Was Bleach cancelled?

On November 17, 2016, Kubo returned to his official account and posted an eleven page manga about how Bleach really ended. In it he writes that in the tenth year of the series his health failed: a cold his doctor diagnosed would not clear the way colds used to, he was in bed for weeks at a time, and as soon as he recovered a little, he would catch another. It continued for a long time. He writes that he thought he had failed as a manga artist, because a manga artist delivers work of a set quality in a set time, and that with the story only partly finished he wondered every single day whether to continue the series or finish it, and how he should end it.

The physical damage was specific, and Kubo named it in a 2017 Jump GIGA interview, as reported in English coverage of that interview: 'I have a habit of leaning my body weight on my left shoulder whilst drawing. It seems that happened because my shoulder took that load. I was told there was a partial fracture.' English reports of the same interview period describe torn tendons in that shoulder found on an MRI. The drawing posture of fifteen years of weekly serialization is, in his own account, what injured him.

In the same November 2016 account, Kubo tells of one letter in a bag of fan mail, with no name and no return address. Its writer was a boy in hospital whose medicine had stopped working. Told he had eighteen months to live, he had taken to manga to think about tomorrow again, and Bleach became the series that did it. The letter was sent, at his request, after his death. Its final request reads: 'Please draw Bleach the way you want to, right to the very end. That is what I would want to read.' Kubo posted the manga to thank his readers and, publicly, to ask for help finding the boy's family so he could say thank you himself.

Bleach ran in Weekly Shonen Jump from August 7, 2001 to August 22, 2016: 698 chapters in 74 volumes. Kubo's closing claim, in that same account, is that he was able to finish the final chapter in a fitting way, the way he had wanted to from the very first chapter, and that he drew Bleach the way he wanted for fifteen years. Nothing in his own published account describes an editorial order to stop, a sales verdict, or an ending imposed on him. A cancellation story may be tidier. It is not the one the author tells.