IT’S NICE TO BE ALIVE [543]

Having spent as long as I had last time talking about the 2003 anime version of the “Kino’s Journey – the Beautiful World” series of novels, the following is proof that I was apparently not done. To be more specific, you would have thought, for as much of a fan of Devo as I have proved, I would have mentioned their song “Beautiful World”.

One of Devo's very best pieces, remaining a persistently perfect closer to their concerts, “Beautiful World” is ironic, sardonic and angry, and I love it more now than ever. Having last time considered my sense of place, I realised how quick some people are to define that place without me, and what a “wonderful place” they make it. I never quite understood when Gerald Casale sang of “the way they show they care”, and especially “the way they comb their hair”, but I feel it now. Of course, the payoff of this being a beautiful world “for you” is that “it’s not for me” but, to tie this back to “Kino’s Journey”, witnessing the world at its worst makes encountering the best of it feel that much sweeter.

One sentence I should have included last time when discussing the “Land of Prophecies” was when one character tells Kino why a proclamation is happening: “The book is prophecy because the priest says the book says that it is.” I appreciate how clunky that line sounds, each clause serving to halve the credibility of the prophecy, if that ever existed for a neutral bystander.

Kino’s use of male pronouns in the light novels was something I carried over in discussing the anime, even though the novels established this information after the anime was completed. However, a follow-up half-hour film was produced in 2005, “Life Goes On”, that depicts how a runaway girl, from a country that was about to dispose of her, becomes a traveller. Only since completing my initial research did I find a copy of this film that included English subtitles, and I am happy I did: this is a story of someone learning how to become a different person, one for a different world, because they must.

But a crucial scene happens as Kino prepares to go to sleep, getting used to a name that was not their own. “Kino. Sometimes it still doesn’t feel like it’s my name. I am Kino... I guess ‘I’ fits Kino better after all.” It doesn’t come up again in the film, but this moment resonated with the series I watched – we are seeing someone who is only themselves, and is defined only by themselves, amongst groups of people in countries with identities ascribed to them, ones that must be witnessed.

This makes the final episode of the 2003 anime, with Kino considering staying a further night in one country that resonates with him, more heartbreaking. He is told he cannot break the agreed duration of his visa, but staying would have meant sharing the same fate, buried under a volcanic eruption the country accepted was coming. Kino discovers the country has purposefully left him with their memory to carry forward, carrying what was a beautiful world with them. “The world is not beautiful, therefore it is”, and so is the memory of what had been, if not what could be.