Naruto Uzumaki, a mischievous fox spirit who can take human form, lives in a village on Mount Oinari with no friends to his name. The village chief sends him down to the human city with one order: don't come back until you have made a friend and brought him home. There Naruto meets Kuroda, a washed-up painter restoring a canvas called Symbol, and his young assistant Takashi, whose murder leaves Naruto the prime suspect. This 1997 one-shot is the fox-spirit story Kishimoto reworked into the ninja manga two years later.