One mark of a really great series (though not all share it, of course) is that the main character can be AWOL for extended stretches and it doesn’t miss a beat.  Hunter X Hunter is obviously a great example of this, with entire arcs passing without one or more major characters having a role.  Golden Kamuy kind of takes it to a ridiculous extreme, though.  There are so many iconic bros in this cast that it almost doesn’t seem to matter who’s on camera at any given time, since they all act like they own the place.

Lt. Tsurumi is one of the most iconic of those guys. and he’s barely been a presence since probably the middle of Season 3.  It doesn’t seem to matter though – both because the show has so many other irons in the fire that it doesn’t need any single character’s presence, and because Tsurumi is so memorable that as soon as he’s back it’s like he was never gone.  He’s a complex and ridiculous figure, a true magnificent bastard, and it’s always interesting to see him in action before his injury forever altered who he was both physically and mentally.

Not many shows could whipsaw around wildly both in place and time like Golden Kamuy does and get away with it.  It almost seems as if it’s an over-compensation away from S3, where we had the most linear narrative in the anime so far.  And that’s because it kind of is – a lot of material was shifted in order to make last season linear, and it’s being grafted back in now.  Having taken a detour to get the Hijikata-Sekiya arc in and then gone up to Noboribetsu to introduce Kikuta, we now go all the way down to Kagoshima – and a decade or more back in time, too – for a bit of backstory explaining how Koito’s unique worship of Tsurumi came to be.

In fact, Koito is the “barchonak” of the episode’s title.  As we meet him here is the spoiled 14 year-old son of naval captain Koito Heiji (played by the great Ohkawa Toru), tooling around Kagoshima in a motorized three-wheeler from France.  He (quite literally) runs into Lt. Tsurumi at his most dashing and charismatic, and Tsurumi makes a deep impression on the young and morose boy who never felt he could fill the shoes of his late brother in his father’s eyes.  Otonoshin tells Tsurumi that he’s soon moving to Hakodate for his father’s work, a piece of information Tsurumi clearly files away for future reference (he never misses a trick).

Heiji’s work in Hakodate is rather important – he’s in charge of a new torpedo fleet and naval outpost that the Russians could easily see as a threat to their fleet sailing from Vladivostok.  Tsurumi sees this as an opportunity, since he uses it as a pretext to stage a kidnapping of the now 16 year-old Otonoshin.  Ogata is involved (it’s obvious why he would use the pejorative term in the title about Koito), and the parents are completely taken in by the ruse (as was I, at first).  This is magnificent opportunity for Tsurumi to be his usual preposterous self, preening for the camera (and the local ladies) as he snows the Koito family lock, stock, and one smoking barrel.

What’a not immediately clear to me is why Tsurumi would go to all this trouble to get Otonoshin to join the army and fall under his control.  What is it about this child that strikes him as so important to go through all this?  Perhaps it’s something that’ll be explained later, or perhaps it’s just one of those suspension of disbelief moments (GK obviously has a few of those, though not generally so plot-driving).   Nevertheless this sequence is full of some very interesting moments, not least Ogata (behind a mask of course) in a rare displauy of humanity, showing empathy for the young Koito as he begs his father to leave him to die and apologizes for not being the son the old man wanted.

Mostly, though, this really amounts to a showcase for Tsurumi.  And I’m not complaining, because like most Noda characters, he really knows how to run with the moment when the spotlight shines on him.  The thing about Tsurumi is that as ruthless and inured to brutality and murder as he is, he’s an incredibly magnetic figure.  Noda is superb at showing us the source of the fierce loyalty Tsurumi’s men have for him – he constantly makes them feel important and indispensable.  He’s far from the only larger-than-life figure in Golden Kamuy, and some of them are even magnificent bastards like him.  But Tsurumi is certainly one of the most memorable – and chilling – of the lot.