Kino's Journey - the Beautiful World-

Episode 5

I'll say this about the latest Kino's Journey episode: it wasn't about politics, and Kino didn't shoot anyone. It reveals something about the tenor of this series so far that I'm counting “didn't accidentally advocate a war crime” as an achievement, but that's just where we're at right now. Unfortunately, this fundamental decency in depicting large-scale human events doesn't mean that the show has gotten any better. It's simply moved onto new pastures of intimate human relationships rather than the conduct of nations.

This episode's main story is preceded by a mini-sode of sorts, which is pretty brief and mostly foreshadowing, but I'll run you through it. Kino arrives at some nation to be promptly given a tour of their ex-president's house. It's been converted into a museum commemorating his days as a traveler, much like Kino. While there, Kino notices that they've misrepresented a lot of his travelling equipment to seem cooler than it actually is. (The poop-trowel, for example, is assumed to be used for planting flowers. I guess that's technically true, depending on what you've eaten.) Eventually, they're led to the room where his old motorrad is stored. Hermes thinks this one should also be able to talk, but according to the guide, it hasn't said a word in years – probably out of sorrow for its owner's passing. However, once Kino is left alone with the motorrad, they manage to strike up a conversation. The poor thing is miserable being stuck in this room forever. Motorrads are meant to be ridden, so this one requests that Kino kill it if they can't set it free. Kino refuses out of fear of retribution from the country (one of the less-shitty things they've done, but it's still pretty unflattering). At least they tell a kid about the motorrad on their way out, implying that the kid – an innkeeper's child who wants to travel – will grow up to free the lonely machine. The specifics of Kino's own origins as a traveler that are hinted at throughout this mini-sode will have some resonance later on in the show.

So going by the episode's title, this story relates to “lying” by acknowledging how nations tend to obscure the mundane or unsavory parts of their histories. It doesn't do anything with this observation, but it was also less than ten minutes long. This may be for the best since – as the next story demonstrates – when Kino's Journey gets too convoluted, it tends to trip over its own ideas and end up feeling meaningless.

The next story is where things really go to hell. Upon entering the next country, Kino is immediately accosted by a guy asking for news of his travelling lover. The guy's obviously a bit loony, so they brush him off at first but ask about him in town later. Apparently, the dude was the head of a revolutionary movement that swept through this country five years ago. He had a girlfriend back then, who he loved dearly. He broke up with her the day before their planned violent uprising, when it was his job to kill the king and his family by firebombing them in their car. When he sees their burning bodies, however, he realizes that his GF had actually been the princess in disguise. This sends him crazy with grief, and in an attempt to ease his suffering somewhat, his friends then convince him that his GF is away on a trip.

This leads to the status quo as we know it, where the dude is being watched over by a maid and runs over to the kingdom's entrance every time he hears a noise at the gate. Now this scenario is already hokey and melodramatic, but it's at this point that things really start going off the rails. On their way out, Kino strikes up a conversation with the guy's maid, who reveals that she's actually the princess, who didn't die in the fire after all. She'd been spying on the revolution via their relationship the whole time, so she knew when to get out of town before being killed, with body doubles in her family's place. She genuinely liked the revolutionary, however, so she felt bad when she heard he'd gone crazy. She decided to come back to him by posing as a downtrodden traveler and accepting a job as his maid. She didn't tell him that she was his old lover, and he apparently didn't recognize her in his grief-stricken madness. This is the situation in which they plan to live until their last days.

The princess is somehow perfectly happy with arrangement, in which the man she loves doesn't recognize her and spends his days miserably pining over her (nonexistent) absence. On her part, it's mostly just baffling that she'd give up her life for this situation, but it also seems cruel that she doesn't even attempt to cure her lover's madness. There are several alternative solutions to this situation. For example, you could reveal the situation to his friends and promise the new revolutionary government that you won't try to retake the throne. (They'd be more than happy to see their friend sane again and don't seem to hold the princess herself ill will.) Almost anything other than this absolutely intolerable situation of isolation and stasis seems better. Of course, the episode's tone is bizarrely accepting of this scenario. Kino maintains their placid face throughout, and the message seems to be something like “people find happiness in the strangest ways.” But according to my own understanding of human nature, this whole situation isn't believable at all. What's the point of a story like this if it doesn't relate to humanity at all?

The kicker is that there's one last twist in the episode's final moments. As they pass through the city gates, the former revolutionary approaches Kino and reveals his own secret: he's not crazy at all! He knows that the maid is his old girlfriend, but he fakes madness in order to preserve the status quo or something. Um, what? That's totally stupid. The many alternate solutions to this problem seems to quadruple now that there are at least two possible brains fully in the know that can think up alternate situations to this emotionally tortured standstill. Kino's still like “oh you rascals” while driving off, and it seems like we're supposed to be charmed by this whole thing. But I'm just baffled.

So this is the “country of liars” because the people living there are trapped in a wacky romcom mix-up. This story is nonsense because it's neither a metaphor for nor representative of any real trends in human behavior. People do build nests within their own tangled webs of deceit, but any happiness that results from that situation is bittersweet at best. Living this many layers of deceit will make someone invariably miserable on some level, which is even made evident by the mourning townsfolk sharing the revolutionary's story with Kino. It doesn't work as a whimsical “oh the things people do” type of story when the characters are so emotionally disconnected from reality that they don't seem human.

This brings up another major issue of this series – the disconnect in intelligence between our POV characters and the inhabitants of the countries that they visit. The people in these countries feel like different species half of the time in their behavior compared to Kino and Shizu. While that would work fine if the show were a cold satire that clearly ridicules exaggerated aspects of human behavior, it isn't that at all. This episode, for example, is supposed to be sweet and touching. At least I think so – it's still hard to tell given how artless the show's direction has been. Basically, fables don't work unless they have some sort of reference point in human behavior. This story is just some weird melodrama following its own nonsense rules for what people can tolerate and be happy with. At least it was funny, since it seems like you have to work hard to get into a romantic debacle this stupid.

Overall, Kino's Journey seems to have reached a plateau in its downward trajectory. Unfortunately, it's still at a pretty dismal place, conveying indecipherable (if not downright abhorrent) messages with both its large and small-scale stories. On some level, I'll just be happy if it stays away from politics in the future, although I'm sure that Kino's travels will take them back to this thorny topic. My respite was brief, and Kino's war march on reasonable human behavior is unending (until the end of the season of course). I'm also about to start hammering down these episode grades. My grace period is well past over, and I may have waited too long to be harsh with the show in that respect. It just sucks when something you were excited for turns out to be this colossal a disappointment.

Grade: C

Kino's Journey - The Beautiful World the Animated Series is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Gabriella Ekens studies film and literature at a US university. Follow her on twitter.