Episode 106 - Yotsuba&! by Kiyohiko Azuma

**Mat** (0:14)
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Manga Tak, the weekly podcast where we really reflect on the finest waste volumes your money can buy so you can find your next favourite manga. As always, I'm your host, Mat, and this week, I'm joined once again by the creator of Twistwood Tales, my own podcasting lucky charm, my good friend, Mr. AC MacDonald. How you doing, mate? You all right?

**AC MacDonald** (0:32)
Hello there, how you doing? Yes, thanks for having me on.

**Mat** (0:35)
No worries, my friend, no worries. You and I have been actually talking about covering this book probably since I started this podcast, I think.

**AC MacDonald** (0:42)
That's right, yes. It's been a wee while, it's been a favourite on the back burner.

**Mat** (0:46)
No, for sure. I like Yotsuba at all. I will say that once at the start and I will refer to it as Yotsuba, because the name gets a bit confusing, but we'll get into that. It's a book that I have adored for years, and when you said you liked it, I was not surprised knowing what I know of you as a person and your work.

**AC MacDonald** (1:06)
Yes, there's something very charming about it that certainly appeals. Looking forward to getting a chance to talk about it today.

**Mat** (1:13)
Dare I say the word whimsical? I will probably say it 700 times in the podcast, so this is my whimsical warning up front. But it is true. It is a book that has a very unique tone for me, as we will get into. I think there are some pros to that. I also think potentially for some people, there might be some cons, but those people are dead inside, so we will discuss them.

**AC MacDonald** (1:37)
But those people are wrong.

**Mat** (1:39)
Exactly, I completely agree.
I don't usually die on hills like this, but yes, if you think that Yotsuba is too sweet, then you need to examine some life choices that you have made to get you to this point. Who hurt you, is the question I would ask. But for me, Yotsuba was a book that actually I kind of stumbled into reading, if I'm totally honest. I had started studying Japanese, I think, in 2017, and as part of that process, I had started trying to find manga that would have been at least accessible for me as someone learning Japanese, like with a lot of everyday speech, a lot of very simple grammar and everything else. And as part of that journey, I was on the Wanakani forums, and a lot of people there said Yotsuba is a kind of series you should be looking at. They had grammar lists and everything else. So I bought the first volume in Japanese, read it, didn't understand half of it, but it kind of drew me into it. And so much so that I picked up the English one to be like, oh, I'm going to have these to both translate back and forth. This will make my life easier. And then I just read the English version, fell in love with it. I was like, oh, okay. This is the way I have to read this book for now, because it's so dense with wordplay, it's so dense with charm. It just brings up this spirit of being around a child and a young person and the way they see the world. There's such an irreverence and such a naivety in the best possible way to how Yotsuba is written. Then I thought, actually, I need to read this in a language I understand much more of the Japanese at that moment in time to get the full double barrels of Yotsuba's optimism on me. And yeah, it worked. I became a fan of this series instantly as a result.

**AC MacDonald** (3:23)
There's some interesting parallels there to my own experience. I don't know how things are for yourself, Mat, but there's so much out there now to enjoy and read and watch and play as far as your time is concerned.
To be convinced to actually engage with something, it's almost like there has to be a subliminal campaign to actually push me over the threshold of actually trying something. So it wasn't one particular thing for me getting into Yotsuba. I'd say first exposure to Yotsuba was probably the memes in the background of the internet, the general radiation of the internet that would appear in forums. And I think I've sent you this picture a few times. There's this parody of a page from Neo Genocide Evangelion. And you see Reyes Hurt and instead of Shinji, it's Yotsuba. New Yotsuba says, in a resigned way, I will get into the mech.