Because of its weird split-season, it feels like as soon as it’s back Golden Kamuy is about to go away again. Only three eps of the insanity left – though it seems likely we’ll get another season to wrap up the anime in the next couple of years. Not having read much of the manga I have no idea what a logical stopping point is going to be – none presents itself as imminent to the unspoiled eye – but this felt like an ep that was trying to get a lot done. Golden Kamuy can be like that sometimes, just because there are so many characters and such a big plot, but this week really was packed to the rafters.
To start with, Tanigaki – who’d seemingly sort of dropped out of the story after Karafuto, is dragged back into it by Tsurumi. We haven’t seen Inkarmat in ages, and if visual evidence is to be believed he wasn’t lying about her being pregnant (presumably with Tanigaki’s child, though who knows). Trying to get Tanigaki to kill Sugimoto and kidnap Asirpa is a very Tsurumi thing to do, but even with Inkarmat as a virtual hostage I just don’t see Tanigaki as being capable of that (maybe recruiting them to find and free her, that I could see). Maybe Tsurumi doesn’t either, but he’s nothing if not thorough – he’s just trying to get any many irons in the first as possible.
This was an unusual episode, in fact, in that it touched almost every base in the narrative – and that’s a lot of bases. Normally GK will pick one or two subsets per week, and maybe that’s another reason why this ep felt so packed. Team Sugimoto gets their moment, as Asirpa finds a very interesting bundle in Heita’s tobacco pouch. To wit (thanks to Shiraishi’s explanation), Heita collected gold samples from every body of water where he’d found any. The idea is that the one from the bottom of Lake Shikotsu will hold the key to which river the main cache of gold came from, as Wilk couldn’t have moved it far on his own. Shiraishi reckons from Heita’s scraps that “Pirate” refers to a tattooed prisoner from Abashiri who can lead them close to the stash.
Pirate (Seki Tomokazu) – also known as Botato and Oosawa Fusatarou – is clearly going to be a major player (he’s on the poster). Noda-sensei does love his serial killers, that’s for sure. Oosawa was indeed working with Heita and does seem to have found Wilk’s wrecked boat in the lake, so he seems like the best lead for the gold, especially as he would allow Asirpa to find it without shadowing Hijikata and Tsurumi’s groups – which both of them are counting on her doing.
Not to be overlooked, Hijikata’s team turns up for the first time in awhile. They’re in Sapporo, where yet another serial killer seems to be at work, in rather Jack the Ripper fashion. Well-known (certainly to viewers of Kitsutsuki Tanteidokoro) poet Ishikawa Takuboku (Toriumi Kousuke) is working as a reporter locally and in cahoots with Hijikata’s group. Hijikata suspects this could be a prisoner’s doing – but he also suspects that Tsurumi will get wind of it and think the same thing (he does, and does, dispatching Kikuta and Usami). He’s also reunited with Ogata, who brings him news from the front – and a warning that Sofia is going to come from Russia searching for Asirpa, and be another dangerous opponent.
In the end, though, it’s Tsurumi who dominates affairs, as he so often does. It’s easy to lose sight of just what a twisted person Tsurumi is, so episodes like this are a good reminder. He talks to the dojo master Takeda about something he observed in the Sino-Japanese War – that many soldiers simply pretended to fire on the enemy, because they didn’t want to kill anybody. How, then, does a commander overcome this? Not with fear, or nationalism, or patriotism – no, he does so with love. Which has really been Tsurumi’s strategy ever since, and he’s very good at it.
That whole Usami backstory is, again, a great reminder of why this whole group are not the good guys here. Tsurumi, by nature of his charisma, tends to attract freaks and weirdos – they see a kindred spirit. Some are worse and/or crazier than others – Usami is pretty near the top of the pile – but it’s a certain type of man that’s drawn to give his loyalty to a man like Tsurumi (not that there are many like him). And the more we see of him before his injury, the more it seems as if the injury has very little to do with the way Tsurumi is now. He was just born that way.
