Hinemosu Notari Nikki, the autobiographical essay manga Tetsuya Chiba had been drawing for the last decade of his life, will finish with its eighth volume. Shogakukan’s Big Comic confirmed the news on November 6, and the final book ships on February 12.
The same date brings a second book: Gagyō 70-shūnen Ai to Heiwa to Chiba Tetsuya (roughly, 70th Anniversary as a Working Artist: Love, Peace, and Tetsuya Chiba), a commemorative volume tracing his seven decades as a manga artist.
How the series got there
Chiba started Hinemosu Notari Nikki in Big Comic in December 2015. The first collected volume followed in 2018, and the seventh arrived in November 2025 — a slow publishing rhythm that matches the strip’s pace. The phrase hinemosu notari describes a whole day passing idly, and that is what the series was: an old man writing and drawing about his days, his health, his memories and the small things he noticed.
He put it on hiatus on September 25 this year, citing poor health. He died on October 22, at 87, from a myelodysplastic syndrome, a cancer affecting the blood cells produced in bone marrow.
So the final volume is not a planned ending in the usual sense. Chiba stopped drawing because he had to, and the eighth book now closes a series that had no chance to wrap itself up. The full story of his death and career is in our report on Chiba’s passing.
Seventy years, counted properly
The commemorative book’s title is precise about the span. Chiba turned professional in 1956, at 17, while he was still in high school. From that debut to the February publication date is seventy years, and for most of them he was working.
Ashita no Joe is the work that defined him. He drew it from 1968 to 1973, and the story of Joe Yabuki, a homeless boxer with a talent for throwing his own life away, became one of the defining Japanese pop-culture texts of the postwar decades. Two television anime followed in 1970 and 1980, then two films in 1980 and 1981. Megalobox, a 2018 reimagining that moved the story into a science-fiction setting with new characters, credits the original manga as its origin, and Megalobox 2: Nomad followed in April 2021.
English readers got an official version of the source material only in December 2024, when Ashita no Joe: Fighting for Tomorrow was published. That is a strange gap for a manga that shaped so much of what came after it.
The honors came late and kept coming. In 2022 he was nominated to the Japan Art Academy as one of the first two manga creators admitted, alongside Yoshiharu Tsuge. He chaired the Japan Cartoonists Association. In 2024 he received the Order of Culture, becoming the first manga creator to hold that honor.
The diary as a late-career form
There is a particular kind of manga that only exists because an artist got old and famous enough to draw whatever he wanted. Hinemosu Notari Nikki belongs to that category. It ran in a magazine that had published his serials for decades, it had no plot to resolve, and its subject was the author himself, at the end of a very long career.
That makes the eighth volume an odd artifact. It will be read as a conclusion even though it was assembled around an interruption. What is confirmed is the February 12 date for both books, and the page count Shogakukan puts behind that date is the last of the diary readers will get.
Why it matters
The manga industry does not have many artists who work for seventy years, and it has almost none who spend the final stretch of that career drawing a quiet diary instead of another hit. Chiba could have coasted on Ashita no Joe reprints and interviews. He kept a monthly deadline instead, into his eighties, until his health took the decision away from him.
Both books arrive on February 12, four months after his death. For readers in Japan, that date is the last new Chiba material they will ever buy. Our coverage of his hiatus in September explains how the series stopped, and why the final volume arrives the way it does.
Source: Anime News Network, citing Big Comic‘s X account
Featured image: Cover art for Tetsuya Chiba’s Hinemosu Notari Nikki, via Anime News Network. © Tetsuya Chiba / Shogakukan
