人の痛みが分かる国 (Country where People Understand Pain)
First Airdate: 4.8.03
Novel: Volume 1 Chapter 11
DVD (Japanese): Disc 1
DVD (North America): Disc 1
Episode Summary:
Part I: プロローグ 「砂漠の真ん中で・ｂ」 Beginner's Luck・a (Prologue: In the Middle of a Desert part a)
Kino and Hermes are traveling through a dry desert. Hermes complains that Kino's going to turn into a mummy at this rate, but Kino ignores his entreaties to return to the master to study. She finds a small wooden building from which she props a tent and rests. Soon, it begins to rain, and Kino and Hermes are saved.
Part II: 「人の痛みが分かる国」 I See You. (Country where People Understand Pain)
Kino and Hermes arrive at a country that appears to be devoid of people. Instead, machines provide all the services such as waiting a restaurant or showing the two travelers their room in a hotel. Everything is very inexpensive (to Kino's delight) but the fact that there are no people is mystifying. The next day, Kino uses a telescope to gaze past the country's walls and finds many houses in the nearby hills. However, each house holds only one person, and is a fair distance away from all the others - in other words, everyone lives by themselves and no one ventures out.
Spoilers for the end of the episode; highlight to read.
Kino travels up and greets one of the people who happens to be trying to fix a watering spout in front of his house. After he initially hides in fright, once he realizes Kino cannot read his thoughts, he opens up and invites Kino into his house. He tells Kino the plight of his country. The scientists had developed a tiny machine that would stimulate the brain and allow any who consumed the drink the machines were in to hear the thoughts of others (who also drank the machine.) This would lead to peace, because war was caused by the inadequacies of people to understand each other's pain, but the telepathy that arose from the machine-drink would circumvent this problem. Everyone drank the drink, and when the man glanced at the woman he was in love with, to his surprise she was also in love with him, so the two began to live together. However, he loved music while she loved flowers and the two could not find a middle ground; the ability to read each others thoughts only made the rift worse. All around the country, telepathy was making things worse because there was too much pain in others' thoughts. Finally, it was decided that to keep the country from destroying itself, everyone should live separately. Because of this, no children are born and the country is doomed to fade away when its last citizen dies. Kino thanks the man for telling her and Hermes the story, and gets up to leave. The man asks if she'd like to stay a while, desperate for human contact, but Kino refuses gently, because if she stays anywhere for too long she will no longer be a traveler. She bids the man farewell, and shares a long glance with the man before leaving with Hermes. When Hermes asks what the long stare was about, Kino replies that she thought the man was telling her "Be careful" and she replied through her thoughts, "Don't worry about me." Hermes asks if she thinks the idea got across, to which Kino can only answer, "Who knows?"
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