Kino's Journey (manga), Volume One

             There is a limit to how much television is endurable, no matter what the quality; but that limit is more flexible for books. Manga has a reputation for interminable plot that can scare off readers unwilling to commit. Kino’s Journey is not such a manga and therefore features here. Kino’s Journey, written by Iruka Shiomiya and drawn by Kouhaku Kuraboshi, is derived from the light novel by Keiichi Sigsawa (that missing vowel is intriguing for a Japanese name).

            Volume One of the English translation features three episodes of Kino’s journey – an origin, a dystopia, and a parable. The first episode is in the Land of Adults and provides an origin for Kino and their talking motorbike Hermes. Too much information here would be spoilers for the other adaptations, but the Land of Adults is reminiscent of the world of “Number 12 Looks Just Like You,” except that the Transformation is at an earlier age and the Carousel is much franker. Kino escapes on Hermes the talking motorcycle. The next land is the Land of Understanding Each Other’s Pain, a land which appears empty. The inhabitants of this land were once normal but they overdosed on an empathy drug to bring society closer together, with the result that now they are all even more isolated and their society will soon be extinct. The reaction of isolation to the negative thoughts revealed by the empathy drug is understandable but one would have thought that the society would have a plan for dealing with the negative thoughts they knew existed in humans. Perhaps this is overthinking, and one reason that Kino and Hermes remain only three days in each Land; but surely there must be a fiction where the sudden telepathy is addressed in a productive manner. The third episode is a parable in which there are only three men: an old man who is replacing the torn-up railway tracks; a middle-aged man who is tearing up the tracks, and a young man who is laying down the tracks. This is obviously a metaphor for stages of life.

            The strength of an episodic format is the minimization of consistent characters. The weakness, however, is that those few characters must be compelling enough to draw a return. Kino and Hermes are successful in this task.