ve read and re-read Fruits Basket several times over the years and I’ve flip-flopped between enjoying the series, feeling it was cloyingly overdramatic and so unrealistic I couldn’t connect with it anymore, and back to enjoying it again, seeing the melodrama now as something half realistic and half representative for the intense and often isolated lives these characters are living and rebelling against. While some of the characters start the story with happy moments in their lives none of them have a happy life; even Tohru’s “normal” friends have problems in their lives that are greater than most teenaged, petty dramas. Most of the Sohmas have gone through or are going through abuse during the course of this series, so much so that I feel the need to give the series a trigger warning for physical and emotional abuse perpetuated by broken characters against other broken characters. It’s never glamorized and each character deals with it in a different way. The story quietly says that while some people can deal with this alone, many people need support and help from loved ones — that you can grow beyond this. And grow they do, as the 23 volumes cover Tohru and her house-mates Yuki and Kyo through all three years of high school, and through countless changes both within the closed, Sohma world and the larger world as they become adults.
Muse: I don’t think that this manga wouldn’t have been nearly as successful if it weren’t for the strength of its characters. While some characters do get more focus than others as a result of the overarching story, Fruits Basket still has an impressive cast size, and one way or another each character has their backstory and motivations explored. Their relationship to the curse, with each other, and with Tohru all come into play. The author’s ability to juggle all of these different subplots is amazing (although not perfect; I’m of the strong opinion that the arc with Yuki and the student council went on far longer than it needed to) and as a result each character feels like more than just that. Early 2000s manga tropes aside, these characters feel like they could be real people.
Helen: And a lot of these tropes are still rather familiar! Tohru is a poor girl and the Sohmas are quite wealthy (how
Muse: There’s not a lot more that I can say directly without spoiling it, but Fruits Basket continues to have a strong reputation for a reason. I feel that it’s a shoujo staple because it has something for everyone in there — I dare you to find an unrelatable recurring character (that’s not Akito). While the writing does have some pacing issues, that’s the worst that I can say about it since the final product ties things up so well. When people talk about shoujo, they talk about Fruits Basket.
