Also written: 4-koma, four-panel manga
A comic strip of four panels stacked vertically, built on a set-up, development, turn and punchline. 31 in the letters, reducing to 4.
4Reduced, this term gives 4. It sits on The Structure with the rest of a structure.
Yonkoma (四コマ, "four frames", often written 4-koma) is the four-panel strip. The panels run top to bottom in a single column, and a page of a yonkoma manga usually carries two strips side by side.
The form is organised around kishōtenketsu, a four-part structure borrowed from classical Chinese poetry: introduction, development, twist, conclusion. The third panel is where the strip turns, and the fourth lands the joke or the quiet observation that closes it.
Yonkoma grew up in newspapers. Machiko Hasegawa's Sazae-san, which began in 1946, ran as a daily strip for decades and is the model most Japanese readers know. Later the form moved into dedicated magazines and into long-running comedies such as Kiyohiko Azuma's Azumanga Daioh.
Because each strip must stand alone, yonkoma favours character over plot: a cast is established once and then observed from strip to strip. That is why so much slice-of-life manga, and a good deal of the anime adapted from it, starts here.
Counted letter by letter this term comes to 31 — 4 once reduced.
The reference files it as a structure. The number's contribution is structure, labour, and the building of lasting systems — and with it the 4's insistence that what lasts must be built patiently, which is the thread the reference follows here.
Split the term again and the vowels give a Heart's Desire of 4 (foundation) against a Personality of 9 (reckoning) in the consonants — the presentation folds back into the want: reckoning in service of foundation.
Read on the 4's terms, this entry asks you to look for the constraint the subject was working inside. The 4 confuses the frame for the work. Structures outlive their usefulness, and several entries here describe conventions kept long past their reason. The other entries that reduce to 4 are collected on The Structure.