Kino's Journey: the Beautiful World (Japanese: キノの旅 -the Beautiful World- Hepburn: Kino no Tabi -the Beautiful World-), shortened to Kino's Journey, is a Japanese light novel series written by Keiichi Sigsawa, with illustrations by Kouhaku Kuroboshi. The series originally started serialization in volume five of MediaWorks' now-defunct light novel magazine Dengeki hp on March 17, 2000. The first volume of the series was published on July 10, 2000 by ASCII Media Works under their Dengeki Bunko publishing imprint. As of October 2014, 18 volumes have been published, and over 8 million copies of the novels have been sold in Japan. In Kino's Journey, the protagonist, Kino, accompanied by a talking motorcycle named Hermes, travels through a mystical world of many different countries and forests,