Good afternoon, all! I decided to take a writing break yesterday to get some errands done. While I’m sure you were anxiously-awaiting this post (maybe?), I wanted to take time and make sure I was happy with it. Since I have the day off anyway, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to postpone it a day. Thank you for waiting.
I’m very pleased with how this book club “session” worked out. While I think active participation diminished over the weeks (this is pretty common from my experience, no worries), I hope that the people who wanted to watch until the end got the chance to do so, and that it was a fun and worthwhile experience. It’s always my goal to broaden people’s horizons with anime, so for those of you who might not have watched the show on your own, I thank you for giving it a try.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. There are still two more episodes to talk about, after all. Last week a joked that this series doesn’t really have a climax, but I suspect that episode 11 might fill that position for some of you. It’s one of only a couple stories that have been animated in both the previous animated series and this one. I think, considering how perceptions about identity have become more important over the last several years, that story in particular might resonate even more now than it did then (or maybe I’m just revealing my prior ignorance on the subject by saying so. Who knows?). I should leave the discussion for after the episode recaps, though.
Below are all the previous weeks’ posts and discussions, for those who are interested:
I’ll do a wrap-up post next week as well, just to share some final thoughts, and perhaps announce my next choice of title. I don’t think I’ll go through the trouble of holding a vote again; instead I think I’ll just pick something and people are welcome to participate or not as they feel up to it. If anything, these re-watches give me a chance to put together some substantial content for the website and practice my analytical writing, so it’s a win for me either way.
Episode 11 – Country of Adults – Crunchyroll – Funimation – Hulu
CW: Stabbing.
Kino and Hermes are traveling through a field of deep red flowers, when Kino decides to stop for a while. This is a place of long-ago memories, some of which Kino decides to share.
Many years ago, Kino was a child in a country near this place. They were a girl with a floral name that’s been lost to memory. In the day’s before Kino’s official transition to adulthood, a traveler arrived in the country – a skinny man named Kino. Looking for a place to stay, he asked the girl her advice – she offered her parents’ inn. While staying there, the man acquired an old motorrad and set to work repairing it. As a traveler, he explains, he and the motorrad enter into a pact for their mutual benefit – the motorrad can take him places much more quickly than he could reach them on foot, and the traveler offers the motorrad the chance to be useful and fulfill its purpose. The conversation shifts to adulthood, and what that will mean to the young girl. She talks about the surgery she will undergo on her twelfth birthday which will “remove the child” from her, allowing her to become an adult and hold a job. Kino is troubled by this, and offers an alternative – perhaps adulthood can be obtained through means other than a surgery. Perhaps adulthood means something more than being able to tolerate drudgery and perform a difficult job. Perhaps adulthood isn’t a concrete thing at all.
The girl seems affected by this revelation, and tells her parents the next day that she would prefer not to undergo the surgery and asks to become an adult some other way. This goes against all teachings of their society and the girl is berated as a sinful creature by her parents and the other adults in the room. Her father retrieves a kitchen knife to dispose of his defective “property.” Kino, the traveler, is blamed for poisoning the child’s mind. As the girl’s father lunges with the knife, Kino blocks him and is stabbed in the heart. As the adults attempt to interpret this turn of events, the girl hears a small voice telling her to get on the motorrad and ride off. As she escapes to a field of red flowers, she offers her name – Kino, like the traveler. The motorrad’s name is Hermes, the name of the traveling man’s old friend.
Episode 12 – Fields of Sheep – Crunchyroll – Funimation – Hulu
CW: Animal Cruelty
Kino and Hermes are in between towns, riding across beautiful verdant land and enjoying the lovely weather. In the distance they spot a herd of sheep sleeping among the trees. Though they make efforts not to disturb the creatures, the sheep wake up and are soon following the traveler and motorrad. In a short time there are sheep stalking them on either side of the road, and it becomes evident that they’re not the gentle creatures one might expect. Their aggression is certainly out of character, and Kino makes some evasive maneuvers to avoid them. Unfortunately, Kino reaches a literal impasse – a ravine cuts through the land and there’s nowhere to go. Kino separates from Hermes to descend into the ravine and hopefully find a solution to retrieve the motorrad later.
Kino finds an abandoned vehicle stuck trying to cross where the ravine is much more narrow, and discovers how its driver met a tragic end. Kino gets the truck un-stuck and returns for Hermes, going to extremes to cut through the herd and prevent the sheep from attacking. Unfortunately in this situation, violence is really the only answer and Kino has to use both a persuader and some good old-fashioned gas-fueled fire to keep the sheep at bay. After an exciting ramp-aided launch across the ravine, Kino and Hermes make their way to the next town, somehow still in one piece. They learn from the town guard that the sheep are descended from fighting sheep, bred to battle for the sake of gambling. They were released to the wild once activists began to protest. The guard is happy to learn that the sheep are still living their lives out on the plains, and Kino doesn’t have the heart to tell him the truth of the encounter.
Discussion Thoughts and Questions (feel free to share additional ones in the comments!)
