The cream has had a tendency to rise to the top this anime season.  And they don’t get any creamier than Golden Kamuy, which has one of the most impressive pedigrees of any manga out there.  It was pretty much a no-brainer that this series was going to wind up at or near the head of the list for Spring, and it’s tended to only get better as it goes along.  Rather than shock and awe you with the first couple of episodes, Golden Kamuy builds and builds layer upon layer into the story and character arcs – which makes it all the more a pity that it’s only one freaking cour.

As we begin this time, Ushiyama has caught up to Shiraishi – but the ox-mountain has bigger problems on his hands.  He uses the hapless escape artist in Nitta-Hina fashion as a weapon against the soldiers of the 7th, but they have bigger problems too.  Hijikata is staging a run on the bank (which he apparently didn’t tell Ushiyama about) and has two men using dynamite and gunshots to lure the police away while he blasts his way into the vault.  Why?  Because he’s gotten a tip that his old katana is inside, and an old solider like Hijikata isn’t going to be content to die swinging a rusty old blade like he has been.

Hijikata also confirms the supposed size of the Ainu gold haul – it is indeed 20,000 kan.  For perspective, that’s over eighty tons (about 165,000 pounds) and by my reckoning at today’ market, has a value of about $3.49 billion.  Whether that’s enough to start a country I don’t know, but at whatever value it would have had at the time it’s apparently about a third of the Japanese government’s budget.  It’s not clear just exactly how many people know the true size of the treasure (assuming the rumor is true), but it’s easy to see why so many powerful men are desperate to find it.

Shiraishi’s plot to track the Shinsengumi faction back to their lair using Ushiyama’s yukata and Retar’s nose works (though he has to settle for the Ainu dog, as Asirpa swears she’s never getting close to Retar again now that she knows his family situation), but it succeeds only in getting him captured.  And potentially turned into a double-agent, as Hijkata more or less blackmails Shiraishi into working for him.  The first assignment is to get Sugimoto to track down and kill Kazuo Henmi – a legendary murderer and one of the tattooed prisoners, who’s lately been on a bit of a killing spree at the expense of the itinerant herring fisherman who’ve flooded the area to help with the catch.

It would hardly seem as if there’s room for another larger-than-life figure in Golden Kamuy, but Kazuo is certainly that.  He’s played with terrifying intensity by the superb Seki Toshihiko, and quite the freakshow.  Shiraishi recalls him telling the story (in grisly detail) of how his younger brother was killed and eaten by a boar while he hid and watched.  Ever since that day Kazuo has been fascinated with killing and death, clearly deriving a sort of Hisoka-like pleasure from it, and he’s not in this for the gold.  He’s just enjoying the killing field.  Using his kills as bait to lure the hunters after him, Kazuo sees this as a thrill ride for his psychotic obsessions.

Asirpa is fine with going to the coast to look for Kazuo, as her uncle is there hunting for whales (time for some cultural sensitivity here, I suppose).  It doesn’t take long to find him either, as Kazuo us in one of the boats that’s rammed by the whale Sugimoto has just harpooned, and falls into the water.  With Shiraishi still tethered to the whale there’s no one in Sugimoto’s little boat that knows Kazuo’s face (though he’s already spotted Shiraishi), so being rescued gives the serial killer a chance to size up those that are hunting for him.  And he likes what he sees.

Henmi is seriously a piece of work – he’s strangling one of his fellow fisherman even as he’s chatting with Sugimoto through a window at the fishermen’s dorm.  He even considers showing Sugimoto his tattoos, on the grounds that it would be a thrill to be killed by him – but he stops himself.  Perhaps Kazuo is simply searching for the right person to kill him and thinks he’s found it in Sugimoto, but he strikes me as the sort of fellow for whom the cat-and-mouse is an essential part of the experience.  Like Nihei, Kazuo – as someone not searching for the gold – is ultimately a sidebar from the main event here.  But like Nihei he’s so commanding a presence that it really makes no difference.  Golden Kamuy has way, way too many characters like that to fit into one cour.