Tohru Honda

"Wow, Kyo, that's amazing! The way you make rice balls, you're really talented. Incredible! I have no idea."

- Tohru Honda flattering Kyo's rice ball making

Tohru Sohma (née Honda) is the main protagonist of the Fruits Basket series. She is the love interest of Kyo Sohma. She is mother of Hajime Sohma & two unnamed children.

In Japanese version, she was voiced by Yui Horie from the original 2001 version of Fruits Basket (The former of which also voiced Ayu Tsukimya from Kanon and Yuki Cross from Vampire Knight), and later on will be voiced by Manaka Iwami from the new 2019 version of Fruits Basket.

In the English version, she is voiced by Laura Bailey (Who also vocied Chun-Li) and returned to reprise her role in remake/reboot of Fruits Basket.

Personality
She is noted for her cheerful optimism, altruistic nature, and great sympathy for others. Takaya created her with an unusual perspective on the world, to balance her empathy. She 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. Yuki once describes her as not the sort who sees her life as a "glass half-empty." Tohru is so kind-hearted that she cannot make herself say mean things while playing a wicked stepsister in a class production of Cinderella, 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 describes herself as an excellent artist who loves cooking and cleaning. In the original Japanese, Tohru habitually speaks formally, but not always correctly. She picked up this habit from her dead father, Katsuya, after he died when she was three, as a way of replacing him in her mother's eyes and from her father's family's statements that she was probably the daughter of a man her mother had an affair with. 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.

History
She moves into the house with Shigure Sohma, Yuki Sohma, and later Kyo Sohma after Yuki and Shigure discovered her living in a tent on their property. She worked part-time to support herself when she was living on her own, and continues to despite moving to Shigure's house. Her two best friends are Arisa Uotani and Saki Hanajima. Tohru is very grateful to the Sohmas and loves every bit of time she spends with them.

Trivia

 * Takaya gave Tohru a name normally used only for men because she likes to give masculine names to female characters "to balance them out." In addition, Takaya chose to have other characters address her as "Tohru-kun," using an honorific typically used for boys, because she thought it was "a more dignified form of address."
 * Her First Japanese Voice Actress, Yui Horie also voices Yuki Cross from Vampire Knight series and Tsurara Oikawa from Nura: Rise of the Yokai Clan series.
 * Her English Voice Actress, Laura Bailey also voices Maka Albarn from Soul Eater series, Tokine Yukimura from Kekkaishi, Kushina Uzumaki from Naruto Shippuden, Lust from Fullmetal Alchemist/Brotherhood, Blaze the Cat from Sonic the Hedgehog series, Tier Harribel, Hiyori Sarugaki (episodes 206+), Mashiro Kuna from Bleach, Beastmon from Digimon Fusion and Xing Huo from Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle.