Tohru Honda of Fruits Basket is an orphaned high school student who, at the start of the story, begins living with Shigure, Yuki, and Kyo Sohma in exchange for housekeeping.
She loves to cook, describes herself as an excellent housekeeper, and has an after-school job as an office janitor to pay her tuition fees to avoid being a burden on her grandfather.
She is depicted as polite, optimistic, extremely kind, and selfless; several other characters, including Kyo, Rin, and Hanajima, tell her she needs to look out for herself and not shoulder everyone else's burdens. In the original Japanese, Tohru habitually speaks formally (see Honorific speech in Japanese), but not always correctly, a habit she picked up from her father, Katsuya, after he died when she was three, as a way of replacing him in her mother's eyes. Tohru's mother, Kyoko, raised her alone until she died in a car accident shortly after Tohru entered high school, a few months before the start of the story. Tohru repeatedly calls Kyoko the most important person in her life and treasures her photograph; when she falls in love with Kyo she feels guilty of being "unfaithful" to her mother's memory.