Hatori Sohma

Hatori cuts the figure of a strikingly handsome man, tall with a build that is lean yet muscular. His black hair carries a faint dark-blue cast and falls to the nape, while shorter bangs sweep to the right in an M-shaped parting that keeps his left eye partly hidden. Sharp purple eyes complete a face he usually wears with a grave, understated look.

Professional dress is second nature to him, and he is seldom out of a suit. His usual outfit runs to a black vest, long or short sleeved, over a white collared shirt with a blue tie, finished with brown trousers and shoes. When his work calls for it, he throws his white physician's coat over the whole ensemble.

Composed and grave at nearly all times, Hatori can strike people as cold or forbidding, which leads many to misread him. He has long since decided that the cursed Sohmas are not meant to love or be loved. Behind the stern exterior, however, sits a man of real warmth who consistently sets other people's happiness ahead of his own, so much so that Ayame calls his kindness both his finest and his most damaging trait. He is sincerely glad that Kana was able to build a happy life with another man even after forgetting him, and he aches over his failure to shield the younger Zodiacs from Akito.

The memory-suppression power he wields has left him thinking little of himself. He carries heavy guilt for wiping the recollections of Yuki's childhood friends and for erasing the memories of Momiji's mother at her own request, a guilt that partly explains how close he stays to Momiji. In earlier years he would erase a person's memories without hesitation whenever his father or Akito ordered it, and that, along with the loss of Kana, convinced him he deserved no happiness of his own. Reuniting with Mayuko finally cracks that belief open. For all his seriousness, he still plays the deadpan straight man to Shigure and Ayame's antics and shows an occasional mischievous streak, once tricking Yuki and Kyo into an accidental smiling photo.

Hatori arrived two months early, a consequence of carrying the Dragon's spirit, and grew up in a chilly, strict home that shaped his stoic manner. Illness took his mother while he was in elementary school and his father during his high school years, and it was from that father that he inherited the family's generations-old memory-suppression technique. He came of age alongside Shigure and Ayame, the three attending school together and becoming known as the Mabudachi Trio, with Hatori serving as Ayame's secretary during Ayame's turn as student council president. Though he holds the Dragon of the zodiac, his cursed body becomes a tiny eight-centimeter seahorse rather than a true dragon, a form he guards so jealously that he resorts to blackmail to keep it from being seen.

While still in high school he was ordered to erase the memories of Yuki's first friends after Yuki transformed in front of them, an act Yuki begged him not to carry out; the incident strained their bond for years. Later he wiped the memories of Momiji's mother, who could no longer bear to remember her son. After becoming the Sohma family's private doctor, Hatori met Kana, assigned as his office assistant. Her cheerfulness thawed him, and the two fell in love, though his curse made him hesitant to hold her close.

When the couple asked Akito for permission to marry, Akito flew into a rage and struck Hatori hard enough to nearly blind his left eye, then twisted the blame onto Kana until she sank into guilt-ridden depression. To spare her that suffering, Hatori erased her memories of their time together; before she forgot, Kana apologized for failing to protect him. She soon left the estate and eventually married someone else, while Hatori withdrew back into himself, determined to keep anyone else from being hurt as he had been.

Across the series he tends to the various Sohmas, warns Tohru away from the family for her own sake, and quietly begins to heal. After Shigure engineers a reunion with Kana's best friend Mayuko, who had loved Hatori from afar, the two grow close, and by the epilogue they are openly dating. In Fruits Basket Another he and Mayuko are married with a daughter, Kinu, and he is described as a father who worries endlessly over her.