Katsuya Honda

Katsuya cuts a handsome figure as a young adult. His hair reads as black, though colored cover artwork lends it a faint purple cast, and his eyes are a dark brown so deep they verge on black.

Sharp-eyed and insightful, Katsuya could read the reasons behind people's behavior, grasping for instance that Kyoko acted out only because she craved someone's attention and affection. He cared nothing for convention, meeting the middle-school Kyoko openly, treating her to meals, and eventually marrying her despite the age gap, her delinquent past, and his family's objections. He adored his wife and treasured their daughter Tohru.

By his own account he trained toward teaching with no real appetite for it, following the path his father and relatives expected, and confessed he had built walls around his true self to satisfy them; one upside, he joked, was the freedom it bought him to bend a few rules. His mother's death from illness helped steer him toward a pharmaceutical career. To the young Kyoko he came across as an aloof sort who had mastered the art of feigning politeness.

Katsuya first met Kyoko while working as a student teacher at her middle school, and the two grew nearly inseparable, with him teasingly dubbing her 'Miss No Eyebrows' for her delinquent styling. They talked over the weekends about nearly everything, and he confided how insecure he had been as a boy and how the kindly manner he used to win people over was a practiced act. When Kyoko's parents chose to disown her, packing her bags as she stood at the door, Katsuya appeared and proposed on the spot. Most of his relatives opposed the union, but his father stood by the decision.

Their brief marriage was a joyful one and gave them Tohru, to whom Katsuya grew deeply attached and whose name he selected. He died of pneumonia while away on a business trip, plunging Kyoko into despair so severe that she once wandered off toward the ocean and left the small Tohru behind, snapping out of the daze only when a nearby child and her mother argued loudly about a train ticket. Years later, as Kyoko herself dies, she pictures Katsuya reaching for her hand, and the couple is reunited at last.