"Kino no Tabi 20" by Shigusawa Keiichi. This is my annual subscription of bizarre conceptual societies. The latest volume includes polyamory relationships, human farms, and running of the bulls sheep.
Kino no Tabi has always had some reflection on real life societies, so it's probably not surprising that marriage related issues made it to the list of topics in volume 20. What is surprising is that it went far beyond what common media might cover and straight to polyamory, and proposed a country where having simultaneous relationships with multiple partners is the law. Any gender is fair game for these relationships, including motorcycles. It even gave some convincing arguments on why such a society would have less sex related crimes. It's a very bold chapter, the usual quality to be expected from this series.
A polyamorous country might be bold, but possibly not as avant-garde as the country that came few pages before it, where everything is advanced except the humans living in it -- it's a country without citizens, because all humans are kept in their primal states for future preservation. It's disturbing in many regards, but perhaps it's meant to balance out all other countries in this series where people die for random reasons.
Random reasons include but are not limited to excessive amounts of sheep, as featured in one of the later chapters. The chapter includes a bit of black humor that is typical of this series, but the real interesting bits are all the action scenes before the end. This chapter features all out carnage by a fully armed Kino against hordes of sheep, definitely a highlight for this volume. There were actually many other great action scenes in earlier chapters, including some gun action and a bit of close-hand combat. There are more pages dedicated to actions than serious philosophical topics, making this volume easier to digest compared to previous volumes.
It's generally easy to digest and generally a pleasurable volume as usual, until you went to look for the obscure "afterwords" that are a distinguishing feature for Kino no Tabi (spoiler). Finding all of them might make you forget everything that you have read, but you will not forget the experience that is unique to this series. Looking forward to more next year.
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