Let's start this out with my own admission of personal bias. I took Statistics as a graduate student way too many years ago, and while I did okay in the class at the time, I must confess that a good 90% of the material fled my brain fifteen minutes after I aced my final. Stats and me are not close friends - let's just say I'm numerically challenged and leave it at that.
I thus approached Shin Takahashi's The Manga Guide to Statistics (No Starch Press) in a somewhat resistant frame of mind. "So you're gonna make Cramer's Coefficient interesting to this numbers fumbling geezer? You've got your work cut out for ya!"
The "EduManga" is told through a young girl named Rui, whose father works for a marketing firm. When Rui's dad brings home a dreamy-looking co-worker named Igarashi, the 14-year-old immediately develops a school crush on her elder. To get him to return to her home ("Thinking of him makes me happy," she says as she squeezes her teddy bear), she asks her father if she could be tutored in statistics by one of his colleagues. Dad, tearfully overjoyed to learn that his daughter is interested in his job, agrees.
The tutor that Rui receives, however, proves not to be the handsome Igarishi, but a bespectacled nerd named Mr. Yamamoto. Rui is disappointed by this seeming bait-and-switch, though most readers can immediately guess where that aspect of the storyline is headed once Yamamoto removes his Coke-bottle glasses. Still, she accepts her new tutor's teachings, which are conducted on a chapter-by-chapter basis – first in manga format then as written exercises.
The manga portions, illustrated by Iroha Inoue, are clean and cutely rendered in shoujo style. Girly Rui is your typical uniformed schoolgirl: prone to histrionic overreactions that are utilized for comic effect. Though much of the art is focused on student and teacher interacting in Rui's home, Inoue does toss in a few visual jokes: imagining a frustrated Rui as a distressed Picasso-esque figure for the space of one panel, drawing Yamamoto as a mustachioed waiter serving up a lesson's "main course" in a later panel. To my eyes, the book could've benefited from more of these moments, but perhaps the textbook's creators were concerned with visually straying too far from the task at hand.
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