As previously reported, there was some early placeholders for Nekogahara volumes 3, 4 & 5 for the English release. There has been yet another change, in which Nekogahara: Stray Cat Samurai volume 3 is now scheduled to come out on September 19th, 2017. Previously the date was for April 11th. Additionally, the placeholder dates for volumes 4 & 5 have been removed completely.
Having 5 volumes being released in a year was a pretty aggressive timeline, so shifting in dates was to be expected. However the “delay” for volume 3 will be quite a distance. No release date has been planned for the third volume of manga in Japan yet, so it’s hard to tell when that volume will be released to use as a reference. It’s possible that Hiroyuki Takei may be slowing down on Nekogahara chapters (page count and/or number of chapters) in the near future. This would cause the number of volumes to dip. Maybe Takei is working on some more Shaman King?
It could also be possible that Nekogahara may move to having “simlupub” or monthly releases in English directly online. If that’s the case, then it’s possible that the volume releases become a bit more delayed and allow more time to be worked on (rather than rushing to release).
Or another scenario could be that the sales expectations for Nekogahara weren’t as strong as they needed to be, and it’s being bumped from Kodansha Comic‘s translation priorities.
Which ever the case may be, the Japanese volume release will always come out first. So once volume 3 has a set date in Japan, we can get a better idea how it relates to the English releases.
