(high to mid-high voice and can sound cheerful, kind, and worried)

(from wiki)

She is noted for her cheerful optimism, altruistic nature, and great sympathy for others.

Tohru is an orphaned high school student who, after meeting Yuki, Kyo, and Shigure Sohma, learns that thirteen members of the Sohma family are possessed by the animals of the Chinese zodiac and turn into their animal forms if they are embraced by anyone of the opposite sex or when their bodies come under a great deal of stress.  As the series progresses, Tohru meets the rest of the zodiac and the family's mysterious head, Akito Sohma, and resolves to break the curse that burdens them.

Tohru is depicted as polite, optimistic, extremely kind, and selfless. Several other characters, including her friends Kyo, tell her she needs to look out for her own interests and not shoulder everyone else's burdens. At the 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, but not always correct.  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.