“Traveller, where are you… where are you headed too?”
I can now say with authority that if you have chosen to create something an average of once a week, every week, for ten years, without anyone asking you to start, that is now something you are, not just something you do. There may be goals and destinations along the way, but no endgames... only the journey.
Saturday 30th May 2026 marks ten years since the first article on this website was published, and if you have read any of these at any point, you have my thanks, because whatever track I am on, I feel it is the right one.
I wrote about what began this journey when I reached the five-year mark and, at that point, it felt like I reached a checkpoint: I talked about doing more videos instead, meaning the rate at which written pieces appear would decline. That ultimately didn’t happen because making videos became too much of a chore at the time and too prone to compromise, so I gave myself an increasingly long break from it. The only reason I never corrected myself since is because I am finding ways of making the video-making process more fun for me, and because I never stopped having ideas for videos. The point is to keep putting things out there, in any form.
Having made enough allusions to travel, I want to talk about a story.
In a land of countries separated by landscapes and forests, and known by characteristics very specific to them, a teenage traveller and their talking motorcycle venture to learn what is important about each country, and what makes its people unique. Limiting each stay to three days and two nights, exploration taking priority over thoughts of settlement, the traveller experiences the full range of human experience, from generosity and compassion to oppression and prejudice, even visiting countries to witness these extremes. Acknowledging the worst of the world to appreciate its best more wholeheartedly becomes this story’s theme: “The world is not beautiful, therefore it is.”
Rarely am I captivated by a story’s premise as much as by “Kino’s Journey – the Beautiful World”, the 2003 anime adaptation of Keiichi Sigsawa’s light novel series that began in 2000, of which there will be spoilers here. Most of the stories from the novels remain not adapted or translated from the original Japanese, which is a shame, although fan translations of most stories exist online. For me, “Kino’s Journey” is almost the inverse of “The Prisoner”, where Number Six is trapped in one extreme place, one deliberately beyond comprehension. When events and the news threaten to overwhelm you, knocking your sense of place, it turns out I turn to stories of strong-minded, stoic individuals in remarkably specific settings.
The land in the story, while fantastic enough to allow for tracts of explored but unclaimed land to exist between countries, appears set during the 20th century, according to the level of technology displayed in the show. The countries portrayed in “Kino’s Journey” feel like our own – indeed, the walled states look very European – but each one invites scrutiny. In one land, all adults conduct their work, whatever it is, with good cheer, because children are mandatorily lobotomised at age twelve to become “perfect” adults. In another, everyone lives far away from each other to avoid hearing or feeling what each other is thinking, an empathetic scientific advancement driving everyone apart because they know too much, the pain of others driving them over the edge. Two countries resolved a decades-long war by turning it into a yearly game where they instead bomb a third. Another country practised the rule of the majority until the last one was sentenced to death. Another country’s ancestors were travellers, who chose to settle for eternity in one place.
My favourite episode of the series involved visits to a few countries. In the “Land of Prophecies”, its people are getting ready for the apocalypse to happen the next day, because a priest has proclaimed that a book, which originated from a faraway land, but a “miracle” had sent it to them, had predicted the end of their world. When the sun rises the next day, another priest reinterprets the book to proclaim the apocalypse won’t happen for another thirty years. Passing through another land that ejected its former king and its traditions, unsuccessfully using travellers to test new traditions, like wearing cat ears, Kino and Hermes come across the “Land of Sadness”, where a lament has been recited on a bridge for decades, one that plunged the country into melancholy and withdrawal. It so happens that someone wrote the lament into a book... The episode ends with an army approaching the “Land of Sadness”, a prophecy telling them they must invade it.
What I was most struck by was how you are being invited to make up your mind about these events shown alongside the characters – we are passing through as much as they are. Pertinent lines of dialogue will be repeated as text on screen, but the on-screen patterns and sound design suggest a fleeting moment to reflect before cutting back to the scene – observations and realisations are highlighted by a soft bell sound.
