Kino no Tabi

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Author: Keiichi Sigsawa

Light Novel Review (Volume 1)
Kino no Tabi was a very popular light novel, first published in the year 2000 in Japan. How popular? There are 12 Kino novels in print, totaling 5.5 million copies.

The basic premise: Kino rides a talking motorcycle named Hermes across a fantasy world, visiting the many little city-states, staying in each a total of 3 days.

As you can imagine, the book is a series of short morality plays. Kino and Hermes visit each city and observe its culture, learning of noble experiments gone wrong and bad ideas gone worse. That's what draws you into the book; wondering what Kino and Hermes will find next. There's no need to draw it all together into one overarching story.

Fortunately, Sigsawa also draws interesting characters in Kino and Hermes. They have a calm relationship. They are symbiotes; Kino needs Hermes as effective transportation, and Hermes can't move without a rider. They bicker a bit, but they have a rock-solid relationship underneath that. And it's not goofy anime bickering; it's the natural squabbling of siblings or a married couple.

The writing itself feels very fluid, painting some lovely word-pictures. The writing doesn't result in intensely memorable passages, but it's not meant to. It glides by like the scenery on the way to the next city.

This volume was translated by Andrew Cunningham and Maya Bohnhoff. I point this out because the book's descriptions are usually beautiful. Japanese has a way of coming across as stiff and stilted, but by and large this translation flows. An example:


 * The forest had some of the largest trees Kino had ever seen--and she had seen many. The trunks were so thick, the stumps could be used as double beds. They were like the pillars of a shrine, but scattered, without any human sense of order.

Compare the lovely English above to the stilted structure of the paragraph below:


 * The man stood. He was old and very short. His face was a collection of wrinkles that all but hid his gray eyes. His long hair was almost perfectly white, and his beard had clearly not been tripped for decades. He wore a small, black pill-shaped hat. His shirt and pants--of the same black--were now worn to rags and patched here and there.

Dialogue, on the other hand, is uniformly excellent. Each character has a unique pattern of speech. Here's a guard:


 * "How about it?" asked another young man, peering at her through narrowed eyes. "You gonna participate? Or you gonna head straight for the slave quarters? You'd be the first person ever to do that, Kino. Or should I say Number 24?"

Here's a dignified, samurai-style fellow:


 * "There's something I have to do...after I become a citizen. I hope you will surrender. I wish you no harm."

And here's Hermes:


 * "Okay, so what about you? Why do you travel, Kino? I mean, I know you've got nowhere to go back to. But we keep running into trouble, you keep almost getting killed, and being on the road isn't easy for you. Why is it you never find some place to settle down? You're smart. You're good with guns; you could find a job anywhere."

I should also mention the anime Kino's Journey, which adapted vignettes from various novels into a 13-episode anime TV series. The anime adaptation is very faithful, but the light novels have an inherent advantage: you get to see inside Kino's head. During the coliseum sequence at the end of the novel, it was very clear to me why Kino behaved the way she did; in the anime, I was a bit confused to see Kino so determined. While the novel stays mostly in the third person, there's enough from Kino's perspective to clearly communicate critical motivations.

Overall? Beautiful writing, affecting vignettes, and entertaining characters: that is Kino no Tabi.