Okay. I'm going to stop complaining about the impossibility of these categories. I'm starting to bore even me. So let's just do this.

Yotsuba, volume 10. There's this moment that five years ago would have meant nothing to me. Yotsuba's lied to her father. He knows this totally in the way that parents do. Also because kids suck at telling believable lies. In any case, he knows. And because he's a dad of a little girl he completely loves, he gives her another shot. An opportunity to back out. And she interrupts this chance to rectify the breach in their relationship by crafting an even more fanciful and ridiculous lie. The entire scene is played through the eyes. There's dialogue, sure, but the wonder of the scene is in the looks. We know the hearts, the souls, of each of these characters wholly by way of Azuma Kiyohiko's storytelling through their eyes.

Here's the scene. It's manga and I haven't flipped it so it reads right-to-left instead of in the normal Western fashion:

Again, five years ago, I would have laughed at the scene (as it is pretty comical), but having my own daughter who is nearbout Yotsuba's age has given these pages an incisive sort of life I could never have imagined. Really, five years ago, all of Yotsuba&! seemed funny and ludicrous, the adventures of a young girl who could never truly exist. Now though, the series might as well be straight-up non-fiction. This is my daughter's story had only she lived in Japan with a single father and been a bit more outgoing than she is.

There may be more visually outstanding moments, more heartrendingly beautiful moments, more aesthetically pleasing moments—but for me, in this time, my beautiful moment is this beautiful moment, because though it may illustrate something negative, it does so with a sacred kind of veracity.

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