Momiji's Mother

A fair-skinned, strikingly beautiful woman of middle age, she has green eyes and long, wavy light-blonde hair that falls near her lower back, framed by loose bangs and usually gathered with a single strand left free. Both of her children clearly take after her. In the years following Momiji's birth her worsening state showed physically: pale and unkempt, dark shadows beneath her eyes, her hair hanging loose, and bandages wrapping her forearms that hint at attempts to cut her wrists.

Freed of her memories of her cursed child, she comes across as a warm, deeply maternal woman who adores her husband and daughter and who feels an odd fondness for Momiji even while believing they are no relation. It was a very different woman who existed before the memory erasure. Consumed by depression, she had broken down so completely that she preferred death to raising Momiji, and only after he was gone from her mind could she return to the gentleness she now shows.

She left Germany after meeting her Japanese husband at college, and their life together was happy until Momiji arrived. Because cursed Sohmas are born two months early, she was already anxious when she first held him, and his transformation into a rabbit broke something in her. She rejected him with her whole being, unable to smile, lashing out at the sight of him, and referring to him only as that thing. Her despair drove her to attempt suicide more than once.

Her husband decided she would never recover while she still remembered Momiji, and after Hatori confirmed that she truly wished it, she consented to have the boy erased from her mind, naming his birth her greatest regret. Within a couple of months she could smile again, and she and her husband went on to have Momo. In the chance encounters that follow, she assumes Momiji is simply another Sohma child, brushing off Momo's remarks about how alike the two look. Only near the end, when Momiji visits after his curse breaks, does she offer him a first truly heartfelt smile.