Tohru's Grandfather

The grandfather is a short old man with grey hair along the sides of his head. His eyes are usually crinkled into a squint, and a smile rarely leaves his face.

He is a warm, good-natured man, patient with the noisy, suspicious daughter and grandchildren who share his roof and understanding when Tohru plainly misses the Sohmas rather than settling in with him. That gentleness has its limits, though: when his grandson sneered at Tohru for living among men, he slapped the boy, scolded him, and apologized to her, bluntly conceding that his daughter's family could be nasty at heart. In the manga he seems to have grown senile, often calling Tohru by her late mother's name, a habit he later reveals he keeps on purpose to hold Tohru and Kyoko together in memory.

Once a schoolteacher, Mr. Honda was a strict father whose bond with his son Katsuya stayed cold for years, the two estranged well into Katsuya's youth. Losing his wife to illness softened him into the kindly man he became, and when Katsuya later brought Kyoko to meet him, he alone among the Hondas gave the couple his blessing. He outlived his son, who died of pneumonia, and stood by Kyoko and Tohru afterward, then took in his sixteen-year-old granddaughter once Kyoko was killed in a road accident.

Tohru stayed under his roof for four months until the house required remodeling, after which he moved in with his daughter's family and later brought Tohru back once the work was finished. Sensing how the relatives made her feel unwelcome, he stood up to them and told Tohru she should live wherever she would be happy, letting her leave with Yuki and Kyo. A year after Kyoko died, he set a packet of her favorite dish by her grave, and after straining his back he confided to a visiting Tohru that Katsuya and Kyoko had come to him in a dream, and that he yearned to be with them once more. He appears a final time at the hospital following Tohru's fall.