Kyo's Father

The man bears an unmistakable likeness to Kyo, sharing his features while wearing a thinner, harsher, perpetually furious version of them. Both the manga and the 2019 anime give him dark hair and equally dark eyes.

Kyo's father is consumed by bitterness, selfishness, and spite. For years he abused both his wife and his son, and he pinned his wife's death squarely on Kyo, ignoring how his own cruelty helped drive her to it. To him the boy is not family or even human but a beast that ought to be caged and hidden away forever, a conviction he clings to across the decades.

Because a child born with the Cat's spirit is treated as an outcast under Sohma custom, the father found himself shunned alongside his son and stripped of much of his standing, a decline he blames on Kyo, exposing him as a small, materialistic man. By the time the curse finally lifts and Kyo comes to face him, he has lost all reason, still seeing a monster before him and bracing for the revenge he assumes is coming.

He fathered Kyo and spent the marriage quarreling with his wife over her devotion to the boy, whom she guarded fiercely. Both mother and child were pushed to the margins of the Sohma family, and the combined weight of shielding Kyo, enduring that rejection, and fighting with her husband eventually broke her; she ended her life in front of a train. He laid the blame on Kyo and abandoned him.

Later he sat down with Kazuma Sohma, the man raising Kyo, to press for the boy's confinement once school was over, only to be coldly told that Kazuma would do anything to keep Kyo out of that solitary room. When Kyo himself comes seeking some form of reconciliation, the man rejects him violently, cursing him for existing and his late wife for having given birth to him, and insisting a normal life is impossible. Kyo leaves saying he will return, then is sick on the way home. Whether the two ever mend things is left unanswered, though the story implies they never do; his grandson Hajime later refuses to regard him as family at all.