Danica Davidson
August 20, 2025 
The historical novel series Ushūboro Tobigumi is having its first volume Hikuidori (translated as Fire Eater) being turned into an anime titled Oedo Fire Slayer -The Legend of Phoenix-. Amuse Creative Studio, the studio behind the adaptation, shared a visual, some of the cast, and a January 2026 premiere.
Here is the visual.
Here’s what we know about the main actors:
- Yūichirō Umehara (Jugram Haschwalth in Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War) plays Gengo Matsunaga, the president of Boro Tobi Gumi
- Shūichirō Umeda (Koichi Haimawari / The Crawler in My Hero Academia: Vigilantes) plays Shinnosuke Torigoe, the Boro Tobi Gumi vice president
- Subaru Kimura (Ryōma Terasaka in Assassination Classroom) plays Torajiro, who used to be a sumo wrestler
- Nobunaga Shimazaki (Takahiro Mizusawa in Bottom-tier Character Tomozaki) plays artisan Hikoya
- Kenshō Ono (Floch Forster in Attack on Titan) plays military strategist Kaji Seijuro
The light novels are written by Shōgo Imamura and began in 2017. So far twelve volumes have been released in Japan. There is also a manga adaptation receiving an English release this summer, digital-only.
Amuse Creative Studio gave this description for the plot:
Oedo Fire Slayer -The Legend of Phoenix- Plot
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 no money and no 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 called “foxfires” continue.
An entertaining action drama opens, with the firefighters scrambling to save lives in the face of the approaching disaster!
Source: ANN
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Danica Davidson is the author of the bestselling Manga Art for Beginners with artist Melanie Westin, plus its sequel, Manga Art for Everyone, and the first-of-its-kind manga chalk book Chalk Art Manga, both illustrated by professional Japanese mangaka Rena Saiya. Check out her other comics and books at www.danicadavidson.com.
