Love Triangle // Fruits Basket Ep. 4 Review

What Year Is She? : Episode 4 Review

Otaku Voice Staff

Soma Kagura is such a sweet innocent girl sheepishly hiding behind the tree at the beginning of Fruits Basket episode 4. Except she isn’t sweet or innocent, and is in fact incredibly dangerous. She immediately flies into the house destroying eveything in her path including poor Kyo. Apparently they are to wed one day in the future, and his martial arts sabbatical has set her off.

The Soma family clan has some interesting quirks about them beyond their propensity to turn into animals. They must have some weird psychic connection bringing them all to the nexus of Shigure’s house and maybe to Tohru herself. Obviously Kagure is here for Kyo, but later in the episode she is drawn to Tohru’s sensible charm.

Soma Kagura

I am not especially fond of Kagura. Kagura is probably the most typical caricature of a tsundere character, flowing from sweet to aggressive and back in the blink of an eye. Its cute that she beats up Kyo for no other reason than he ran away without calling her, but she seems to find more and more reasons later. Its a bit exhausting to watch her come in and try to steal the show. I definitely believe that she has a crush on Kyo from her actions. She has passion for him, but calling it love is wrong. There is not a lot of reason to believe she has anything more than a weird infatuation with him. I assume we aren’t really supposed to believe that it is anything more than that at this point anyway.

It is great that they actually start to explain how the Soma family has continued on for so many generations. Shigure makes a point that there have been marriages from outside of the family, but there is a quiet quip in there about inter-familial marriages working out better. That is left up to interpretation as to whether there is an unknown outside force working against the marriages, or the obvious issue with physical affection. Now we know that Soma members can embrace members of the opposite sex without issue. Tohru catches it quickly that Kagure is able to hug Kyo without problems leading to Shigure’s pop quiz as to Kagure’s spirit animal. Too bad Tohru can’t guess it.

The Year of the Boar (Pig)

Turns out that Kagure is from the year of the Boar. She is absolutely adorable in her little piglet form. Kagure is also just as tsundere too. My initial guess was the tiger spirit. She seems to have a ferocity to her and a connection to the cat spirit. It would make sense for her to be a tiger. I guess the logic behind her boar spirit is her selfishness. A common characteristic of those born in the year of the boar/pig. Our Heroine isn’t able to figure this out before she conveniently transforms running into the newspaper boy.

Yuki swiftly moves in to push him out of the way, and that is about all he did this episode. He also makes mention of growing strawberries. This was definitely a Kagure and Kyo episode for sure. Shigure has more to do this episode since he lets out that there are at least two secrets the Soma family is hiding from Tohru. Kagure lets slip that there is something more that she can do, and there is some issue with outside of the family marrying members of the Soma clan.

I am glad that Kagure is not going to be a permanent fixture of the show. Fruits Basket episode 4 felt aggressive compared to most slice-of-life shows and really added to the complexity of the love triangle. We saw in the last scene that Tohru is splitting her efforts between Kyo and Yuki. She grabs books on martial arts and on strawberries. Calling back to her conversations with both Kyo and Yuki.

[Sources and Further Reading]
[Episode 3 Review]
[Images via Crunchyroll]