By Kiyohiko Azuma. Released in Japan by ASCII Media Works, serialization ongoing in the magazine Dengeki Daioh. Released in North America by Yen Press.

This is not the best volume of Yotsuba we’ve seen. It’s a sign of how good this series is that I have to note that right off the bat. Yes, it’s still heartwarming, funny, and generally leaves a smile on your face, but it’s merely fantastic here.

As always, most of what we see involves Yotsuba interacting with anything and everything. Yotsuba smashing up pears, Yotsuba having hamburg steak, Yotsuba going to a culture fair, Yotsuba in a typhoon… enjoy everything, indeed. As long as she remains this innocent (and really, the manga’s been running for years and maybe 6 months have passed in-universe, so no worries there), there will be no worries about this manga losing our interest.

There’s also a nice helping of my favorite characters, Ayase Asagi and Ayase Fuuka. I love them both, if for totally different reasons. Asagi is the perfect confident, cool big sis. From Chapter 1 she was presented to us as awesome, and she’s also the best of the three girls at dealing with Yotsuba. (Ena, the youngest, plays with Yotsuba a lot, but doesn’t control her per se.) I loved Asagi’s blase reaction to Yotsuba on top of Jumbo’s shoulders – she knows exactly how not to break the illusion for the child. Also, that lunch with Torako was totally a date. I decree it. :)

Fuuka, meanwhile, is fascinating for a totally different reason. Every time we see her, it seems to set her up to be laughable or dorky in some way. Her life in the manga is made for embarrassment. And yet whenever we see her on the periphery, or look at her outside the confines of Yotsuba’s life, she’s pretty much the popular, savvy girl. She’s vice president of the class, seems to be in charge of the culture fair, and can wrap guys in her school around her little finger (though she seems unaware of this last part.) No doubt she is living the perfect life in a manga that isn’t this one and doesn’t require her to be humiliated every few chapters.

My favorite chapter in the volume is the one with the typhoon. It features Yotsuba, her father, and the Ayases, which is the best core cast for varied interactions. It has Yotsuba’s dad being silly and awesome at the same time, something he does at least once a volume. (Azuma apparently noted he gets a lot of letters talking about how sexy girls think Koiwai is, and they disturb him. The girls are correct – he is.) We see Asagi learning once more that one cannot be too careful when dealing with Yotsuba. And we have the final page of the chapter, which conveys in 3 panels how under-appreciated the art itself is in this series. (I think one reason that Azuma refuses to let an anime be made is that Yotsuba&! works best in still frames. Animating it would lose a lot of the action.)

Yen’s translation is just fine, though I wish they’d just kept Shimau’s name as Shimau and added a footnote. Miss Stake just sounds dumb.

Overall, I hope you don’t need me to tell you to go get this manga. A merely great volume of Yotsuba&! is still great, and head and shoulders above the ‘awwwwww’ manga competition.