By Mikase Hayashi
Published by CMX
Rating: Teen

It would be so easy for March on Earth to fall into the cliché pile.

The setup is there: Yuzu Takamiya, 15, finds herself in an unenviable position: she’s on her own, raising her two-year-old nephew, Shou. How she got to this situation is painful and sad: when she was in fourth grade and her older sister Tsubaki in eleventh, their parents died. Tsubaki took on the responsibility of caring for Yuzu, and a couple of years later had a child of her own. She never told Yuzu who Shou’s father was, merely smiling and saying that she was just happy to have the child of someone she loved. A month before the story begins, Tsubaki dies in a car accident.

There are no other relatives to care for Shou. The city welfare service wants to put him in an institution, but Yuzu argues for the right to care for her only remaining relative. She’s backed up by her landlady “Kusano-chan,” a middle-aged woman with two teenage sons of her own. The elder of these two sons, Seita, is in Yuzu’s grade at school and has something of a raging crush on her.

It’d be so, so easy for this manga to become nothing more than a wasteland of shojo stereotype. Instead, it pulls away from the ordinary to tell a quiet story about perseverance, love, and family.

The first thing that strikes me about March on Earth is how there isn’t a villain. Yes, social services wants to take Shou away, but this makes perfect sense to me. Leaving a toddler in the care of a fifteen-year-old is a questionable choice at best, and I truly think (though it’s never stated) that the only reason that Yuzu is allowed to keep her nephew is that Kusano-chan is right there to back her up. In a later scene, there’s a girl at Yuzu and Seita’s school who says some harsh things due to jealousy, though even that doesn’t paint her as being bad. A silly, immature girl? Absolutely, and I think even she realizes that by the time that everything’s said and done. This story is framed in a gentle world, allowing Yuzu and Shou’s story to take center stage without elbowing in with unnecessary complications.

The characters are fantastic. Yuzu is a strong girl, and she’s the best aunt she can be to this child she’s raising while still aiming at her goal of becoming an attorney and helping those who have been in situations such as the one Tsubaki found herself in. While she isn’t too proud to let others help her out at times, she doesn’t expect it. Through it all, she holds her head high and tries to keep smiling and continue on for Shou’s sake. Shou has his moments of being too cutesy, but he’s also like a real child—he wants his mother when he’s sick, he clings to Yuzu when he’s scared, he takes his sweet time being toilet trained.

Tsubaki is a real character in the series as well (despite having died before it started), far more feminine than her younger sister but possessed of a kind and generous spirit and a real love for life. She seemed unafraid of raising her sister and her fatherless child in a society that might grudgingly accept the first but wholly disapproves of the second. Her presence is felt throughout the text through both her sister and her son, and she continues to give them strength even after her passing. It’s a credit to Hayashi-sensei that she manages to pull this off without it seeming cloying or crowbarred in. Instead, Tsubaki and the children’s book she wrote are the backbone of this story, helping Yuzu to keep her optimistic attitude throughout the narrative.

The weakest element of March on Earth, in fact, is the art. It’s not really bad, but it’s not great. There are angles where the facial features don’t seem placed correctly, making the faces look flat. There’s not a lot of contrast in the second volume, either. The lines are very fine and most of the screentones used are very light. This makes Yuzu’s black hair stand out, but other objects and people have the unfortunate tendency to blend into the background.

These are small complaints. Trifling ones. March on Earth is a title I’d wholeheartedly recommend to anyone who wants to read something heartwarming and sweet.

Volumes one and two of March on Earth are available now.

Review copies provided by the publisher.