Kazuo Hara is a Japanese manga artist best known as the creator of the series Noramimi. He made his professional debut in 2001 with the one-shot Shinso, which was published in an extra issue of Shogakukan's Big Comic Spirits magazine. His major breakthrough came when he began serializing Noramimi in Shogakukan's Monthly Ikki magazine, where it ran from December 2002 to August 2009. The completed series was compiled into eight tankobon volumes.

The manga Noramimi was adapted into a twenty-four episode anime television series produced by TMS Entertainment. The anime aired in two seasons during 2008, with the first season running from January to March and the second season from October to December. The series is a comedy set in a world where humans and mascot characters live and work together. The story follows the title character, Noramimi, a mascot from a demon family who struggles to find a family that will adopt him, leaving him stuck living at his agency's branch office.

Beyond Noramimi, Hara's other manga works include Mujina Drill, published in Monthly Ikki in 2005, and San Paulo, which ran in Kodansha's MiChao! magazine starting in 2007. In 2014, he began publishing Fumi-chan no Kyushoku Bukuro on the Ikipara Comic website. That same year, he changed his professional pen name from the kanji 原一雄 to the hiragana rendering はらかずお. His artistic identity is closely tied to light-hearted comedic storytelling, with Noramimi standing as his most significant and widely recognized work in both manga and anime formats.