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Naoki Urusawa is the closest Japan has to an Alan Moore, and his most ambitious manga epic, Billy Bat, is finally getting an English edition.
Posted in: Comics, Manga, Review | Tagged: A Smart and Courageous Child, autobiography, manga, Miki Yamamoto, tokyopop
A Smart and Gifted Child: A Raw Manga About the Anxiety of Parenthood
Miki Yamamoto's A Smart and Courageous Child is one of the best manga of the last few years. It is a quiet drama about the anxieties of parenthood.
Article Summary
- A Smart and Courageous Child explores the raw anxieties of expecting parents in a turbulent world.
- Miki Yamamoto delivers a quiet, intense drama focused on maternal fear, neurosis, and mental health.
- The manga’s storytelling and art style depict emotional descent with sensitivity and depth.
- Award-winning and highly recommended, this indie manga offers a fresh lens on modern parenthood.
TOKYOPOP continues to fight the good fight in publishing indie manga that's not the usual Shonen action stories, with Miki Yamamoto's indie manga about the anxieties of having a baby in a world fraught with fear and chaos, A Smart and Courageous Child. It's a raw and unflinching portrayal of a couple whose happiness and excitement at the upcoming birth of their first baby descends into a rabbit hole of fear and anxiety, even madness.
A Smart and Courageous Child may not be necessarily autobiographical, but Yamamoto
Sara and Kouto Takano are a young couple with their lives ahead of them and expecting their first baby. They're educated, have steady jobs, and are conscientious about their lives and how they want to raise their child. They fantasise about what kind of person their child will grow up into, a kind and courageous child, and a good person. But gradually, things take a turn when Sara becomes increasingly anxious about the world they're bringing a child into, triggered by Malala Yousafzai's attempted assassination by the Taliban. Sara is shocked at a world that would try to murder a kid just for being a kid who wants to learn and grow, and she sinks into a rabbit hole of horrific news headlines on her feed. It's not a sudden break but a slow slide into mania and even psychosis as Kouto watches Sara helplessly become nearly delusional to the point where he's afraid she might harm herself or their unborn child. It's an everyday crisis that's more common than you think, amplified into a drama that every mother and mother-to-be would recognise. The rest of the story is Kouta's attempts to pull Sara back from the brink and come to terms with the world they live in, the price of living in it, and the price every child must pay just by existing.
It's not for nothing that A Smart and Courageous Child 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 2020. Yamamoto is not only a mangaka but a junior professor in the Faculty of Art and Design at Tsukuba University. She draws in a raw, simple style that's almost childish, but her command of storytelling, of panel layout, pacing, facial expressions, body language, and dialogue is impeccable. This manga exists in the same world as any Shonen or Shoujou manga, and Sara and Touka's kid is almost certainly going to read those to manage their way into life.
A Smart and Courageous Child is now available from bookshops.
A Smart and Courageous Child
8/10
TOKYOPOP continues to fight the good fight in publishing indie manga that's not the usual Shonen action stories with Miki Yamamoto's indie manga about the anxieties of having a baby in a world fraught with fear and chaos, A Smart and Courageous Child, which follows a couple expecting their first child as they go from joy to existential horror at the kind of world they're bringing their baby into and how they come to terms with that.
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