“Pain, suffering. It's pointless to just think about those things. The traveler didn't. That may be stupid to some people but that's not stupid to me. Yuki... Kyo... when you close your eyes, what do you think?”
Momiji Sohma Quotes
2 quotes from Fruits Basket, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“I've gained freedom...and yet... it's so lonesome...”
Momiji's curse breaks without warning, in the middle of an ordinary day, and the first thing he feels is not relief. To Akito a freed zodiac member is a piece of the god torn off; to the rabbit himself it is this. The series has spent its length treating the curse as the thing everyone wants gone, and the rabbit is the first of the main cast to get the wish and report back, and the report is that a bond can be a prison and still be the only place you belonged. Kureno had said something similar years earlier and nobody listened. What the line commits the story to is an ending in which breaking the curse is not the finish line: every character who is freed afterward has to face the same empty afternoon, and the manga's last volumes are about what people build in it.
Read Momiji Sohma's story from the start
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The story Momiji has just told is the most foolish traveler: a man who gives away his money, his clothes and finally his own body to people who lie to him, and dies content on the strength of a gift that was not one. Momiji is the rabbit, and the series treats him as the child of the cast until it does not. His mother asked to have her memory of him erased because she could not bear having given birth to an animal, and he visits her as a stranger. So when he tells a story about a fool who keeps giving to people who take, he is not being naive. He is describing the only terms on which he has been allowed to love anyone. The question at the end is aimed at two boys who think about pain constantly, from a boy who has decided not to, and the show does not say he is right.