Isuzu's Mother

Isuzu's mother is a fair-skinned woman in middle age with wavy, dirty-blonde hair that falls to just below her chin, and like her husband her eyes remain shadowed and unseen. She favors plain blouses and long skirts, adding an apron when she is at work in the kitchen.

She first comes across as a kind, doting mother, always smiling and seemingly devoted to her daughter. The tenderness was an act. Once Isuzu voiced doubt about her parents' happiness, the facade shattered into an angry, entitled, and violent woman who smashed things in her fits of rage and abused her daughter both emotionally and physically. Even in calmer moments she showed a cold selfishness, abandoning Isuzu without a moment's regard for the harm she had caused.

At some point she married and gave birth to Isuzu, cursed from birth by the Horse's spirit, and the household maintained a careful image of a loving family. That image broke the day Isuzu gently asked whether her parents were truly happy; her mother's smile collapsed and she flew into a screaming rage, hurling and breaking objects. Both parents had secretly grown to see their daughter as a burden, repressing the resentment for years until it spilled over into recurring abuse, even as Isuzu clung to the hope they might return to the family they once appeared to be.

After a frail, middle-school-aged Isuzu collapsed in the street and was taken to the hospital, her mother arrived only to say it would be better never to see her again, no longer able to love her. Hatsuharu's blistering rebuke of her selfishness visibly startled her, though Kazuma had to physically hold him back. She has since lived entirely apart from her daughter. Isuzu remains haunted by the abuse, yet she also recalls the gentler treatment of earlier days, and she comes to unconsciously see Tohru Honda as the caring mother she never truly had.