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It's both surprising and unsurprising that the final volumes of Natsuki Takaya's
Fruits Basket didn't make it onto Sandy Bilus'
compiled critics' "Best of 2009" list: it also failed to show in many manga critics' lists, as well. There are many reasons for this, I suppose: that fact that it's been so commercially successful for so long (Tokyopop boasts that it is its
best-selling title, with over two million copies in print; the last volume was on
The New York Times Best-Seller list) means that manga pundits probably feel that it hardly needs the championing that other, lower-selling manga needs (and it was winding down in 2009: just the two dénouement volumes).
Meanwhile, this same popularity, plus the fact that it's good enough to be disqualified from the "it's popular trash that signals the end of Western (and Eastern!) Civilization" critical approach, not to mention its genre (
shõjo), rendered it nearly invisible to many mainstream superhero fans and alt-comics readers. It's surprising because it's extremely rare for serial comics, in Japan or the U.S., to stick the landing, which
Fruits Basket did. (It's also rare for the manga and anime versions to be equally satisfying, which is another
Fruits Basket accomplishment.)
Fruits Basket is what I personally define as a "fat" text: something that can support discourse on its themes and engender different (but germane) responses in its readers. (As opposed to a "thin" text, in which the author lays it all out for you on the surface, with no real entry point for interpretation: for example, I find Neil Gaiman's novels to be disappointingly "thin.") Here are some of the discussions I can see stemming from an examination of
Fruits Basket. [1]
(A quick summary: female high-school student Tohru Honda, a perpetually upbeat, homeless orphan, befriends two male classmates, members of the Sohma family. Passed down among the generations of the Sohma family is a curse in which unlucky individuals turn into animals from the Chinese Zodiac when touched by a member of the opposite sex: among these count Tohru's friends, Yuki the rat and Kyo the cat (the cat's exile from the Zodiac is a legend retold twice throughout the 23-volume series). Tohru becomes privy to this family secret, and many others, such as the abuse that Akito, the "god" and head of the clan, inflicts on all the rest.
By the time the series winds down in Vols. 21-23, Takaya's clean line, which earlier on in the series lent itself well to the rounded cuteness of the anthropomorphic Zodiac-animal forms of the characters and Tohru's girlishness, has narrowed as the characters have become longer and leaner with age. In Vol. 22, especially, the panels are almost all close-ups of characters' reaction shots or long vertical panels that, through composition, reflect that without the family curse/bond, the afflicted Sohmas are suddenly, and for the first times in their lives, on their own. If there are multiple characters in a panel, their body language is entirely focused on reflecting the hard-won intimacy of their relationships, signaling that emotional and physical distance has been breeched.
Spoilers follow.)
Cyclical
David Welsh touched on what I took away as
Fruits Basket's ultimate analogy: how Takaya uses the cycle of the Zodiac to mirror the cycle of abuse . Just as each Zodiac animal represents a personality type, which in turn is personified by a character, each character represents how different personalities respond to abuse. (Which is a big part of the Sohma family's attraction to Tohru: having been loved (by her deceased single mom), she has the ability to love and serve as a role model for how to love; she maintains her capacity for joy no matter how grim her circumstances.)
This is probably the easiest to demonstrate through the character of "Rin" Isuzu, the horse. There are attempts to "break her spirit" throughout the series: she has a nervous breakdown due to parental neglect, and is later thrown of a window when she has a confrontation with Akito. In the simplest terms, once the Zodiac Sohmas actively (and collectively) learn self-love (as opposed to selfish love) and decide to pursue healthy relationships, they break the cycle of abuse, which in turn breaks the curse.
Repression
Via the curse, Takaya was able to somewhat delicately examine the effects of emotional and sexual repression as adolescents grow into adulthood. For example, Ritsu, the monkey, queers the over-determined gender-related issues of the curse by his transvestitism (which "calms" him); Ayame, the snake, turns women into fetish objects via the cosplay costumes he sells; several characters channel it through violence; and so on and so forth. As is often the case, however, the physical restraint necessitated by the curse heightens dramatic impact when the characters touch (a scene in which characters embrace with a sheet hanging on a clothesline between them is extremely emotionally charged).
Next Week: Part Two: Feudalism and Love TrianglesNote:
[1] Though they have probably been discussed ad infinitum in print media and message wings of the Internet I do not come across very often.
Images [©2007 Natsuki Takaya, English translation ©2009 Tokyopop]
Kristy Valenti currently works for The Comics Journal and Fantagraphics Books, Inc.
Uncharted Territory is © Kristy Valenti, 2010
