Kino is an adolescent who is traveling through a strange world on Hermes, her Motorrad (a talking motorbike). She wanders from country to country, staying no more than three days, encountering individuals who range from slave trader cannibals to millennial religious fanatics, but she remains a detached outsider. She expresses no more interest in the lives of the slavers she kills than in the people of a city that has made sorrow into a ritual. Kino has escaped from a eerie country where children are surgically transformed into conformist adults on their 12th birthdays.