Go Into Kiyohiko Azuma’s Yotsuba&! V16 With Childlike Wonder

In 2026, it’s too easy to look at the world and feel beaten down or cynical about it.  When a President can make a call and get a major sports competition’s penalty overturned, it seems like the fix is in and the world is just a broken place.  And that’s just a symptom of everything wrong, not the real issues that we would need to address to start turning this world around.  See? That’s how easy it is to look at the world and think that it sucks.  And then there’s Kiyohiko Azuma’s Yotsuba&! V16, which makes the world a little less dark, a bit lighter, and offers joy and hope that nearly everything else around us denies us.  

There are really only three things that happen in this volume: 1) Yotsuba and her father set up a Christmas tree, 2) Yotsuba, her father, and their friend Yanda hike up a mountain just outside of Tokyo, and 3) Yotsuba sees a school teacher for the first time and tests the teacher’s skills.  In case you don’t know, Yotsuba is a young, green-haired girl who gets to experience everything that life has to offer for the first time.  Azuma’s stories are equal parts innocence, naïveté, and longing as she opens up the world to a child’s view of it.  Most of us have had years and years of Christmas trees, but for Yotsuba, this is the first time.

Just seeing the box that the tree is in prompts Yotsuba to ask her dad, “Is that Christmas?” as if the tree is everything.  This is all new to her, and for a little bit, Azuma allows us to give ourselves over to the moment and live this life through Yotsuba’s eyes.  That sounds like it could all be extremely sugary and cloying- the world seen from the viewpoint of a silly child— so Azuma balances it out by inserting here and there other viewpoints like her father’s and the older neighbor girls’.  Yotsuba is never alone— she’s got an amazing supporting cast around her that Azuma allows to react to Yotsuba or to offer a differing view of the experience.  

As Yotsuba discovers things like Christmas trees and ornaments, it would be too easy to be cynical and wonder what’s so special about these things.  She’s a child, so of course these things would be new and exciting to her.  Just wait until she grows up a bit and gets a taste of the real world.  We see a bit of that worldly sensibility in Yotsuba’s father.  He’s not cynical, but he’s worn and tired. On their hike up the mountain’s easy path, he’s looking for the benches to rest on. He clearly loves Yotsuba and wants to do these things with her, but he’s coming at it from a different direction. He has work to do, and he has responsibilities (including Yotsuba) that wear him down. You can see what he’s trying to do for his daughter and the experiences he’s trying to give her. 

Through Yotsuba, Azuma makes the world both bigger and smaller.  The wide-eyed view that this young girl offers does allow us to remember those days of innocence when everything was new.  Everything is just there waiting for us to discover it anew through Yotsuba’s experiences.  This volume opens with Yotsuba practicing riding a bike.  Again, it’s rather commonplace, but the glee Azuma draws on Yotsuba’s face turns it into an extraordinary moment.  Or looking at the overhead cloud and being amazed by their formation allows us to have this moment of awe and wonder.  

But Azuma also captures the universality of these experiences.  What we see and experience in this comic is not so different than the things that we see and experience in everyday life.  This is a comic about growing up in Tokyo, but it could be any big city anywhere in the world.  It’s not like Yotsuba is having an exotic upbringing; it’s fairly normal, and that’s part of the way that Azuma makes the world seem just a bit smaller— it’s relatable in a very hands-on way.   Somewhere along the way, we’ve all had to learn something from our parents or teach something to our children. We’ve all looked at a Christmas tree with wonder.  

This is where Azuma’s drawings become so effective.  Between her simple but stylized figures and the detailed drawings of the world around them, it’s easy to see ourselves in these characters and imprint their reactions as our reactions.  It’s how the story of a young girl becomes so effective at pulling us into it and how her world becomes our world.  Yotsuba’s cartoonish and exaggerated expressions invite us into her world.  But it’s an easy transition because it’s a world that we recognize through the realistic backgrounds.  Azuma shapes this so we understand all of the stimulation that Yotsuba is taking in and her reactions to it.  

Kiyohiko Azuma’s Yotsuba&! V16 is a balm for cynicism, a reminder (or maybe an encouragement) to look at the world with the eyes of a child.  It’s wonderful and a small miracle to be able to give yourself over to a book like this, a child’s story but not a childish story.  It allows you to live through this green-haired girl and approach the world without any biases or preconceived ideas. Cynicism is easy nowadays, maybe too easy, but this book permits us to appreciate the world around us with wonder and awe.