Now this is the Kino I remember. Somber stories that aren’t about Kino showing up and being cool but instead about people and fascinating food for thought. We have two stories this week which both include heroes. The first story involves Kino paying a visit to a museum in honor of a traveler who saved the country. It started off slow but it does present an interesting way of showing how people glorify idols and forget they are human as they are. The tour guide constantly dresses up everything this traveler did and owned as if it has some grand meaning while Kino and Hermes silently establish the cruder truth between each other. This is a bit too much of a segway but it reminds me a lot of how some talk of Evangelion and it’s creator Anno. I have seen people speak of Anno like he was some incredible mastermind who always knew what Evangelion would be right from the beginning and weaved an intricate canvas of direction and detail to make it what it is. In reality Evangelion was more lightning in a bottle that became what it was more due to a dwindling budget and Anno’s mental state at the time. But that is it, after the fact people dress up the accomplishment as some grand effort of genius which glorifies the moment of it’s conception. Sort of how some may dress up how they met there lover as some grand event when it could have been much more mundane in reality.
Thus enter the motorrad, a sentient being whose been propped up for display and the only other motorrad to be introduced aside from Hermes. Again the tour guide fashions up a grand story of the motorrad going silent perhaps in mourning of his previous master or having died with him. But the reality is that the motorrad is in pure display at being put up for display and denied the freedom of riding the lands as a motorrad should. The people have glorified the object as a memory of a great man but in doing so have denied that thing it’s very purpose. There was real emotion in seeing the bike pled Kino to take him out of there or destroy him, only to fall into despair again when Kino revealed that she could do neither of those things. This is the Kino I know, she listens to the stories of the people but never interferes. Instead letting things play out, regardless how they may turn out. Still she did at least throw a little hope the motorrads way by telling a boy to reveal his desire to travel to the bike, perhaps resulting in the boy starting to travel much in the same way Kino did.
I liked the first half of this episode but it was the second half that truly stole the show. The story is of a country full of liars as this episode is named after but much like any other Kino story, the title is not quite what it appears. It is true that this country is full of people lying to each other but the intent is rather different from one might expect. This story flips the table many times and your opinion on the situation completely changes with it. We have a bitter story of a man waiting for his lover to come back to a story of a man gone mad after accidently killing his lover in a revolt against the country’s king, to the story of the lover returning to look after her now insane lover who no longer recognises her to an oddly heartwarming reveal of the man not being insane at all and choosing to pretend to be because he is happy with the situation and doesn’t wish to disrupt it.
It’s an odd situation where everyone is lying to each other and yet out of that everyone is still happy to continue lying because their life is better. It’s so conflicting that no one knows the truth and yet are content in the lives they live. In an old episode of Kino there was a situation where everyone could read each other’s minds and that tore society apart while this episode is almost a antithesis of that story. Where no one truly knows what the other person is thinking and hiding and yet are happier than those that know everything about everyone else. The hedgehog’s dilemma laments that people cannot get close to one another without hurting each other but if there is distance through deceit then can a more meaningful relationship be formed? Even if everyone is lying to you does that mean you will be unhappy? Ahhh…this kind of thought…I missed you Kino.
