Nekojiru was a multimedia franchise created by husband and wife pair Chiyomi Hashiguchi (writing under 'Nekojiru' as her penname) and the manga artist known publicly as ‘Yamano Hajime’. The series covers a range of genres and formats such as episodic, fictional stories and autobiographic accounts of Chiyomi's life. The same basic cast is used across most entries in the series, often with slight variations to suit the story.
Outside of Japan, Nekojiru is best known for the direct to video animation 'Cat Soup' but saw massive success in Japan throughout the 90’s for its manga releases and extensive merchandising. The series would slowly lose this momentum and enter into a state of obsucrity after Chiyomi's suicide in May 1998. Yamano has released a comparitively small amount of manga under the altered name 'Nekojiru y' since then.
Nekojiru y manga is under an indefinite hiatus, the most recent activity being 'Obake Apartment, part 1' in 2013. In 2023 an online storefront for Nekojiru merchandise was opened.
Almost no official translations of any Nekojiru manga have ever been produced. Today most of Nekojiru is out of print or only availble as ebooks to Japanese consumers. This website's goal is to eventually make all of Nekojiru accessible in English.
(For the sake of clarity this website will call Nekojiru the author by her given name but in general she isn't known this way and none of her work was published under her real name)
読みやすくために、ねこぢるさんは名前で呼びます。 失礼なことを言ったり、ねこぢるさんを個人的に知っていたとほのめかしたりするつもりはありません。