The Fall 2024 Manga Guide

A Smart and Courageous Child

What's It About? 

Every young couple has high hopes for their unborn child, and Sara and Kouta Takano are no different. But only days away from giving birth, Sara learns about the tragedy of Malala Yousafzai's attempted assassination at the hands of the Taliban, and her pure and innocent belief in the future is shaken. If such A Smart and Courageous Child can be hurt so badly by the world, how can she keep her own baby safe? With Sara now in a state of shock, will the young couple be able to bridge the widening gap between them, or will it tear their family apart?

A Smart and Courageous Child has a story and art by Miki Yamamoto. The English translation is by Katie Kimura. This volume was lettered by Vibrraant Publishing Studio. Published by TOKYOPOP (September 24, 2024).

---

Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

I once asked my parents why they did a specific thing I didn't like – it may have been making me go to a school dance or something similar. They knew, I told them, that I didn't like loud, crowded places, so why would they insist I go? They were quiet for a moment, and then my mother said, “You didn't come with an instruction manual.” It may sound a little trite, but over the years, watching people with children around me, I've come to realize that she was not only telling the truth, but it was also the best way to express the way she and my father felt. Children don't come with specialized instructions, and you don't know the person you're having until they're born and grow. All parents can do is their best.

Sara, the pregnant mother in A Smart and Courageous Child, is doing her absolute best to find that missing instruction book. She doesn't think of it that way; she and her husband Kouta are having their first child and they're amassing all the information they possibly can. Sara in particular obsesses over books of child geniuses and prodigies, they make exhaustive lists of the lessons their child (eventually revealed to be a daughter) will take, and they dream of being the parents of the next Malala Yousafzai. And then the news hits: Malala has been shot in the head, all for being A Smart and Courageous Child. Suddenly, the pregnancy doesn't look so rosy anymore, and the prospect of bringing a child into a dangerous world is terrifying.

I don't have children of my own. I can't speak to what it's like to feel the terror that something awful will happen to your baby in a dark world. (I know what it feels like to be an aunt, but I suspect that may be different.) But even without that knowledge, this book is remarkably poignant and effective. We watch Sara go from giddy to paralyzed by fear, from reading about healthy, safe children to obsessing over Malala and Anne Frank. If you've ever felt any anxiety about something you can't control, you will empathize with Sara and how she can't cope with these new fears that have sprung up out of what feels like nowhere, the loss of control that she can't help but feel. Towards the end of the book, six days past her estimated delivery date, Sara begins screaming in the OB-GYN's office, begging them to “get [the baby] out,” and when the nurse tries to calm her, she cries that it's her body. The implication may be that she needs to not carry this responsibility anymore, or at least not feel like she's bearing most of the burden, but it could also be a shout for help. Sara's pregnancy represents fear now. She doesn't want to feel that anymore.

The story doesn't try to be political, and Kouta is supportive of his wife throughout, clearly wishing that he could help with the physical burden of pregnancy as well. The art is deceptively simple, using what looks like colored pencils to create a sense of a picture book, which of course, as one character says, is for not just children, but parents as well. Ultimately, it's a story about wanting what's best for your child while fearing the worst, ending on a hopeful note. Children don't come with instructions, but all that means is that you get to figure things out as a family.

---

Lauren Orsini
Rating:

With soft, scribbly artwork and a warm, domestic story, this is the kind of comic I'd expect to pick up at an indie comics festival, not the manga section of a bookstore. A story that exposes its whole heart on the page, Miki Yamamoto's “A Smart and Courageous Child” perfectly encapsulates the nearly unbearable hope and angst of being a new, expectant parent. It is no exaggeration to say this comic made me cry with recognition and remembrance of this fragile time before my own children's births.

At the beginning of the manga, Sara and Kouta Takano have just found out that they are about to become parents for the first time. Their joy takes on a physical form as big, bubbly hearts pour out of their car's tailpipe and into traffic as they drive home from the maternity clinic. Just as palpable as their love for each other and their new baby, however, is their concern. Sara and Kouka don't just want their child to be happy and healthy; they want her to be outstanding. They pore over stories about exceptional children, like activist Malala Yousafzai, as inspiration. But during Sara's pregnancy, Malala is wounded—targeted because of her excellency. Sara begins to have doubts: would teaching her daughter to be brilliant make her a target, too? As their daughter's due date draws nearer, the couple finds themselves fracturing.

Raw and relatable to any parent, A Smart and Courageous Child uses simplistic illustrations to tell a universal story. Drawn only with black, red, yellow, and slate-blue colored pencils, it captures a muted snow globe of a world—the strange liminal space that new parents occupy, seemingly insulated from everything else. In this short-lived echo chamber of expectant parenthood, Sara and Kouka's concerns feel larger than life in a way that I found instantly familiar. “I don't want to call parents with young kids ‘monsters’ but they're definitely on a different wavelength from everyone else,” Sara's friend Yuu says, truthfully if not tactfully. Sara's worries and actions don't always seem logical, but that's the charm of this vulnerable comic.

---