start of the series, she is living in a tent rather than staying with her friends, Arisa Uotani and Saki Hanajima, to avoid being a burden to them, and she has an after-school job as an office janitor to pay her tuition fees so that her grandfather does not have to. Yuki once describes her as not the sort who sees her life as a "glass half-empty." Tohru is so kind-hearted that she cannot make herself say mean things while playing a wicked stepsister in a class production of Cinderella, and when her mother told her the bedtime story of how the cat was excluded from the Chinese zodiac, in sympathy she declared she wished to be born in the year of the cat. Tohru describes herself as an excellent artist who loves cooking and cleaning. In the original Japanese, Tohru habitually speaks formally (see Honorific speech in Japanese), but not always correctly. She picked up this habit from her dead father, Katsuya, after he died when she was three, as a way of replacing him in her mother's eyes and from her father's family's statements that she was probably the daughter of a man her mother had an affair with. Tohru tends to be especially concerned for people with minor illnesses. This comes from the circumstances of her father's death, when Katsuya was originally diagnosed with a fever but eventually died of pneumonia. She was raised by her mother, Kyoko, until Kyoko died in a car accident shortly after Tohru entered high school, a few months before the series starts. Tohru treasures her mother's photograph and vowed at her death to keep Kyoko the most important person in her life. Tohru is distressed whenever she feels she is being "unfaithful" to her mother, for example, when she gets failing marks on end-of-term exams, thus endangering her promise to graduate high school, or when she falls in love with Kyo. Tohru eventually realizes that her vow is an attempt to cling to the past, and that Kyoko would have wanted her to move on and fall in love with someone else. Life with the Sohmas A few months before the series begins, Tohru's mother died in a car accident, leaving her an orphan in the care of her grandfather. When his house needs remodeling, she moves into a tent on land that turns out to belong to the Sohmas. When