“Sometimes I think the whole world is conspiring to destroy my house.”
Shigure Sohma Quotes
3 quotes from Fruits Basket, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
The dog, a novelist, and the adult whose house keeps getting destroyed. The 2001 anime left him as comic relief; the manga and the 2019 series reveal a man who decided years ago how the curse would end and who he would use to end it.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“Because of my objectives, no matter what the obstacle may be...no matter who I use...even if the result will hurt someone, it will be fine with me.”
The 2001 anime ended before this side of him existed, and viewers who only know that version remember a perverted uncle who writes novels and teases high school girls. The manga's Shigure is that man too. He is also the one Sohma who decided, years before Tohru arrived, that the curse would end in his lifetime and that he would be the one to make it end, and he chose his methods with open eyes: he brought a stranger into the house knowing what she would do to the family, and he used Akito's own loneliness against her. The line has no villainy in its tone. It is a man reporting his terms. Whether the series forgives him is the reader's call; it is careful never to have him ask. The dog is the loyal animal, and Shigure's loyalty was always to a result rather than a person.
“I became an author so I wouldn't have to.”
Yuki has asked, at night, why a grown man cannot keep a normal sleep pattern, and Shigure's answer doubles as the only career advice in the series. Compare it with Ging Freecss telling Gon to enjoy the side trips at the end of Hunter x Hunter, another absent-adult speech about wanting the thing next to the goal rather than the goal. Ging's is delivered as wisdom and treated by the story as slightly monstrous. Shigure's is delivered as a gag and turns out to be the truest thing he ever says about himself: he chose a profession with no schedule because a schedule is a form of being told what to do, and no Sohma has ever been told what to do more thoroughly than the ones Akito keeps close. His editor Mitchan spends the series in tears over deadlines he ignores. The freedom is real and it is petty, which is the whole character.
Read Shigure Sohma's story from the start
Every line above is a fragment. The manga is where the fragments come from, and the print edition is the one this site checks its quotes against.
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Links on this page are affiliate links, which cost you nothing extra. They never influence what appears on this site or what the commentary says about it.
Three teenagers who turn into animals when hugged live under the roof of a novelist who deliberately let a fourth move in, and the roof is the running casualty. Kyo comes through the ceiling in his first scene. Kagura takes the paper doors. Shigure's complaint is the comedy engine of the early volumes, and it is also the first hint of what he is: the one adult in the house, standing back, remarking on the damage rather than preventing it. The reboot makes the point sharp by keeping this joke exactly as light as the original did while surrounding it with scenes that show him arranging the collisions. His house gets wrecked because he keeps inviting the wreckers in, and he keeps inviting them because he wants to see what happens. The line is a landlord's sigh from a man who is really the experiment's designer.