Acting as a guide without feeling didactic, the effect created by these decisions, alongside a more muted colour palette than early 2000s digitally-painted anime usually suggests, creates a calming and contemplative feeling in me as I watched. This is also aided by the constant presence of lines across the screen, in imitation of a cathode ray tube television showing us a story from another place, and another time, with its own alphabet.
Kino, the traveller, is stoic, straightforward and dispassionate in how he approaches each place he visits, helping if required, but not there to interfere. A quirk of Kino’s character design, barely shared by anyone else in the series, is a slight triangular cut from each pupil to make them look slightly “pie-eyed”, to use the term previously applied to Mickey Mouse and Betty Boop, but giving the impression of someone mentally putting themselves at a distance from what they are seeing. Hermes, the novels and the series using the German “motorrad”, is more a sounding board for Kino than comic relief, and is sympatico with him – one provides speed, the other balance. (Hermes is modelled on a Brough Superior motorcycle, multiple models of which were owned by the explorer T.E. Lawrence.) However, we do not discover this fully in the first episode, your impression of Kino building with time. His level of resourcefulness as a traveller, plus prodigious use of guns and knives – the sound of a “persuader” pistol being drawn is heard many times, Kino continuing to practise their reactive speed – suggest that, if not for Hermes, and indeed the “Master” they supposedly learned under, they would be completely alone.
This is because Kino comes from the land where he was expected to have “the operation” at age twelve. The arrival of a traveller at his parents’ hotel led to questioning if they could become an adult simply by being themselves, causing the parents to label him “defective”, and triggering a “right of disposal” – the traveller gets in the way of the father’s knife, killing them, leading to an escape from the country on the motorcycle built during the story, and Kino taking on the name of the traveller who died. Originally, the Kino of our story was a girl whose unsaid name was that of a beautiful flower, which became an insult when one letter was changed. Kino later decided that male pronouns suited them better, during his training with the Master described in the first seventh volume of the light novels, the first published after the TV series aired – perhaps this was a clarification by the author, or one more journey taken.
“Kino’s Journey” was a story that made me question my sense of place. I have lived in the same town all my life, but I don’t believe I belong to it – it is by the sea, which always helps, but this may have left something I need to explore, alongside physically leaving its boundaries, if only to work and shop. I am not defined by where I live, but does that mean I could live anywhere? Would I still be the same person if I arrived in another place? Why would it take so long for me to think about that? I have no answers right now, but the series, the stories, and its premise have, intentionally, left me with many questions.
Travel has been important to this website over the last ten years: I have written about being caught in the orange sky that descended on New York City in 2023, I have witnessed the work of Hieronymus Bosch in Belgium, and I essentially made a pilgrimage to Liverpool to see the work of Keith Haring. This will continue, and I should continue to make room for opportunities.
This may sound silly, but I once had a short trip in 2021, for three days and two nights, to a place that was known to run things its own way, but turned out to be a place where this was tried once, and seemingly never again, due to cost or indifference – it was Milton Keynes.
Perhaps it explains why I have found myself thinking about Milton Keynes since: the grid system, separating pedestrians and cyclists from the roads to a place of wheeled robots and abandoned scooters for hire; buildings and trees kept to a maximum height that has since been abandoned by new developments; a shopping centre so iconic in its design, it has now been preserved as a listed building, unable to develop further.
Indeed, my trip to Milton Keynes was to look at an exhibition of postmodern Memphis furniture. I have joked that I would like a square of Milton Keynes to call my own, but just because it is a place I have visited, doesn’t mean there are other places where I could settle better – Oxford comes close, but again, it is not near the sea.
With the twenty-third and latest volume of “Kino’s Journey” published in 2020, I found no information online to confirm if this was the last. Going so far as ordering a copy of it, resolving to use my phone to translate the conclusion for my benefit, volume twenty-four was announced before it arrived, marking its twenty-fifth anniversary. The journey goes on.
Once again, thank you for the last ten years – let’s keep going.
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