Is Yotsuba&! a tiny bit creepy?
Posted on | August 31, 2010 | 6 Comments
Yotsuba&! is one of those titles that I sometimes feel a little bit schizophrenic about. In some ways it is the closest to portraying pure joy out of all the manga series that I’ve read. It is also one of the few series that I laugh out loud while reading. But if I think about this manga a little too much, I start feeling a little unsettled. Yotsuba&! is one of the few series where the gap between the original audience in Japan (readers of the magazine Degenki Daioh) and the marketing of the comic as all-ages, suitable for kids manga in the United states. Sean Gaffney goes into this discussion in his post about Yotsuba&! and Strawberry Marshmallow.
Sometimes people tend to play down the original audience of manga, and shonen series are marketed as shoujo or vice versa. While I certainly don’t think that readers need to remain in silos invented by Japanese manga editors, I think paying attention to the original audience of a manga can be useful when thinking about how to critique it, since it speaks to the intent of the author. While Yotsuba&! is funny and touching, there are some odd elements in the manga that can be a bit disquieting that reflect this disconnect between the audience for the manga in Japan and the audience for the manga in America.
Yotsuba&! shows the single father of our quirky 5 year old protagonist surrounded by girls. There’s his daughter, but the only females he mainly has contact with are the young girls in the Ayase family next door. He occasionally runs into their mother, but he’s basically interacting with either young girls, teenage girls, or his wacky bachelor friends. There are no women Kowai’s age in the series. The image of childhood portrayed in Yotsuba&! is very idealized. There are always festivals for Yotsuba to attend, and new experiences for her to react to in her charmingly literal and often over-the-top manner. But Yotsuba’s world is mainly confined to the family next door. She isn’t shown reacting to other kids her age. She doesn’t go to school, but remains in the sealed bubble of her neighborhood. If she interacted with a bunch of other 5 year olds, her intrinsic ignorance about the world around her and inability to conform to social norms might be seen as a reason to call social services instead of laughing.
Childhood by its very nature is full of change. But I can’t even imagine an older Yotsuba. She remains static and unchanging, the eternal five year old. There’s plenty of lazy summer days, ice cream, and cicada hunting in Yotsuba&!, but none of the aggravating aspects of childhood or parenting are introduced. Everything’s so perfect, the experience of fatherhood is romanticized and presented in such a encapsulated way that the single men who read the comic can see this idealized portrayal of a life with a daughter where the presence of a wife or mother is absent. Yotsuba&! is undeniably funny. Azuma is a talented cartoonist. But I find that there’s something a little hollow at the core of this manga simply due to the way childhood is both romanticized and then used as a consistent punchline.
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6 Responses to “Is Yotsuba&! a tiny bit creepy?”
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August 31st, 2010 @ 11:39 pm
I could be completely and utterly wrong here, but I always assumed that Yotsuba&! would end with Yotsuba going to school (her first step in “growing up”), which would bookend Azumanga Daioh’s ending when the characters leave school.
I’m, uh, not sure what exactly that has to do with the romanticizing of childhood, but I feel like it’s the fact that Yotsuba DOES exist in that age before school — which has turned her closest peer, Ena, into an extremely serious girl devoted to literally following directions on her homework like “let’s see the stars” — is the thing that allows for its comedy.
Someone should probably talk to Kiowai about sleeping all day while his daughter runs around unsupervised, though.
August 31st, 2010 @ 11:53 pm
I fall into the category of Degenki Daioh’s target audience. Being 49, no kids, I find my paternal instincts popping up. Not just in manga or anime. The first time I realized it was with Willow: the computer-geek wiccan daughter I never had! It’s the same with the Ayase sisters and the Azumanga girls. So while I understand your reservations I … don’t really care to much.
September 1st, 2010 @ 8:50 am
I guess my being a parent of young children is feeding in to my reaction to Yotsuba&, because I think it is weird that she isn’t going to pre-school occasionally or playgroups or hanging out with other kids her age in the neighborhood.
If the main point of Yotsuba&! is to invoke pleasant feelings about the idea of parenthood in single men, it just seems a little strange that in America we’re saying it is a great series for kids. I also wonder if the series would be half as popular if Yotsuba was a boy.
September 1st, 2010 @ 10:17 am
Regarding “why it’s always girls,” I think the theories in the book “Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman” are relevant this.
To paraphrase: In Victorian culture, children were by default feminine. Partially just because the socially-prescribed traits of females and children match up: passive, gentle, receptive. Even boys went through a period of femininity before graduating to masculinity around 10-12 when they left the home and went to boarding school. So when Victorian literature romanticizes childhood, it always focuses on little girls since little girls are considered the “purest distillation” of childhood. I’d assume that moe culture is at least partially influenced by this. And I think a lot of the conditions for this phenomena exist across different cultures (the roles of females and children matching up, for example, and male chilren not truly”becoming men” until a later age).
Regarding whether Yotsuba&! or Strawberry Marshmallow are creepy for this, well, I’m a lolicon, so it doesn’t phase me. And Ena is so cute!
September 1st, 2010 @ 4:09 pm
I disagree. I don’t see the romanticism regarding childhood as hollow. Why in the world would it be? What’s problematic about that?
With certain subjects, like war, romanticizing is problematic. But that’s not because romanticism is somehow inherently a problem.
It is precisely this cynical, modernist adult attitude that Yotsuba stands proudly in opposition to.
September 2nd, 2010 @ 8:56 am
I keep waiting for Little Lulu and Bart Simpson to grow up too.