The world is not beautiful; therefore it is

I’ve mentioned Kino’s Journey in my very first post to Lover’s Lanes and again in my previous post. For some reason I’ve never bothered explaining what it is. It has to do with the nature of writing. You’re on one subject and you think of something relevant, so you include it, but then you can’t explain what it is or why it’s relevant without changing the subject. Good writers stay organized so that they’re not constantly referring to people you haven’t met yet; that, or they make the mystery of who those people are part of the experience of reading. Mystery adds depth. It reminds you that the narrator’s a complete human being, the sum of whose experiences will not fit in a book of any length.

With that in mind, I’m almost tempted not to tell you about Kino’s Journey. I could do that. Just let you wonder what left such a mark on me that I named my audio recorder after it. But then if you were really interested you’d just Google it and you’d get a sterile Wikipedia treatment of the show’s premise, cast, and prevailing themes. I’d rather you learn about it from me so you understand at least a fraction of why it’s so important.

What I want you to imagine is that the world is a collection of city-states separated by wilderness. These countries are works of man, and as such are all deeply dysfunctional; yet each has its own underlying logic, its own myth, its own beauty. There’s the land of perfect democracy, where by majority vote the citizens gradually ordered each other executed as traitors until only one citizen was left – an absolute king over a democracy of one. There’s the land of wizards, a place where the value of a person or idea is judged solely by what they contribute to agriculture, and yet where one woman lives who dreams of flight. There’s the land of empathy, where the citizens invented a potion that let everyone know each other’s thoughts – and where, terrified by what they saw in the minds of others, the people withdrew one and all to live like hermits.

Through this beautiful, broken world travels Kino. She’s a young girl who escaped from the land of adults, where people have an operation to make them compliant executors of their assigned occupations, to find her own way. She rides a motorcycle named Hermes which she inherited from the previous Kino, a man traveling through the land of adults who gave his life to liberate our Kino. Hermes can talk, and as with a child every other thing out of his mouth (or rather speakers?) is a question. Kino, on the other hand, tends not to talk. When she does she hides behind allegory, or riddles, or banalities. Instead of talking, she listens. She travels to each country, staying no more than three days, listening to the people and trying to grasp the riddle the city presents. When she’s done, she moves on, often without comment, to the next country.

The countries themselves, of course, are allegorical to problems faced by real societies and for that matter by individuals. Kino is the vehicle we use to travel from one country to the next. But she is also an intriguing enigma in herself, and her internally contradictory and eternally wary psyche contrasts in its complexity with the simplicity of the places she travels. Kino and her world both stick in your head. But what sticks in your head most is the journey, because it’s through the journey that both the destination and the wayfarer are revealed.

I’m not out to recreate Kino’s Journey – which is an anime, by the way, as I somehow forgot to mention, you see how that happens? – with Lover’s Lanes. But the aesthetic of a journey that is about both the stationary points and the moving one – that’s what I want to capture. To the extent, in fact, that Lover’s Lanes wasn’t even my first idea for what to call this project. The Japanese name for Kino’s Journey is Kino no Tabi. Kino’s name sounds a lot like kinou, the Japanese word for yesterday. So my first idea was to call this project Ashita no Tabi – Tomorrow’s Journey, or Journey into Tomorrow. I rejected it because it was in Japanese and didn’t make sense and anyway I like Lover’s Lanes better. I’m just including this vignette to help you understand what effect Kino’s Journey had on how I think about this project. Without Kino’s Journey there would be no Lover’s Lanes.