Make no mistake about it, Golden Kamuy is a dark ride.  Some series are violent and shocking in relentless fashion, to the point where one can become almost inured to it.  In contrast, I think what this one does is actually more effective.  It plays off the contrast between its more humorous or emotional moments and its brutal ones.  As a result, you never feel as if you know what’s coming, and nothing seems as if it would be truly off-limits.  Certainly Golden Kamuy isn’t the first anime to employ that strategy, but it’s relatively rare (and nowadays more than ever).

The cultural aspect of this series is certainly important, not least the clash of culture where the Ainu meet the Sisam.  The extent to which Sugimoto has been accepted in Asirpra’s village is a credit to the respect she’s earned from her elders, the respect Sugimoto has shown towards the villagers (and their customs), and a general sense of hospitality towards travelers which is particular to harsh and remote places.  But he’s still an outsider among them, make no mistake – and I feel as if this is something he’s quite comfortable with, since I don’t think Sugimoto ever really fit in with the Japanese, either.

Did Sugimoto misunderstand what Asirpa’s grandmother said to him right before he left the village?  No, I don’t think so – he may not have understood the words, but he understood their meaning.  He left because having been reminded by her uncle and grandma how much Asirpa means to the village, he didn’t want to put her (or it) in any more danger.  It may be naive of Sugimoto to believe Asirpa would give up just like that, but I think he was acting out of a sense of duty here.

The problem, of course, is that the Immortal Sugimoto is a marked and rather easily recognizable man, and the batshit Tsurumi doesn’t seem like the sort who ever gives up.  Sugimoto may not know the full array of men searching for the Ainu gold, but Tsurumi is his most pressing problem – and he’s problem enough.  His two dogs (twins played by Tomokazu Sugita) catch up to Sugimoto after a brother madam sells him out, and after a bit of mutual face-bashing they drag him back to Tsurumi’s headquarters.

I would be very curious to know just how much Tsurumi really did change after that shell blew off half his skull.  He likes to play up how crazy he is, but I suspect that as much as anything he enjoys being able to act like the psychopath he always was and use the injury as an excuse.  He is, in fact, a soldier angry about the way society treated he and his men after winning a war they were drafted to fight (a very old story, and one quite applicable to Japanese veterans of the Russo-Japanese war).   For him, the gold is a ticket to legitimacy – a means by which to buy weapons (from an American arms dealer) and turn Hokkaido into a semi-autonomous land ruled by the 7th.  Crazy or not, Tsurumi is certainly ambitious.

That whole skewer thing I could gave lived without, but again – that’s Golden Kamuy doing what it does.  There are no rules here – this is a hostile and dangerous land awash in men who’ve seen (and delivered) so much death that it’s lost all meaning to them.  it doesn’t take a genius to see that a character titled “The Immortal…” is a bad bet to make it out of a series like this alive, but it’s hard to see a good end for Sugimoto given all the insanity being dispensed around him.  The wild card here is Asirpa – she’s tired of being abandoned, and with the wolf who didn’t abandon her by her side, she has the means both to find Sugimoto and liberate him.  In the end, I suspect Tsurumi will have been easier to escape from than Asirpa.