Yotsuba&! is a fiendishly cute manga by Kiyohiko Azuma, the one palatable moe artist. - Shaenon K. Garrity
The impression left from reading the comics blogs is that Yotsuba&! is the greatest domestic comedy this side of the Ocean, and who am I to argue with their collective wisdom? Actually I'm addicted to Yotsuba&! I go through withdrawal every time I finish reading a volume. Seriously, when's the next one coming out? I'm dying out here.
Anyway, I was thinking about the subject of moe and whether it can be connected to Yotsuba&! I suppose creator Kiyohiko Azuma could be accused of a certain regressive obsession with the juvenile and the cute. His previous work Azumanga Daioh focussed on the interactions of several adolescent girls, while in Yotsuba&! he goes back to early childhood. Both works tend to focus on the parts that people remember fondly when looking back on life. But there's a bittersweet quality to Azuma's nostalgia - a certain recognition of the passage of time and the ephemeral nature of youth. It doesn't undermine the serene lightness, but it gives the comedy just enough of an emotional edge that nicely deepens the overall effect.
There is something about the Yotsuba&! household that targets the seinen demographic: Mister Koiwai, A single, unattached, adult male, goes overseas and brings back a cute orphan girl. Notice the lack of romantic complications with another adult to come between them. But Yotsuba doesn't act like some cloying, sentimental image of a child, nor does she possess the usual cliches designed to appeal to some otaku fetish: She's not a robot, maid, magical girl, or an alien, as far as we know. She doesn't have any affectations or strange vulnerabilities calculated to evoke a protective response outside of her age and innocence. Her unexplained background, odball behavior, ignorance of certain aspects of Japanese culture, as well as her dad's laid-back parenting style do imply there's more to her than Koiwai is letting on. But otherwise the two behave a lot like any single father and adoptive daughter would behave given the circumstances.
Kiyohiko Azuma's cartooning style is slick enough to appeal to the general audience, but clean and simple enough not to appear too saccharine. He cleverly modulates his characters' renditions based on their age: Yotsuba's cartoonish appearance perfectly reflects her hyperactive personality, while the grown-ups are drawn with greater realism. Yotsuba's neighbors the Ayase sisters fall somewhere in between. In comparison, the girls in Barasui's similarly-styled comedy Strawberry Marshmallow come across as all too precious. And even that's pretty restrained next to the fan-service heavy male/female "sibling" relationship in Chokotto's Sister. The moe mind-set means going deep into very creepy territory in order to scratch that itch.
But Yotsuba inhabits a perfectly mundane world capably rendered by Azuma (or his assistants?). There's not much in it that most adults would find interesting. But when filtered through Yotsuba's largely uninformed point of view...
Awww...now ain't she the cutest?
