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(3.91/5)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 reme
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
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
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 fo
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 f