Shijūkara ga Naku Koro ni is close to done. Hiromasa Okujima announced on X on Saturday that the manga will end with its eighth chapter, which makes it a short series finishing on purpose rather than one cut off mid-run.
The manga follows the daily life of a 41-year-old office worker. That is the premise as far as the announcement goes, and it suits the title: the shijūkara is the Japanese tit, and the name translates roughly to “when the Japanese tit sings.”
Okujima launched the series on Fusosha’s Manga Spa! platform in December 2025. Eight chapters across roughly a year fits a digital release that was never built for a decade-long run.
Why it is ending now
The ending is a one-line piece of news, but the timing says something about how busy Okujima has become. Something had to give, and it was the smallest project on the list.
In February he launched Together with Serial-san (Serial-san to Issho) in Shueisha’s Grand Jump Mucha. Shueisha’s new global digital platform MANGA MILLION is releasing that one in English, so it has an overseas audience from day one.
Baban Baban Ban Vampire is the bigger one. Okujima started it in Akita Shoten’s Bessatsu Shōnen Champion in October 2021, and the series has gone well past the manga page. An anime streamed on Netflix in January 2025. A live-action film opened in July 2025. Akita Shoten published the 14th compiled volume on August 6, and Dark Horse holds the English license with the first volume due November 10.
There is more on the shelf. Viz Media’s SuBLime imprint licensed Bad Boys, Happy Home (Dōsei Yankee Akamatsu Seven), the boys-love series Okujima made with SHOOWA, and released the first volume in July 2021 after the pair launched it in Akita Shoten’s Kachi Comi in April 2018. His Katei Kyōshi no Kishi Knight Desu. (I Am the Home Tutor Kishi Knight.) ran in Akita Shoten’s Nicchan Gecchan in 2019 and became a live-action series that premiered on January 5.
He has been running two series in parallel for most of the year, since Together with Serial-san started in February, and this ending brings that back to one.
What eight chapters means
Manga Spa! is a digital platform, which puts the series in a different bucket from his magazine work. Digital-first titles get shorter leashes and smaller budgets, and a short, finished run is a normal outcome rather than a failure.
The pattern is clear enough. Okujima writes short, strange comedies across several publishers, and one of them keeps turning into television. Shijūkara ga Naku Koro ni was the smallest of those bets, and closing it at eight chapters reads like housekeeping rather than bad news.
The announcement did not include a date for the final chapter. Fusosha has also not said whether the eight chapters will be collected into a single volume, which is the usual shape for a run this short.
Whenever the last chapter lands, the series will finish as a complete, compact story with a beginning and an end, which is more than a lot of manga that simply stop can claim.
Sources
Anime News Network — Hiromasa Okujima Shijūkara ga Naku Koro ni Manga Ends in Next Chapter
Featured image: Banner image for Shijūkara ga Naku Koro ni, via Anime News Network.
