The Invisible Cities Made Visible: Kino’s Journey
A reflection on space, architecture, and anime as narrative
Reading Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities feels like embarking on a mental and metaphorical journey—one that meanders through memory, desire, meaning, and uncertainty. Marco Polo, the narrator, describes to Kublai Khan a series of cities that may not physically exist, yet somehow feel more real than any we know.
For Calvino, a city is never just streets and buildings—it is something we carry in memory and imagination. Being Venetian himself, born in a city suspended between water and remembrance, Calvino believed that every city is a reflection of the self. Each story reconstructs the city through our collective unconscious, echoing the ideas of architect Terunobu Fujimori and filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki: that the unconscious is embedded in every structure we build.
If Calvino builds his cities with words, Kino no Tabi (Kino’s Journey) expresses them through space and silence. In this anime, space is no longer a passive backdrop; it becomes the narrator.
Here, spatial elements—fūdo, ma (intervals), exaggerated architectural scales, absence of human interaction, and the form of the land—become language.
Calvino’s cities are not directly mirrored in the lands Kino visits, but they resonate with each other. Take Despina, for instance: a city that looks like a camel when approached from the sea, and like a ship when approached from the desert. It closely resembles the floating ship-nation in Kino’s Journey. In both worlds, cities are not static—they constantly reshape those who live in them and the land they occupy.
This perspective in anime recalls the Metabolist movement in post-war Japanese architecture: a vision of the city as a living organism. Architects like Kenzo Tange and Kisho Kurokawa imagined structures that could grow, transform, and respond to their environments. The influence of Metabolism, along with Calvino’s poetic urbanism, can be seen in the work of Pierre Jean Giloux, who created his own “invisible cities” by collaging images of Japanese cities with other layered visuals.
Many of the cities in Kino no Tabi echo this dynamic architectural thinking:
• A city floating on water, physically flexible but mentally rigid;
• Cities caught in endless cycles of construction and collapse;
• Spaces whose façades are new, yet their inner identities remain stagnant or worn.
All of these reveal how anime can animate architecture—transforming it from a fixed object into a living process, just as Metabolism imagined.
Ultimately, both Invisible Cities and Kino no Tabi invite us to reflect on the nature of space.
Calvino narrates it with words; Kino frames it through images.
Both works teach us that a city is not merely a place—it is a human condition.
And perhaps most importantly, they plant this question in our minds:
Can space tell a story?
Their answer, undoubtedly, is yes.
