Well hello there. This a pretty obscure page isn't it? Well if anyone is actually reading this, Hana no Keiji is a really interesting manga. I'm not even talking about the actual story, but the surrounding facts about it. So if you're at all interested, I researched this manga for hours trying to figure things out. The only reason I even know about it is because I was given the manga from this nice lady in a ramen shop in Japan. Hana no Keiji was a really popular manga back in its day, it was a best seller for Shonen Jump with over 17+ million sold. But that popularity didn't transfer over here. It seems that Raijin Comics released the first 24 chapters in English, but then died out. So you would think that's as far as it got translated, yet when you look for scans of it, the English goes up to chapter 30. Where did those 6 chapters come from, and did it get translated any further? No idea.
Another thing, right now MAL says there are 108 chapters total. This is absolutely not the case. The manga I got from that ramen shop is actually part of a reprint that compressed it into 8 volumes. I only got 1-2 and 4-6 as it happens. But the 6th volume goes to chapter 123. I could not for the life of me find any information on the actual number of chapters anywhere, even checking Japanese sites. Finally though, I found it by looking at a book preview for the 18th volume here:
http://booklive.jp/product/index/title_id/297447/vol_no/018
So the actual number is 167 chapters. I don't know where this random 108 chapters comes from, but you find it spread around the internet (just like the summary). This makes me wonder about all the people on MAL that have claimed to complete this manga. Surely one of them would have changed the chapter number. Well I guess some people also say they've completed anime that hasn't even aired so whatever. I've never tried changing info on MAL, but I'm sure about this so I hope it gets approved (it did). Anyway, long story short, if you want to read this manga in English, it seems you can only go to chapter 30. If you want to read all of it though, you'll probably have to buy the Japanese version off amazon or something. I'm buying the 3 volumes I don't have (I'm studying Japanese). It'll likely be over a year before I finish this, (only understand like 25% right now). So here's someone's chance to beat me to being the first to review this hidden gem. |
