The problem with the common, inescapably-classically-liberal trope that “We need stories to understand ourselves” and that books are “empathy machines” is that, should the tone of its phrasing be inverted, what one ends up with is the rather fatalist implication of a core human helplessness: without stories, we don’t understand ourselves and so we don’t have empathy. And yet what stories offer is little more than the old map/territory conundrum — for a story to be traditionally appealing, it must conform to a neatness of narrative; a story emphasizes the rhetorical on whom one projects oneself. And if one cannot fathom a form of caring that does not entail projection… well, in that case, one has a bigger problem that stories alone will not be able to solve.
Consider the Takano family, the focus of A Smart and Courageous Child, the first appearance of Japanese cartoonist Miki Yamamoto in English, translated into English by Katie Kimura and published by Tokyopop in November of last year. Wife Sara and husband Kouta are preparing for the birth of their firstborn daughter, and the expectation is getting the best of both of them. They get giddy at the sight of young children and buy every item on the checklist; they relish the thought of their child’s future life, making lists of possible fields of interests and classes she might partake in. Sara, in particular, gives in to flights of fancy in this field.
The complication arises when Sara’s ambitions-by-proxy are transferred from the tentative to the comparative and specific. As she searches for possible life directions for her daughter, she readily finds herself swimming in a sea of names of children who have achieved success in various fields — children and stories borrowed, crucially, from real life, from Tavi Gevinson to Malala Yousafzai. Sara grows particularly attached to Yousafzai, viewing her as a paramount inspiration; after the murder attempt on Yousafzai which occurs mere days before the due date, Sara enters a profound depression, all of a sudden having second thoughts about bringing a child into the world. Now, she immerses herself in the stories of other real-life children and teenagers who underwent atrocities, from Åsne Seierstad’s One of Us1, about the 2011 attacks by the Norwegian far-right terrorist Anders Breivik, to The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank.
Though the back-cover copy proclaims that the book “tackles the complex reality of motherhood in an uncertain world,” I would contend that, whether or not that was the author’s aim, this is a rather extreme misrepresentation of the book as it stands. If anything, A Smart and Courageous Child is about a theme far headier than that — it is about the hazards of the psychological narrativizing urge that strips events of their specific details so that they may more closely resemble the outside spectator. It is, in fact, about the psychological need for importance that, left unchecked, devolves into solipsism.
On its face, the message that arises from Sara’s arc is simple: Every child is somebody’s child, and it’s not until you’re a parent that you understand the fear that other parents feel for their children’s safety. Except this message is, to put it generously, rather grossly reductive, and entirely inapplicable at that. To start with, Sara and Kouta are shown to have a pretty comfortable life — they both have steady work (which they intend to continue to do even after childbirth, Sara from home and Kouta from the office), and any real ongoing struggles they might have are left markedly off the page; indeed, there is absolutely no interfacing between the familial unit presented and the sociopolitical world around it. This makes Yamamoto’s decision to use real-life points of reference all the more befuddling and dissonant. I had heretofore thought it impossible to name-drop Anne Frank without discussing the Holocaust, or invoke Iqbal Masih without a mention of child slavery, but Yamamoto does just that: the atrocity-books Sara reads are mere name-drops, not expanded upon beyond the title, and the best she can muster for Yousafzai is to state that she “[has] been advocating for education for girls since she was eleven” (in Sara’s own words) and that she “wrote a blog under her pseudonym Gul Makai for the BBC Urdu to detail her [unintelligible] during the Taliban [unintelligible] of Swat” (in the textbook that Sara reads). That any and all explicit mentions of violence or oppression are literally cropped out of the panel (at least in the English) is almost parodically on the nose, as the comic successfully presents a vision of inspiration without explicit adversity — thus, when Yousafzai is shot and wounded, it is shocking precisely because it came, in Yamamoto’s carefully curated view, out of the blue. It can be flattened into ‘another bad thing that happened in the world, randomly and without explanation,’ with the implication that if it happened to them it can happen to us — even though there is absolutely nothing in Yamamoto’s story, or in Sara and Kouta’s life, that even tenuously connects them to any real-life horrors.
This flippancy dictates not only Yamamoto’s narrative conflict but its resolution as well. The book opens as Sara sits outside the maternity clinic and watches two girls playing recklessly on the street as their mother warns them not to hurt themselves, growing excited at the sight of playful children; toward the end, mirroring the beginning, Sara — past her due date and at her wits’ end, crying and breaking down in the middle of the clinic — is pulled outside by her husband, and, as they have an argument (Kouta being the rational and uncomprehending party), the same two girls physically crash into Sara and she falls on top of them. The girls cry as they scrape their hands and knees against the sidewalk, and, after their mother has taken them away, Sara is met with a painful realization: she has hurt two children, two beautiful, innocent children — just like the Taliban hurt Malala Yousafzai. To counter this notion, Kouta shows Sara a faint scar on his leg — the vestige of a motorcycle accident that happened when he was a child — and reminds her of her own scars. His bottom line? “We’ll continue to hurt others and be hurt in the future too. And one day, something even worse might happen… but we have a chance to change things for the better. If we raise a smart and courageous2 child.” The young couple drives home, and when Sara sees a school bus pass by, she imagines it to be the same school bus, Malala Yousafzai was on — only, in her imagination, the terrorists fail to identify Yousafzai, because a certain smart and courageous child leads the rest of the kids in standing up for her, Dead Poets Society-style. The terrorists finally run away, unsuccessful in their task. The next day, the news announces that the Pakistani activist has regained consciousness and is expected to make a full recovery. At that exact moment, Sara goes into labor.
