Kiyohiko Azuma’s Yotsuba&! began on 21 March 2003 and is still going more than twenty years later. That nothing much happens is close to being the premise. Yotsuba, five years old with green hair tied into two points, moves to a new town with her adoptive father, and every chapter is one day in which she meets something she has never seen before.
A chapter can be built out of a swing set, cicada hunting, a milk delivery or a camping trip, and the drawing keeps very close track of what a child finds strange and in what order she gets things wrong. The adults around her mostly play along rather than explain or correct: the three Ayase sisters next door, Koiwai who took her in, and the two friends who wander in and out of the house.
Backgrounds are unusually detailed, so the season and the hour of the day are legible on the page, and that precision is what keeps a story with no plot readable to the end. Chapters stand alone and any volume works as an entry point, which makes it a good book to pick up when there is no time to follow a running story.
