"Kino no Tabi 23" by Shigusawa Keiichi. Our annual supply of strange worlds, with features such as red fog, red paint, free press, free labor, and mind control.
The very muted gray cover might be a reflection of what this year feels like. But few pages past the cover and readers would be met with dancing lights in red fog from part B of the prologue, with a matching part A that was as romantic as it was surreal. And chapter 2 features a "Pink Island" that was best described as red beyond expectations. So this is actually quite a bright and colorful volume, but maybe not bright and cheerful except cheerful in the dark humor sense that is typical of this series.
This has been an exceptional year that is stranger than fiction by many measures, I was expecting some of this year's events to show up in volume 23 but that didn't really happen. Although "Country of the Pen" is likely extrapolated from the ongoing disinformation crisis, and "Country where Robots Exist" (also translates to "Country where Robots are Needed") can be interpreted as a general parable on over-reliance of technology. So it's possible to see reflections of the real world in "Kino no Tabi" if I look for them, but mostly the worlds in this series are novel worlds that are proper escapes from our daily lives.
Honestly, this has been a cheerful volume and a total joy to read, progressively more so all the way up to the afterwords chapter. Looking forward to more deviants from real world.
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