Kino no Tabi: Vol. 1
© Tokyopop

Mania Grade: A+
Story: Keiichi Sigsawa
Art: Kouhaku Kuroboshi
Publisher: TOKYOPOP
Rating: 13+
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"Kino no Tabi: Vol. 1"

I have always wanted to check out Kino’s Journey, an anime series about a girl riding a sentient motorcycle around the world. It sounded... cute. Oh, how wrong I was. This story is so much more than just cute. 

One of the first books in TOKYOPOP’s new young adult fiction line, Pop Fiction, Kino no Tabi is the light novel series that the anime is based upon. Unlike the other light novels (short novels for young adults, usually with some illustrations inside) I’ve read up to now, TOKYOPOP seems to be aiming for a more generalized teenage audience, instead of teens already into anime and manga, or at the very least, science-fiction and fantasy. The cover has a sleek, modern look, with simple text and a plain outline illustration in tri-color (grey, yellow and gold), blending in with many popular young adult fiction on regular bookshelves, as in not the manga section.   

The book opens with the statement: “The world is not beautiful, therefore it is.” This theme links all of the chapters/adventures of Kino and her motorcycle, Hermes in the book. The first chapter sets up the story as the girl who would become Kino meets a male traveler named Kino, who is staying at the inn her family runs. The male Kino builds a motorcycle from scrap metal during his three-day stay in her village (one of his rule in regards to visiting different cities; it only takes three days to know a city and its inhabitants), which also happens to be the last three days of the girl’s life as a child. In her village, all of the children at the age of twelve have an operation and become adults, following in their parents’ profession. She asks Kino about life in other villages, and is shocked to hear that other people don’t have operations to become adults and they choose their career. When she asks her father about whether she has to have the operation, he explodes and attempts to kill her in front of the entire community, as she is a bad child for defying her father’s will, and children are the property of their parents. Kino comes between father and daughter and is killed. Numbed by shock, the girl touches the motorcycle that the male Kino was about to ride off on, and it talks, commanding her to get on and ride it out of town. Thus begins the relationship between Kino, who adopts the traveler’s name as she feels her name as a village child doesn’t suit her anymore, and Hermes, the often complaining motorcycle. 

The rest of the novel mostly consists of Kino and Hermes visiting a city, staying there for three days and witnessing the dark side as well as the merits of its society, and then moving on after making a comment or so (oftentimes involving her two guns, The Cannon and The Woodsman, and Kino is a master sharpshooter). There is one chapter where Kino and Hermes travel through a forest while experiencing the evils of bureaucracy, naming a man cleaning the old railroad tracks, another removing the tracks, followed by another man laying new tracks. Kino no Tabi is very much in the vein of The Twilight Zone, with its discussion of social issues and how destructive and wrong a “perfect” society is. The land where everyone is telepathic and empathic is also the land where everyone lives in isolation, unable to abide the honest and uncensored negative thoughts and feelings of others. The book is also very concerned with the question of violence, of how necessary it is, from killing animals for food to killing people to maintain peace. The cities vary in their technological level, from medieval to futuristic with robot attendants, but most cities are a mish-mash of technology. 

This is rather heavy subject matter for the average teenager, yet I think many teens in our day and age would enjoy this book a lot. Social justice issues are discussed in classrooms around the world, and Kino no Tabi definitely raises more questions than it settles in each chapter; Sigsawa seems to make an effort to avoid preaching, or if Kino does make an absolute moral decision, it’s Kino who says it, not the author. 

To some fan condemnation (any alteration of the original Japanese work is wrong!), TOKYOPOP rearranged the chapter order into chronological order, as well as dropped the afterward. Looking at the original format, I think the editor made a good decision, as the Japanese order would be rather confusing for first-time readers, as the introduction of Girl Kino, Male Kino and Hermes comes one chapter shy of the end of the book. I’m against censorship and alterations, but sometimes it makes for a better book. The editors also chose to switch the final chapter, leaving us exiting upon meeting new characters who will appear in later novels, instead of the anti-war story illustrated on the cover. 

Kino no Tabi is a great book for young adults, as well as twenty-somethings like myself. I ended up devouring this book in chapter segments. I’m looking forward to the next volume in early 2007, and I’d recommend this for fans of sci-fi and fantasy who don’t mind a little touch of philosophy in their recreational reading.