Kino no Tabi:Volume2 Prologue

Rain continues to fall. It pounds the earth endlessly. The landscape is shrouded in mist as far as eye can see, and the fierce sound of water pouring on the earth never seems to cease. Although it is daytime, the sky remains a dark gloomy grey.

There is, in this great storm, a solitary standing figure. The person is young; about 15 years old. Her brown overcoat shelters only her body from the rain. Her short black hair is already soaked; bangs plastered to her forehead. Rain runs down and drips off of her face. The drops that reach her mouth are caught by her tongue.

“It’s so rare for it to rain like this in such a place. How unusual……” someone said to her. The voice sounded like that of a young boy, but no one appeared to be there. The brown-clad figure suddenly raised her head to stare at the sky.

Rain fell mercilessly upon the girl’s face and ran from her eyes like tears.

“Aha ha ha! Aha ha ha ha!”

A smile suddenly appeared on her face, still looking at the sky with mouth open wide and arms outstretched, laughing incessantly.

“Aha ha ha! Aha ha ha ha!”

She continued to smile happily, skipping merrily in a circle with the hem of her overcoat twirling in the air like a gown.

“Aha ha! Aha ha ha ha! Aha ha ha ha! Aha ha ha ha ha!”

She danced and laughed insanely for a while, then said out into the rain:

“So what do you think?”

The question seems unacknowledged, so she asked again.

“What do you think, Hermes?”

“There’s nothing all that great about it…”

“Nothing?”

After hearing the previous words repeated, there came an unenthusiastic response:

“Maybe it's no fun to me at all, but currently my feelings are very complex!”

“Aha ha ha! Aha ha ha ha ha ha---”

The girl started to raise her head again in unrestrained laughter.

The voice asked:

“Kino, what do you plan to do next next?”

“I don’t know. What to do? Why bother worrying?”

When the girl named Kino had replied, she began once again to laugh.

This rainstorm, perhaps, will continue for a while.