Solution to Fruits Stickers

At first glance, this puzzle contains a number of “fruit stickers”. Each numbered sticker has two words, and is represented by one of five colors and one of nine shapes. A few of the stickers seem to include notches. Below the collection of 37 stickers is a “gift tag” with 37 numbers arranged into 14 different groups. Further below that is a smaller set of similar stickers. These smaller stickers are blank, and some also have notches, but one other has a hole punched out.

First, solvers must discover that the two words in each sticker can form two phrases or compound words when the same word is placed after the first word and before the second word (i.e. Bronze AGE and AGE Group). The complete list of words can be found below:

After finding all 37 words, solvers can use the information from the tag to arrange these stickers into fourteen different groups, like below. When grouped correctly, the words discovered from the before-and-afters clue 14 new words, which happen to be the “god”, the 12 animals of the Chinese Zodiac (in the correct order), and one other member. Having only one word to associate itself with, ALLEY may be ambiguous to figure out, but at this point solvers may realize that these fourteen entities are related to the 14 cursed members of the Sohma family from the anime Fruits Basket. To get to this realization, solvers that may be more familiar with the anime can either notice how “Fruits” in the puzzle title is pluralized and note the words “package”, “family from the east”, and “Curses!”. Those who aren’t familiar with the anime, however, may be able to find this data set by “questioning the existence of god”. That is: googling something along the lines of “Chinese Zodiac with god” to get Fruits Basket as one of the top hits. Doing so will confirm that the last entry should be associated with “cat”.

The gift tag in the puzzle indicates that the stickers come from the fourteen characters from the anime. The “curse” of the Sohma family involves each character turning into a specific animal when they are hugged by the member of the opposite sex (archaic, we know). As such, solvers should then associate each Sohma family member to their respective group of stickers. After associating the name of each character to their group of stickers, solvers may realize that the number of syllables in each character’s name matches the number of stickers associated with that group. In realizing that, solvers may discover that each sticker represents a different Japanese kana character with the shape indicating the consonant sound (a syllable that is just a vowel sound is represented by a circle), and the color indicating the vowel sound. The notches and the hole are a representation of the dakuten and handakuten diacritic marks that respectively appear next to a kana character as a " or a °. The sticker within a sticker, which is associated with the character KYO, is representative of the digraph that’s written in kana as KI with a smaller YO. Note that names in Japanese are typically written in Kanji and not Katakana or Hiragana. This “not traditional” way is hinted by the final sentence of the flavor text. After realizing all of this, solvers should be able to reason which sticker properties are associated with which consonant or vowel sound. The full list of shapes and colors and their associated consonant and vowel sounds follows below:

By making the correct associations, solvers can translate the blank stickers at the end of the puzzle to form one final sentence in Japanese, which when translated states the answer to this puzzle, SALAMI.

ANATA NO PAZURU NO KOTAEHA SARAMI DESU = The answer to your puzzle is salami.