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Hi-no-ToriOriginal.png

Hi-no-Tori (literally "bird of fire", and usually rendered in English as "Phoenix") is the name of an unfinished manga series by Osamu Tezuka, consisting of 12 chapters published in between 1967 and 1988 (with Tezuka passing away in 1989), as well as a slew of adaptations to anime, film and live-action media.

The manga functions like an anthology, with each chapter being a self-contained story with different characters and plots, as well as being set in different time periods. The series' overall premise concerns the overarching themes of reincarnation and searching for immortality; all of the chapters center around the blood of the eponymous Phoenix, which is said to grant eternal life and is sought after by one or more characters in each of the stories. The stories also share the common revelation of immortality being either unobtainable or a terrible curse, with the series presenting natural life and death ('the cycle of life') as the proper order of things.

The Hi-no-Tori character received a Kemono Friends-style design for an art exhibition honoring Tezuka's work at the Hankyu Umeda department store in April 2017; however, it did not feature in any franchise media of any kind, and was thus technically an unofficial friend until almost four years later, when she featured in Kemono Friends 3.