Kino's Journey is Keiichi Sigsawa's (with Kouhaku Kuroboshi's character designs) highly successful light novel (I'm guessing that's like young adult?) series in Japan, about Kino, a teenager who travels the world with a talking motorrad named Hermes. Kino's rule is never to stay in any land they visit for more than 3 days, though that usually seems to be long enough. It was turned into a 13-episode anime back in the 2000s (it's one of my favorites), and Viz Media released 8 volumes of manga adaptations of the stories starting in 2017.
While Volume 1 kicks off with where Kino was from and how they both met Hermes and took the name "Kino", the manga doesn't progress in chronological order. A story later in volume 1 references a land Kino and Hermes visited with only one inhabitant, but we don't see that adventure until volume 2. Volume 5 has stories starring the woman who taught Kino to shoot, set in her younger days, and volume 7 is Kino's first trip to another land after staying with Master for some time.
Most of the stories are frankly depressing, focused on humanity's ability to destroy themselves. Or come up with excuses to destroy others, maybe. The country with only one citizen is an example of the danger of mob rule, as the majority always executes the minority after every vote. Much better than a tyrannical king. A woman neglected her family to develop automatons, and once the family is dead, decides she's the automaton built to serve her "family". Kino saves three guys from starving in the winter, and they turn out to be slave traders who ate their most recent prisoner when their truck broke down. The book's subtitle, "The Beautiful World" really feels like a joke, even if Shiomiya draws some lovely landscapes for Kino to travel through.
Shiomiya (I assumed based off how Sigsawa wrote them) writes Kino as generally nonplussed by any of this. They can be bright and bubbly like a child at times, dancing when a sudden downpour saves them from dying of thirst, or taking full advantage of a high-quality hotel room an an affordable price. But violence or cruelty rarely faze them. Maybe they've seen too much, or maybe they don't think there's anything they can do. These people want to be this way, and Kino's just a traveler passing through. They know what happens to travelers who object too loudly to local customs.
The manga ended with the former prince Shizu ending his wandering days to take on responsibility for a lost child, but there's no indication Kino or Hermes will do likewise. They'll keep traveling the world, occasionally getting lost or receiving bad directions. Staying three days at a time in a different land and then moving on. Not a bad life if you can hack it, I guess. I don't think I could.
And that concludes the letter K. Quick, I know.
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