Book: Fruits Basket, Volume 9 by Natsuki Takaya

Pages: 192 (Paperback)

Thoughts: In Volume 9, we meet a couple of the student council members, when Yuki finds the student council room trashed.  We also meet Kureno Sohma, who meets Arisa while she’s working at a convenience store.  They end up meeting again, and Arisa wonders if she’ll ever see him again.  We also have a flashback to Hanajima’s childhood, which was really difficult because of a psychic power that she can’t control.  She believes she used her power to almost kill a boy; she finally transfers to a new middle school, where she meets Arisa and Tohru.  She starts to learn how to control her abilities so she doesn’t hurt them.  We also meet Kyo’s father!  He insists that Kyo needs to be confined after he graduates, and turns to Kazuma (the man who “adopted” Kyo) for help, but Kazuma says he won’t help confine Kyo.  Rin, who’s out of the hospital, visits Shigure so she can ask him a question.

I wasn’t sympathetic to Kyo’s dad, and I found that I just couldn’t like him.  Honestly, the parents in this series are terrible!  Well, the little we see of them.  They’re either really protective of their kids, or they want nothing to do with their zodiac children.  The only exception would be Kazuma, but it’s partly because he feels bad about the way he treated his grandfather (who was the cat before Kyo).  Although he does care for Kyo, which you can definitely see in the series.

As usual, we have the character list at the beginning, which usually has a new character added to it with each passing volume.  We also have the fan art, the side notes about video games and we learn about the year of the snake.  All in all, this is a really good volume, and shows what could be Kyo’s future.

Rating: 5 out of 5.  We learn more about the characters, and it definitely adds to the story.