Hatori Sohma Quotes

The riddle in Hatori's arc is what snow becomes when it melts, and the answer the story wants is not water but spring, which is what Kana said when he asked her and what Tohru says later, word for word, without knowing she is repeating a woman whose memory Hatori erased. He is the family doctor, and his job includes wiping the memories of outsiders who learn the secret. He had to do it to his own fiancée after Akito injured his eye and Kana could not stop blaming herself. So when Hatori says the snow will melt, he is quoting the person he made forget him, to a girl who happens to think the same way, and he says it in the voice of a man reporting a forecast. The line is hopeful only if you know what it cost him to keep saying it.

Hatori is the one man in the story who knows exactly how memory works, because erasing it is his job, and this sentence is the least he could have said about it. It reads like a proverb and it is quoted as one. The scene deserves better: a doctor who removed his own fiancée's memory of him, who visits her once a year and watches her not know him, offering a general observation about how people romanticize. It is deflection, and the writing knows it is deflection, which makes it a good beat and a poor quote. Pulled out of the scene the line is just a truism about nostalgia that any character in any drama could say. The specific Hatori is in the next thing he does, which is go back to work.