Provided by TOKYOPOPO
A smart and courageous child
Author: Yamamoto Miki
Publisher: tokyopop
Publication date: November 19, 2024
Rating: 13 and up
The works of Assistant Professors, Faculty of Arts, Mangaka and Tsukuba University, Miki Yamamoto are not something that most people in the West think about Japanese manga. She has a more free-style expressive style, and regularly avoids typical genre-style elements (e.g., page layout, book structure, art style, color schemes, etc.) to realize female stories in a way that no other cartoon creators have. While Yamamoto openly speaks about the fact that her work is often perceived as not typical of most manga works, she also discussed how her first full English release from Tokyopop, a smart and courageous child, introduced Western manga fans to the entire world of Japanese artists. Yamamoto has partially translated parts of her work into English in the past, but the wise and courageous child is her first work to get a full adaptation of English.
He won the 24th Manga Division Excellence Award at the 2020 Japan Media Arts Festival and was nominated for Best One Shot at the 2025 American Manga Awards. In the early months of pregnancy, Sarah and Kuta hope that their children have smart and courageous children. And like most new parents I know, they spend a lot of time studying how to best set up their kids to buy many books.
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In Yamamoto’s story, these books symbolize the expectations and desires parents have for their children. Some books seem to help Sarah and Kuta, but provide them with ways to teach them basic childcare skills and encourage their children to develop. Also, the amount of information available seems to overwhelm them. And I think this is a problem that can affect a lot of people. Whether or not you are a new parent. It is a constant bombardment of information that feels more like a contradictory duty than useful advice.
In an interview with Anime News Network, Yamamoto told this, “As depicted in the story, what parents expect from a picture book overlaps with what parents expect from their children. Such excessive expectations are a bit annoying for the children. About having a child in the first place.”
However, as her birth date approaches, Sarah begins to become obsessed with who her child will be. After learning about Malala Yousafzai, an educational rights activist who was targeted by the Taliban at the age of 15, she begins to conduct a book about clever and brave children who are at risk for these qualities. And Kuta’s clever and brave child.
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“Like the main character Sarah, I learned that Malala was shot in the news and the assailant asked, ‘Who is Malala?’,” Yamamoto told Anne. “The shooter didn’t listen to him so he tried to shoot a little girl. Meanwhile, due to rules imposed on women such as “not too noticeable” and “face covering,” the gunman didn’t know which girls were “malala.” She wasn’t the only one being targeted, but when Sarah began reading books about Anne Frank, Iqbal Masi and the other children killed, she wanted to show that this was not a new event, but something recurring.
Thus, like many of Yamamoto’s other works, the clever and courageous child is a story of femininity and the places occupying the world by the Afabian people. I wasn’t involved in most of this story, but what I felt was a universal message in this comic was the sense that social pressure conforms to the expected role of gender. Sarah wants to regain control of her body, and she experiences overwhelming emotions near the end of the story, which is related to the pressure to act in the appropriate “mother” way.
As someone who can’t become a parent, this was a complicated story for me to read. Because I wanted Sarah to show more gratitude for the gift she was given. I can understand the raw emotions of the story, but as someone who is infertile and does not have the privilege of being able to give birth, I wanted more from Sarah as a new mother (I realize this is my x). But that’s not how the story works.
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Overall, it was difficult to separate my own trauma from the narrative that was being told. I have continued to think about how parents often set up their children for feelings of failure, in order to be wise and courageous in their children, to change the world, and when their high expectations are unable to meet the expectations of the challenges (intellectual, mental or physical disabilities) that the children get in a way of courage and success. In my experience, parents have a hard time separating what they want from their children from who they really are.
What I was most grateful for about smart and courageous kids is how cartoons use the creator’s non-traditional style to appeal to female audiences. This incorporates soft colours and round lines. “I have mixed feelings about this, but I arrived in this art style to negotiate an ideal illustration and the real world,” Yamamoto said. “I was planning on drawing on a black, gray, and beige base and in a limited number of colors, so red was useful because it was the focus. Red gives a sense of energy and passion, but there is also a sense of danger.”
Smart and courageous children can purchase directly from this publisher.
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