Golden Kamuy: Adventure, Betrayal, and…Cooking?

​While a good adventure can certainly benefit from a touch of the fantastic, sometimes it’s nice for a story to remind us what an interesting place our world is already. 

​Golden Kamuy is such a series, cut from the cloth of such classic adventure books as Call of the Wild, Moby Dick, and Last of the Mohicans, with the over the top action and characters anime does best.
Set in the early 20th century, just after the Russo-Japanese War, in the northern Hokkaido region of Japan, which is mostly still unsettled, Golden Kamuy follows Saichi “Immortal” Sugimoto, a war veteran known for his bloody-minded refusal to die. Starting as a humble gold-panner trying to provide for a fallen comrade’s widow, Sugimoto stumbles onto a legend about an enormous trove of gold, hidden behind a map tattooed in pieces on the backs of a group of escaped prisoners. Assisted by a young Ainu girl named Asirpa, herself an expert in natural medicines and archery, who seeks the treasure for personal reasons, Sugimoto sets off on a quest to find the criminals and claim the gold, though he only wants a small portion of it for himself. But they aren’t the only ones hunting for the gold. Several of the escaped criminals themselves are after it as well, along with the totally unhinged Lieutenant Tsurumi and his breakaway faction of the Japanese army. Sugimoto and Asirpa are forced to contend not only with these various opponents, whose alliances shift like the wind, but also the myriad dangers of the natural world.

On its most basic level, Golden Kamuy is a story about civilization and frontier, and the kind of strange individuals who choose the latter over the former. Most of the characters we meet, hero and villain, are people who simply don’t belong in the rapidly industrializing and Westernizing country that Japan had become, so they found themselves drawn to the last place in their homeland unaffected by such changes. Whether they’re scarred by war, relics of another time, or socially maladjusted to begin with, these characters may seem to be out for the vast fortune in gold, but in reality, they’re all seeking a world that still has a place for them in it. We’re introduced to several characters who seem at first like one-off antagonists, but we come to learn their stories and develop sympathy for them, hoping they too can share in the gold we want Sugimoto and Asirpa to find. 

Oddly enough, the series is also educational, at least for me, who didn’t know much going in about the Hokkaido frontier or the Ainu people, and we learn a great deal about both throughout the story. We are treated in almost every episode to some new Ainu recipe, as Asirpa shows Sugimoto what animals to hunt and how to prepare them well. It happens enough that one could almost mistake this for a historical cooking show, if not for the much greater preponderance of battle and intrigue. There’s something neat about learning while you’re being entertained, and I like that the creators did their research.
Like most series based on a long manga, Golden Kamuy is ongoing, and if you want to know how it all ends, you’ll be disappointed because it’s simply not there yet. As it is with longer stories, some arcs can drag a little, especially when Sugimoto and Asirpa get separated and we don’t get to see their amusing interactions for a long period of time. There’s also a lot of fan service in the show, but in a rare twist, it’s only the male characters. Not really for me, but your mileage may vary. 
Despite minor gripes, there’s just something fun and refreshing about an old-fashioned adventure yarn like Golden Kamuy, and I’ll be looking forward to its eventual return.