Or “why Tokyopop cannot be trusted”
Kino no Tabi (“Kino” is a name, tabi = “journey” not socks-with-toes) is “Kino’s Journey” or “travels”… it’s a light novel where this girl and her talking motorcycle visit a new city in each chapter, most of which have succumbed to some bizarre social disaster in the recent past. Like the place where the total democracy voted to kill all dissenters until there were only 2 people left, or the place where everyone took a magic telepathy drug that wiped out civilization.
They made a anime out of it… I was thinking I’d read the books. Tokyopop translated and printed volume 1. It turned out to be slightly controversial, because Kino’s gender is meant to be ambiguous at first, and this was lost by Tokyopop changing the chapter order.
But it turns out “volume 1” that Tokyopop made is really “the one and only volume” because they couldn’t get it together to ever make a volume 2. There are 8 hypothetical volumes. Bastids.
Fortunately there is a fan translation project which will… slowly… translate the other books.