Amuse Creative Studio released the main cast of Oedo Fire Slayer -The Legend of Phoenix-, the anime adaptation of Hikuidori (Fire Eater), which is the first book in Shōgo Imamura’s Ushūboro Tobigumi historical novel series. Additionally, the studio revealed the main visual and confirmed that the anime will air in January 2026.
The cast of the anime includes:
- Yūichirō Umehara as Gengo Matsunaga
- Shūichirō Umeda as Shinnosuke Torigoe
- Subaru Kimura as Torajiro
- Nobunaga Shimazaki as Hikoya
- Kenshō Ono as Kaji Seijuro
Shōgo Imamura released the Ushūboro Tobigumi novel series in 2017. Shodensha has published 12 volumes of the novel, as well as a spinoff short story collection, which was released in 2022. The novel achieved massive success, winning the sixth Yoshikawa Eiji Bunko Award in 2021.
On April 24, Shinobu Seguchi released his manga adaptation of the Hikuidori novel, also titled “Oedo Fire Slayer – The Legend of Phoenix.” The manga will get a digital English release in North America this summer.
Amuse Creative Studio describes the story as follows:
The fire extinguishing samurai who stopped the great fire was called “The fire-eating bird”. Matsunaga Gengo, once known as the “Fire-eating Bird”, was the best fire-fighting samurai in Edo.
He had resigned from the fire brigade for a reason, but suddenly received an invitation to serve in the Shinjo clan. The Shinjo clan’s fire-fighting team had neither money nor personnel and was looked down upon by those around them.
With the encouragement of his wife, Miyuki, Gengo decides to rebuild the collapsed fire-fighting clan as its chairman. Gengo and his friends, all of whom have their own peculiarities, struggle to “save any life”, despite being ridiculed as “ragged steeplejacks”(= the ‘Boro-Tobi-Gumi’). In Edo, a mysterious series of suspicious fires, known as “foxfires,” continues.
