Kino’s Journey

In Kino's Journey, the main character, Kino, travels through a mystical world of several nations and woodlands, each with its own own culture and populace. Kino is followed by a talking motorcycle named Hermes. She only stays three days and two nights in each town she visits because she believes that this gives her enough time to absorb nearly all there is to know about a location while still having time to travel to new places. This principle is definitely a falsehood, according to Kino in The Land of Visible Pain, who states expressly that "if I stay any longer, I'm scared I will settle down." The slogan "The world is not lovely, therefore it is" sums up the recurring theme of the anime and literature. In exploring what the anime director Rytar Nakamura called "a radical sense of 'beautiful,'" Kino's Journey frequently contrasts cruelty, lonesomeness, foolishness, oppression, and tragedy with compassion and a whimsical setting.