To say that there’s a lot going on in Golden Kamuy would be a healthy understatement.  It’s pretty easy to see why the manga has won just about every award it was eligible for – the story just keeps revealing layer upon layer of intrigue and delight.  There have been a few glitches with the anime (Bear!) – and in fact, the discs have been delayed a month to enhance the visuals (Bear!) – but the rewards far outweigh them.  For one thing, this series is a seiyuu bonanza of the likes we rarely see in anime – a clowder of legends given the chance to voice roles that embrace both bombast and subtlety.  And no matter how good the manga is, that’s a pleasure it can’t give you.

A larger concern than the bear(!), surely, is pacing.  There’s a downside to that puff pastry of a plot with all those iconic characters – it feels as if we’ve just gotten started, and the series is already more than half over.  The quality of writing and direction may be the reason things haven’t felt rushed so far, or maybe they simply haven’t been – but there are really only two possibilities here, and both are unnerving.  Either we’re going to experience breakneck pacing to try and cram as much of the manga into the last 5 eps as possible, or we’re going to see the story end somewhere right in the middle.

For now, there are intermediate endings – such of the story of the hunt for Retar.  Which in truth, really boils down to a duel between Nihei and the wolf.  In another universe that could probably have been a 12-episode series all by itself, and the screen just didn’t seem big enough to hold the two of them so you knew one was going to die.  Tanigaki ends up turning the tables of the cliffhanger showdown by making a hostage out of Asirpa – he’s quite right that she has a role in the larger drama here, but that was definitely the angriest I’ve seen Sugimoto.  Fortunately he’s clear-headed enough to remember that he has the great escape artist on his side, which effectively gives him the final trump card of the confrontation.

Asirpa, for her part, is consistent – consistent in her desire to defend human life.  That extends to Tanigaki even though she knows exactly what he’s planning to do to Retar – she tries to warn him off stepping into a deer trap, and does the unpleasant work of cutting out the poisoned flesh around the resulting arrow wound.  Nihei is unsentimental, however – he knows that Asirpa is the key to calling out the wolf he seeks.  But while Retar is indeed wily enough to be the last Hokkaido Wolf (serpentining is pretty advanced for canus lupus), he’s not – and that proves to be Nihei’s final downfall (though he seems to be OK with having been taken out by a woman).

Whether all this means Tanigaki is an ally now is uncertain – Sugimoto is highly skeptical of him, and has every right to be.  But Asirpa isn’t about to leave either he or the Ainu dog there to die, so she brings the two of them back to her village where the Motagi hunter recuperates.  And while doing so he spins a very interesting tale about the gold – about the size of the treasure, and Tsurumi’s motivation for seeking it out.  Having been at Port Arthur himself Sugimoto can certainly empathize, but he’s seen what Tsurumi has become (or perhaps what he always was).  For him, an alliance is out of the question for both practical and personal reasons.

In effect, then, we have two different groups seeking out the treasure specifically for the purposes of staging a coup and founding an independent state.  Though of course it could really be argued that Hijikata is after a warrior’s death as much as that impossible dream.  Ushiyama is the Hijikata ally we haven’t heard much from yet, but he certainly stands out when he bumps into Shiraishi at a brothel and engages in a high-speed chase which includes a Mongo-like takedown of a horse.  In most series he’d stick out like a sore thumb but here he’s a face in the crowd of GAR bastards – albeit more a mystery than his allies, as he’s not based on a historical figure.  Truthfully, seems to me that too many people – and the wrong sort of people – desperately want this gold for it to do anybody any good…