A Plum on the Back

The campus holds its cultural festival, and a day meant for fun grows tense once two Sohma visitors appear. Hatori and Momiji have been dispatched by Akito to look in on Yuki and the others, though the purpose behind the errand stays uneasy.

Senior girls talk Yuki into wearing a dress for the festival, an ordeal he finds thoroughly humiliating, while Kyo insists yet again that the stray cats crowding him are not his own. Hatori, who also happens to be a doctor, turns up alongside Momiji because Yuki skipped a scheduled appointment. Over the course of the visit Tohru learns that Yuki's airways have always been delicate and that asthma attacks plagued his early childhood, though the condition has been steadily easing. Momiji, meanwhile, hugs Tohru and pops into a rabbit, confirming that he too belongs to the cursed zodiac.

This 2001 installment adapts chapters 8 and 9 of the manga and maps onto two 2019 episodes, Let's Play Rich Man-Poor Man! and Perhaps We Should Invite Ourselves Over. It premiered in Japan on August 16, 2001, and aired in the United States on January 20, 2003, carrying the opening For Fruits Basket and the ending Chiisana Inori.