Episode 11 is a fascinating episode to me in a lot of ways. Speaking from a “meta” perspective, the timing of the episode within the series as a whole has definitely been a point of discussion within the fandom. There’s an argument that the story, which reveals Kino’s former life and thus their original gender presentation, is treated as a sort of “prize” for viewers; that it over-emphasizes the fact that Kino was once a girl (something that has come up through other characters’ observations once or twice already throughout the series). I can see how that might be the case – several times, in response to being asked about their gender (or called a gender-related term like “boy,” for example), they’ve responded that they’re “just Kino” (the implied interpretation being “stop that, and it’s actually none of your damn business.”). Having this story occur so late in the game, after we as viewers have likely become unattached from the notion that Kino’s gender is some information that we need to know, only brings it to the forefront again and muddies the waters, or so it’s been said.
Having watched the entire series a second time at this point, I feel a little bit differently now. As a viewer I feel like I was effectively disconnected from needing to know about Kino’s gender, and watching this episode didn’t really change that. I had no moment of “Oh wait, Kino is a girl! This changes my entire perception of the series as a whole!” Perhaps it’s partly because I made a conscious decision going in that, even though I already knew this “secret” from past viewings of this anime and the 2003 Kino series, that I would respect what I thought the intent of the character was. The little girl feels like some other person from a long, long time ago, a person half-asleep or not fully-formed. Definitely not the Kino that we’ve grown to know over the last several episodes. Considering that the episode’s core seems to be focused on asking the question of what truly defines someone as an adult, I think it makes a lot more sense to look at it from that perspective.
I think in our society we have a bit of an obsession with trying to define adulthood while also having a troubling lack of awareness of what being an adult actually means in a substantive sense. We try to set an age of majority – 18 years to vote and fight, 21 to drink, 16 to drive a car (but much later to rent one). I suppose for legal purposes there has to be something concrete and numerical in place, but numbers ignore the incredible range of maturity that exists among different people at various ages, as well as some other things like biological brain development (I’ve heard that the brain doesn’t reach a point of full maturity until around age 25 in most humans, and yet we ask people much younger than that to make life-altering decisions on a regular basis). It’s not as if a switch flips at certain ages and everyone who has that number of years under their belt is suddenly capable of taking on a new set of responsibilities.
Our ideas of what an adult should be like and what adulthood ought to entail are often confused; they’re also focused around activities and expectations that aren’t achievable for everyone, or if they were would severely limit our society if everyone chose to adhere to them. These beliefs are expressed plainly in this episode – hold a job (and remember, it’s not “work” if it doesn’t completely suck!), get married, have children (and raise them to believe what’s proper and correct), and uphold the tenets of society to live a proper adult life. Spoken by the young girl to Kino the traveler these things come across as decidedly negative, and yet they aren’t far off from the expectations we have for ourselves if we’re being completely honest. Kino the traveler doesn’t fit the definition of adulthood since he enjoys his life and lives it freely and without limiting himself to one place and function, and yet he’s clearly not a child because he’s physically grown beyond childhood and he’s not controlled by anyone. I think many of us would find his way of life admirable, if not actually attainable; whether that’s a limit of our own minds or the knowledge that that type of freedom, if acted-out by everyone, would also not bode well for society as a cohesive unit, is up to interpretation.
There are some other thoughts I have about this story, but I think I’m going to save them for next week’s wrap-up rather than introduce them here because I think they fit in more widely with some of the series’ broader themes.
- What, if anything, defines adulthood for you? Is it a specific set of traits, an age, or something completely different?
- Do you think that this episode is specifically commenting on any specific cultural attitudes, or do you think it’s broader than that?
- What’s your opinion on Kino’s backstory and the timing of this episode?
Episode 12 is certainly amusing. I’m not sure how I feel about it as a note of finality considering how so many other episodes sparked a lot of conversation about various aspects of our society, but in a way I can’t fault the creators for wrapping things up on a decidedly lighter note. Episode 11 is definitely kind of an endpoint; we learn about how Kino’s journey started after seeing them in action in so many different situations. Episode 12 is sort of like a bonus OVA that didn’t fit in with the tone or arc of the series as a whole.
Despite being goofy, I think the episode does introduce yet another situation where people who think that they’re doing things for the purposes of good might not have taken the consequences of their actions into consideration. I’m mostly against using animals for sport, especially violent sport; I agree that they shouldn’t be imprisoned and used for the purposes of betting any longer. But the sheep were bred for a certain temperament and even in the wild they continue to express that; they’re fearless and strong, and aren’t deterred by threats from human beings. To put them out to pasture and expect them to live a happy life as normal sheep is foolish, and to expect them to treat humans, the beings that captured them and caused them to be how they are, with respect is ignorant. They are what they know how to be, and unfortunately Kino (as well as the traveler that came before them) ends up at the wrong end of things.
