Tohru Honda

*This article is about the **Tohru Honda** character. For articles that share the same name, see Toru.*

## Profile

### Likes

Cooking, cleaning, the color pink, romance, making friends, animals, helping others, honesty, love, flowers, good behavior, people with both inner and outer beauty, rice balls

### Dislikes

Lies, bullying, her loved ones in danger, prejudice, Kyo's stubbornness, selfishness, rudeness, manipulation, disrespect, confinement

## Relationships

### Parents

Katsuya Honda (Father)
Kyoko Honda (Mother)

### Other relatives

Tomohiro Honda (Grandfather)
Unnamed Grandmother †
Eshima Honda (Aunt)
Unnamed Uncle
Aneko Honda (Cousin)
Souji Honda (Cousin)
Unnamed Grandfather
Unnamed Grandmother

### Partner(s)

Kyo Sohma (Boyfriend)
Ken Ichijouji (Boyfriend)
Davis Motomiya (Crush)
Jaime Santiago (Girlfriend)
Yuki Sohma (Former Crush)

## Voice Actors

### English

Laura Bailey

**Tohru Honda** (本田 透, *Honda Tōru*) is a main character in the series. She is the only daughter of Kyoko and Katsuya Honda.

Tohru is a student at Kaibara Municipal High School. She loves to cook, describes herself as an excellent housekeeper, and has an after-school job as an office janitor to pay her tuition fees to avoid being a burden to her relatives. She is depicted as a polite, optimistic, independent, extremely kind, and selfless person with a nurturing personality.

## Description

### Appearance

Tohru is a very cute fair-skinned and slim girl of average height. She has straight, waist-length, brown hair and an eyebrow-length fringe that frames her round, brown eyes. She has two long strands of hair that lay over her shoulders. She usually wears bows in her hair which are often pink or yellow in color, although sometimes they're blue or purple. She either wears a large one in the center of the back of her head or two smaller ones that pull her front strands of hair to the sides. Outside of school, she either has her hair untied, in pigtails, in a ponytail, or in braids.

Her school uniform is a classic naval-styled Japanese school uniform. The uniform has a blue mini-skirt with pleats and ruffles at the hem, and a white and blue top with a blue jacket. She wears navy blue socks that go up to mid-shin, and brown slip-on shoes. This is the outfit she is most commonly seen in, although she is known for wearing other short dresses.

Tohru wears simple and practical clothes when she is not in her uniform, typically dresses or skirts. Her work uniform as a janitor is a light blue shirt and pants. She wears whites gloves and styles her hair in pigtails, which she covers with a white bandana. Her swimsuit is a baby pink one-piece with daisies. The only time she dresses up is when other characters like Ayame Sohma or Mine Kuramae dress her. She wears a large ballgown as a costume when she plays the "not-so-evil stepsister" in the school play Cinderella-ish.

### Personality

Tohru is an extremely kind-hearted, optimistic and nice girl who sees the good in everyone she meets and is willing to help them no matter what shows. She does not hold any grudges toward those who have wronged her, especially in regards to Akito, who has physically and emotionally scarred most of the Zodiacs. Despite losing her father at a very young age, her mother in her teens, and even living in a tent for a while, she always has a smile on her face, remaining sweet, hardworking and positive. She also is considered to be very airheaded, selfless and considerate of other people's feelings.

Tohru is incredibly patient, polite and considerate when it comes to people's feelings, and her approachable and loveable aura draws people to her, making them feel understood and accepted. She is a very nurturing girl with unconditional love and immense empathy who is willing to help the Sohmas work through their traumas and emotional problems without expecting anything in return. Because of this, Yuki Sohma and Isuzu Sohma cannot help but view Tohru as the loving mother they never had. She is also very protective of her friends; helping them and standing up for them without a second thought, despite her own fears and insecurities.

However, Tohru can be a bit stubborn and easy going partly because she wants to take care of her friends, but really because she can’t face her own trauma. Behind her smile she has serious self-esteem issues and a tendency to hide her true feelings of worry, fear, and loneliness and instead project her usual cheerful exterior to give emotional support to the people around her and to not make them think lesser of her. She has great difficulty with standing up for herself and never says a word of complaint, even if others treat her badly, because she believes that she doesn’t deserve any kindness for herself.

Tohru is also incredibly fragile, has a deep-rooted fear of being abandoned, and constantly lives in fear of her loved ones disappearing and leaving her alone. After her father Katsuya's death, Tohru became terrified that he was taking her mother away and that Kyoko didn’t love her because “she didn't resemble her father”, especially since her relatives on her father’s side of the family had commented on how Tohru might be the daughter of another man. Because of this, Tohru started to mimic Katsuya’s overly-polite speech and adapted *Keigo* into her speech—which she uses incorrectly and in situations where it is unnecessary—to keep her mother all to herself. And after Kyoko passes away, Tohru is overcome with fear that all their moments together and her very existence will fade away, so she promises herself to always put her mother first in her heart, never talks about her in the past tense, and develops an over-attachment to photos of her. This shows that Tohru's inability to move on from Kyoko’s death is weighing her down and keeping her from moving on in several aspects of her life.

