Leave it to Golden Kamuy to off the serial killer and use that as a jumping off point to get more violent.

As I noted about Hinamatsuri last week, it seems awfully late in the game for Golden Kamuy to be introducing new characters.  But it keeps right on doing so, despite the fact that we’re just a couple of weeks from the anime ending and it seems very unlikely (though less so than is the case with Hitomimatsuri) that there will be a sequel.  As with the orca last week though, what should bother me with Golden Kamuy often delights me instead.  There’s just such a sense of vastness with this story (like the land it depicts) that any effort to constrain it would feel like an affront.

We once again see an episode split down the middle (unusual for this genre), starting with Tanigaki’s attempted escape from the pursuing Ogata.  Tanigaki may be wounded, but he knows how to hunt and how to fool other hunters – he copies the same trick a baby bear uses, walking in its mother’s tracks in the snow.  That bear (I was going to say “bear” is a four-letter word when it comes to Golden Kamuy, but I guess it always is) turns out to be the key to Tanigaki’s counterattack – with Nikadou taking the brunt of it.

This is ugly stuff, for certain, but Ogata comes off unscathed – and one gets a sense that skating through danger with that smirk on his face is something of an Ogata specialty.  His binoculars save him from Tanigaki’s shot – which sucks in the sense that it was such an artfully laid trap that it deserved to succeed.  Nikaidou isn’t so lucky – he loses his left ear to the bear and his right to Lt. Tsurumi, and in-between seems to have a few chunks taken out of him while Ogata hesitates over whether to shoot and give away his position.  Nikaidou is really only interested in killing Sugimoto, which means he’s happy to throw the other traitors under the bus even when being tortured wouldn’t move him. But this could hardly have worked out better for Tanigaki – now no one has any reason to chase him, and he’s free to slip into “home is where the heart is” mode.

Meanwhile, the power trio of Sugimoto, Asirpa and Shiraishi are engaged in a more idyllic venture, complete with interesting background on Ainu tradition and Japanese legends.  This includes the pursuit of the Huchen, a huge Asian salmon and the largest freshwater fish in Japan.  But while they do find a giant among that species, of more interest is Kiroranke (Terasoma Masaki – yes, another great old-time seiyuu joins the cast).  He’s an old friend of Asirpa’s father and a member of the 7th – which puts him in the nexus of events in Golden Kamuy in a way that no one else really is.

Kiroranke seems to be a badass (anime characters with that much chest hair generally are), but that was pretty much a given.  But he drops so many infobombs on the plot that it’s hard to keep them all straight.  Most important among these, surely, is that Nopperabo (the prisoner who stole the gold, supposedly) is Asirpa’s real father.  And since Kiroranke also tells us that he was “not from Japan”, that tells us that Asirpa is only half-Ainu.  Just where Nopperabo came from is not spelled out, though Russia seems like the most logical option.  Also of huge interest is the reveal of Asirpa’s Japanese name – “Kochoube Asuko”.

The rub in all this, of course, is that Kiroranke could be lying about some or all of it, and I don’t take the fact that Asirpa likes him as stipulation of his good intentions (regarding the gold, particularly) like Sugimoto does.  But while I don’t by any means think Kiroranke should be assumed to be trustworthy yet, I don’t get the sense he was lying here – and if he wasn’t, that really makes Asirpa the key to everything.  Whether it was his intention to put a giant target on his daughter’s back I don’t know, but that’s what Nopperabo has done here if what Kiroranke says is all true.  With the heroes – now joined by Kiroranke – riding (Shiraishi on a hilariously undersized chibi horse) off to Abashiri so Shiraishi can try and get Asirpa inside to talk to Nopperabo, we may not be far from getting a few answers, at least.