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(3.91/5)Who is this for?
It is not clear who this book is for. It is a wandering traveler encountering strangers in a word that doesn't jive with them and they end up parting ways sometimes dueling.
Pointless book.
Guns everywhere
I have no idea why this is so highly rated. The story is fine, the grammar used is easy enough... but the vocabulary is borderline useless at times. Some pages are riddled with terms used to describe guns, and I'm not American enough to have any need for those words.
Kino no Tabi (2003) is one of my favourite animes. It has one downside though: It has a limited number of episodes, and there's obviously a lot of content that is not adapted. And I wanted more. So for a few years I've been thinking to myself: I'm gonna read the LN in its original language once my Japanese is finally good enough. Needless to say, that's a lot of anticipation.
And well... I don't know what exactly it is, but I liked the anime much more than this volume. Maybe it's because I remembered some of the twists. Maybe it's because of my glacial reading speed. Maybe the author just hasn't quite found his voice yet. Maybe the anime is just better.
Maybe, and that's what I hope for, it's a matter of the topics explored. The anime probably cherry-picked the best chapters from the available volumes and had a fair bit more diversity. On the other hand, half of the chapters in this volume can be summarized with "humans kill other humans for basically no good reason at all", and to be honest, those were the chapters that I enjoyed the least.
So, if it's that, there's hope that the other volumes explore a bigger variety of topics, and that I might enjoy them more. I will find out once I continue reading, but for now, this volume was nice, but not quite there yet.
My First Light Novel
I read this book after finishing the Tango N3 deck and it was still really difficult at first but at the more I read it the more I started to understand. I wouldn't suggest this as a very first light novel but it was really fun!
Surprisingly dark content matter
And I don't mean that in a bad way or anything; I came into this book knowing only two things: the series was popular and generally recommended as a good first book for a Japanese learner. The subjects of some of Kino's travels were far more serious than I originally anticipated, and I think it helped quite a bit in forming my impressions of the book. They left more of an impact that a generally light-hearted book would have, I think.
But I will echo other reviewers here: I don't think this is a great book for a first-time book reader. I started this book three times, and it was only on the third try (years after the first two) that I not only finished the book, but even made it past the prologue. You're going to want a very firm base of vocabulary to work your way through the different stories; the grammar I don't remember being particularly difficult (N3 level, perhaps), but the amount of vocab you'll need can definitely stop you in your tracks.
The prologue doesn't do the learner any favors, either: it starts in media res, with only vaguely defined speakers. If you start the book and find yourself struggling, I would recommend skipping the prologue and starting with chapter one to gauge how you feel from there.
Vibes™
This book is a collection of short stories, where Kino and his motorcycle travel to different "kingdoms" and spend three days getting to know each one. Every kingdom has a single defining feature (for example, a kingdom where everything is determined by a majority vote of the populace) and the stories basically show the current state of the kingdom as the logical yet extreme conclusion of that system.
It's a book that just kind of makes you think. At the end of several stories I had a feeling similar to the one you get after finishing a Cowboy Bebop episode, where you're just kind of considering the state of the world.
Not the best choice for your first book
This used to always be recommended as a "first good book" and I would strongly disagree with that. Even without mentioning children's books, there's a lot of easier LN, novels, etc out there.
The series consists of stories about Kino's travels to different countries. Expect a lot of descriptive text on the way to these places and once our characters arrive there. In addition, this book is rather notorious for the amount of "gun words" you end up picking up. Not sure how useful those will be for you unless you like reading books involving guns!
I haven't watched it, but if you liked this there's multiple anime series. So you can try getting some listening practice in afterwards.
My first light novel 100% experience
Hell yeah, happy for this achievement. I have studied Japanese for 1 year and 6 months (June 2025) and accumulated 8000 known words. I was able to read this book from start to end, with an average of 5 unknown words per page. The difficulty for my level felt just right. There is a bunch of super-specific vocabulary related to war, weapons, armory, motorbikes, etc. To be honest, a lot of those words I haven't added to my new words pile because I judge them not to be worth the effort for now. As for the story itself, I was quite bored with most of the short stories here. After reading each chapter, I could see the same structure of a story: Kino travels with her bike, finds a country, looks for people, observes the cultural differences and how dystopic that country is, then the story throws some philosophical themes, Kino leaves the country. I didn't feel emotionally attached to any of the short stories, but this was a great language learning resource.