However, as time goes on, Tohru learns to speak up, make self-serving requests once in a while, and allow other people to help her and feel worthy of that help. She even lowers her guard enough to let her admit all of her insecurities and fears to Kyo, including how she had secretly resented her father for almost “taking” her mother away from her. After gaining the knowledge that Kyo is going to be locked up after graduation and that the Zodiacs will stay by Akito’s side until death, Tohru makes it her goal to break the Zodiacs' curse to free all of them. In the process, she grows more assertive, bold, and embittered towards the circumstances of the curse; she stubbornly argues with Rin that she won’t stop before she succeeds, she does not feel the need to apologize when she gets into a “fight” with Kagura Sohma, and she decides to directly oppose Akito by doing the exact thing she was told to not do. Tohru herself mentions that she will never go along with something she does not agree with.

Tohru later admits that her wish to break the curse is not as much of a selfless wish as she would have liked it to be. In reality, she only wants to break the curse for Kyo’s sake, because she refuses to let anyone or anything to take him away from her and because she wants to be together with him, since he had become the most important person to her. Although she feels guilty about it because she fears she’s demeaning her mother's memory by placing a new person in her heart, Tohru learns to live her life while still having a special place for her mother in her heart. And although she can be selfish in wanting to pursue Kyo, she is selfless in wishing him happiness, even if it’s without her. Upon breaking the curse, Tohru remains the self-assured, stubborn, and honest girl she had become, yet the similarly air-headed, kind-hearted, and wise girl she always has been.

## Etymology

* The name **Tohru** means “transparent” 透 (**Toru**).
* 本田 **Honda** (**Hondo**) means "root ricefield" or "origin ricefield", 本多 "root/origin many" or 誉田 "honor ricefield").

## Trivia

* Tohru is fiercely self-reliant and pays for all of her own school expenses and clothes from her part-time salary. In connection to this, she works at Momiji’s father’s company building as a cleaner.
	+ Tohru’s co-workers love her enthusiasm and talent for lightening the workload.
* Tohru chooses clothes based on how sturdy and practical they are, rather than their looks, so she dresses very plainly. Natsuki Takaya mentions that Tohru is quite “unfashionable”.
	+ But since she recently had a bit more money, her newer clothes are somewhat cuter.
		- When she wears particularly adorable outfits, they are usually things Shigure picked out.
		- Tohru has a maid’s costume in her possession but doesn’t wear it, and keeps it safely in the dresser she uses for western clothes.
	+ Tohru receives presents from Shigure quite often.
	+ The boys that teased her when she was younger presumably did it because they liked her.
	+ Tohru is very quick to respond when people come down with colds since her father died of complications from a cold. But when she gets sick herself, she is slower to react.
	+ Tohru is a very good cook, and can cook about any dish; Japanese, Western, or Chinese.
	+ She is also very good at cleaning, as she got Shigure’s “disaster of a kitchen” under control in the blink of an eye.
* Tohru’s day-to-day clothing is based on how long a garment will last her, its robustness, and how good it looks.
* *Keigo*, the polite language Tohru always uses, is mentioned to be her most noticeable character trait. Takaya jokingly says that she wouldn’t recognize Tohru without her overly polite language. This, however, does not exist in English languages so it is incredibly hard to replicate or translate Tohru’s polite language, which is why some of Tohru’s character is “lost in translation”.
* Tohru sometimes makes Yuki and Kyo’s *bento*, as in their lunch boxes for school.
* Despite not being able to transform, Tohru is represented by a rice ball with a “plum on the back”.
* Although she is born in the year of the Dog, Tohru wants to be born of the year of the Cat since she feels sorry for the Cat for being tricked in the Zodiac Legend.
* Tohru is a very deep sleeper, and is the type of person who could sleep anywhere and even through an earthquake. Apparently, her son, Hajime, inherited this trait of hers.
* Tohru was supposed to have a younger sibling.
* Kyoko’s, Tohru’s mother, “color” was red, which was inspired by her former nickname, “The Red Butterfly”. Katsuya’s, Tohru’s father, “color” was white, since he was described to be a straightforward man. A mix between the two colors results in pink, which is Tohru’s trademark color as well as her favorite one.
* When Tohru was hospitalized, the following events occurred;
	+ Tohru practiced smiling because she wanted to smile when she met Kyo again.
	+ People constantly wanted to visit Tohru at the same time, but because the patient’s rooms are small, there was always a queue. At one point, Shigure fell asleep in the waiting room because of it.
	+ Kakeru Manabe bought her a some CDs and visited her, both in Komaki Nakao’s and his own behalf.
	+ Machi Kuragi didn’t visit her, but she gifted her a bath set via Yuki, because she really appreciates everything Tohru has done for Yuki.
	+ Momiji skipped some of his classes to visit Tohru and also gifted her a bunny plushie.
	+ It is implied that Yuki visited Tohru and stayed by her side more than anyone else during her hospitalization.
* Tohru can swim very fast. But she actually doesn't know how to breathe while swimming, and she is frantically swimming to somewhere she could catch a breath.