I also want to note that this scenario reminded me of the video game Oblivion – there’s an empty village filled only with sheep, and as it turns out the sheep are all people who were transformed into their current form in some sort of accidental magic way. The very silly, human-like bleating of the sheep as they’re run into and tossed-aside by Kino and the truck just made me remember that from long ago.
I do like how this episode wraps up, with Kino taking a well-deserved nap in a hammock. Kino says something that got me thinking a little bit – “You can change your situation however you like, depending on how you think of it.” While I don’t buy into the idea that one’s life can magically be transformed through the power of positive thinking (I’ve been told by people much of my adult life that I just need to “choose not to be depressed” and have a better attitude about life – excuse my language but those people can kindly go fuck themselves), I do think that some situations benefit from being examined from a different perspective. A situation might seem disappointing, but may also offer up a different opportunity in the place of an intended one. Sometimes someone may seem to be rude or unfriendly, but they may have something difficult going on in their life and it might not be all about you. And sometimes a journey comes to its end, but that end opens up the possibility of a new beginning. It can be sad to finish a favorite book, manga, film, or anime and it might be difficult to leave those beloved characters and settings behind. But there are always new books and manga, and the internet is jam-packed with hundreds of new anime to watch, in amounts un-consumable by any one person. I think that’s a good way to look at things.
As usual, feel free to sound off below. I’ll be back next week with a wrap-up post, and I’ll try to come up with a great entry for the next Anime Book Club!
2 replies on “Anime Book Club – Kino’s Journey ~The Beautiful World~ Week #6”
I’ll start with episode 11. I would agree that I did not feel like this episode, and it’s place as close to a wrap-up of the series, is supposed to highlight especially Kino’s gender, or assert that they REALLY are female. I, too, come from having already known from the original Kino series that their birth-gender is female, and I hope it is not offensive to the trans community to acknowledge that everyone comes from somewhere, and as a child I would assume that most trans people did live as a particular gender, and probably at least to some extent performed to the expectations of that gender. Provided that one does not then insist on then permanently attaching birth gender to someone’s present or true gender as some necessary piece of how to think about that person and their gender, I feel like this is fair territory. Especially given the larger story: we start with a child who primarily lives up to her society’s expectations, and we see the conflict caused when that person begins to doubt weather following those expectations will lead them to the person they wish to be, and at the end we have an adult who is very independent and lives by their own moral convictions. That that person also now identifies their gender differently as well is just one sign, one part of the transformation, and I think this story and the larger show strongly prefer the adult Kino to the child they were. Several of the stories prefer powerful characters who determine their own fate and choose their own path, and this is really just the culmination of that through-line, rather than some attempt to blow the audience’s mind by explaining who Kino REALLY is. The adult Kino is who Kino REALLY is, and this is how they got there.
NOTE: I all-capped REALLY cause I don’t think I can italicize int his comment. Please forgive.
The other thing this episode, and some of the other stories in the series that dealt with escaping from harmful expectations placed on people, is the essay “Secret Names” by David Mamet: https://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/mamet_w04.html. While we are not specifically focusing on names in this discussion, I find the discussion in this essay of how shameful it is for any person to rebel against the expectations put on them is an idea I am reminded of constantly in all kinds of contexts. I first encountered this essay almost 15 years ago, but this part of it in particular comes to my mind on at least a weekly basis, and I think it is an underestimated element of the difficulty faced by anyone who is trying to change their circumstances.
Episode 12 is a bit different. I agree that it’s frankly kind of goofy for most of the episode. We haven’t had a lot of action stories in the show; it’s basically assumed that Kino is highly capable and will get themselves out of any difficult situation, so to see something with no real political notions is an odd choice for the last episode. Still, the bond between Kino and Hermes has been something that gets explored a little more in this series than the original, and I can’t dislike that. The wrap-up of learning why the sheep are so aggressive also serves to bring it a little bit back into the usual purview of the show. The last couple minutes of Kino talking to Hermes before taking a nap were very nice, and I think do make an excellent final scene for the show as a whole.
Setting the Adults episode immediately after the Kind episode creates an interesting echo effect. KIno, like Sakura, was an innkeeper’s daughter with a floral name. But where the Country of Adults sees children as the property of their parents, to the point it’s okay to eliminate a defective child, Sakura’s parents were willing to let her choose her own way, even if it meant losing her.
This episode also kind of explains why Kino sometimes seems…flat…in their emotions. The brain operation, whatever it is, seems to suppress feelings and force a kind of grim pleasantness on the recipient. One can imagine that even the children of that country are discouraged from showing strong emotion. That said, the sudden madness of the adults when the operation is questioned must have been especially frightening to young Kino.
The Country of Adults looks like a stagnant society that will gradually die unless an outside force destroys its way of life first.
I’m also reminded of the Tripods series by John Christopher, a YA series popular when I was a lad. There, the Masters “Cap” the humans at age fourteen to make them “adults” by muting their creativity and curiosity, making it more difficult to rebel.
Sheep: Clearly it was a bit more than mere breeding and training that turned these critters into a b-movie horror scenario.