Chiyomi Hashiguchi

Chiyomi Hashiguchi (橋口 千代美) is the real name of the manga artist Nekojiru, her maiden name was Chiyomi Nakayama (中山).
She was born January 19 1967, in present-day Kawaguchi city (at the time of her birth it was considered North Adachi county), Saitama prefecture.
She debuted as Nekojiru in the June 1990 edition of Garo magazine and was active as an artist for 8 years until her death on May 10th 1998.

Overview
Little is known about Chiyomi before her debut as Nekojiru.
According to Yoshinaga Yoshiaki she was attending a local beauty school before she became an artist.
She had an interest in underground artists and was a fan of Yamano Hajime's work. She met Yamano through an 'aquiantence of an aquiantence' and married him when she was 18.
She would assist Yamano with minor aspects of his work like coloring but had no plans to become a manga artist.

Yamano took notice of a 'strange, octopus-like cat' drawing Chiyomi had created while doodling and wrote a story based around the drawing that Chiyomi illustrated.
After presenting the resulting manuscripts to seirindo it was recieved positively and began serialization in Garo magazine.


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