Any notion that perhaps the story is more cynical than is shown at face value, that perhaps it is, in fact, a scathing satire in the guise of reassurance, is readily dispelled by Tokyopop’s own peripheral materials. A pull quote from the website Fandom Press tells us that A Smart and Courageous Child is “a book that we need right now, to remind us that life is worth living outside of the doomscrolling.” Another pull quote, from Asian Movie Pulse, describes it as the story of “a world saturated with bad news and skepticism,” whereas a third, from Anime News Network, describes the central theme as “anxiety about something you can’t control.” A supplementary essay by Paolo La Marca, an assistant professor specializing in contemporary Japanese literature and curator of the venerable Italian comics publisher Coconino’s manga department, offers a sophomoric analysis of the theme of ‘family’ in Yamamoto’s work, which, with its gushing tone and surface-level observations, appears to have been written exclusively for people who have never read a comic in their life. Palpably absent in all of the above is any specific mention of Yamamoto’s use of real-life anchors, thus perpetuating the same shallow discourse peddled by the cartoonist herself.
I am brought to think of Arata Imai’s excellent Flash Point, published in English last year by Glacier Bay (tr. Ryan Holmberg), except what Arata wrote as absurdist satire — an individual being forced into a political framework not by choice, and not quite by circumstance, but by other unrelated individuals’ parasocial and paranoid-conspiratorial projections onto circumstance — Yamamoto accepts as a complete given: as soon as Malala Yousafzai became a public figure, she became simultaneously more than human (in that she symbolized a greater struggle) and less than human (in that she lost her ability to control what she herself meant or signified). An obvious observation, perhaps, but one that Yamamoto takes advantage of with gleeful abandon, reducing public figures to little more than Funko Pops, hollow-eyed and mass-manufactured for one’s personal play-acting amusement.
I first learned of Yamamoto’s work from a post by a friend of mine, who shared pages from her as-yet-untranslated-into-English book Sunny Sunny Ann!, a book that, on the graphic level at least, is fairly easy to become captivated with — her brush-strokes are bold and sweeping, sketchy in a way that feels lively and spontaneous rather than unfinished. (Okazaki Kyoko appears to be a common comparison, but Okazaki’s clean, fine pen-work bears a much cooler air of detachment than Yamamoto.)
I point this out specifically because A Smart and Courageous Child stands in almost-total contrast to the look of Sunny Sunny Ann!, as Yamamoto sets aside the ink-brush in favor of colored pencils. This choice determines the rest of her approach — the work becomes tight and figurative, the frenetic energy replaced with the humility of mainstream palatability. And it is, in fact, a look with immediate appeal, solid but not stiff, one that might sit on one’s shelf next to Lucy Knisley. Furthermore, Yamamoto makes the wise decision to embellish certain details — mostly facial expressions — with ink, breaking up the monotextural softness and giving the reader’s eye something more concrete to latch onto.
But, aesthetically pleasant though Yamamoto’s artwork may be, I cannot help but feel that its fundamental softness — and the knowledge that that softness is not necessarily a given within Yamamoto’s broader oeuvre — is part of the problem. On the textural level, there is never a feeling of real distress, only all-encompassing cleanness and composure, further driving home the sense that Sara’s problem is, to a great degree, made up, a mere contrivance in a story whose essence is confidence regained at someone else’s expense.
I am not a parent. It is a distinct possibility that, in my harsh critique of A Smart and Courageous Child, I am missing some unknown emotional facet, preventing me from properly appreciating its nuances. But, because the luxurious field of comics criticism does not pay enough for me to test out my thesis by having a child just for the sake of one review, I must rely on mere theoretical critical faculties, and, at least in that limited field, A Smart and Courageous Child is a resounding failure.
The problem with the trope that “We need stories to understand ourselves” and that books are “empathy machines” is that it obscures its own conclusion: stories are not an alternate existence; they are merely the tentative, fictional, immaterial idea thereof. If they do, indeed, allow us to see different worlds, different experiences, it is only ever at a remove.
It is precisely in that remove that Miki Yamamoto revels. In A Smart and Courageous Child, she perfectly — and seemingly unintentionally — articulates this mindset of elective naïvete and follows it through to its inevitable logical conclusion, reducing real life to story and curating the narrative in whatever way best suits her needs. Hers is a world where Malala Yousafzai was merely a child who was hurt, and, because she lived, she is an inspiration; hers is a world where Anne Frank was also a child who was hurt, but because she died, she is, I suppose, a cautionary tale. Crucially, Yamamoto’s is a world where couples may take comfort in both stories, picking and choosing the good parts (the parts they see themselves in) and discarding the bad (the parts they do not wish upon their own lives). It is a myopic, politically-avoidant world that ignores anything that might require serious engagement and cannot be filed down to a cloying, saccharine shape. It is, simply put, quite repulsive when you get right down to it.
- Although A Smart and Courageous Child explicitly cites Seierstad’s book, in reality, it was not published until November of 2013 — more than a year after Yamamoto’s chosen real-time setting. It appears that, while grasping at straws for human suffering, she grasped through time itself.
↩︎ - The phrase “smart and courageous” appears several times over the course of the book as the embodiment of the Takanos’ ideal child, but on several occasions the word “courageous” is replaced by the simpler “brave” — perhaps out of recognition that the latter is simply more common in day-to-day use, this inconsistency on translator Kimura’s part compromises what is clearly designed to be a recurring refrain.
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