Golden Kamuy
First tankōbon volume cover, featuring Saichi Sugimoto
ゴールデンカムイ (Gōruden Kamui)
Manga Written by Satoru Noda Published by Shueisha English publisher Viz Media
Imprint Young Jump Comics
Magazine Weekly Young Jump
Demographic Seinen
Original run August 21, 2014 – April 28, 2022
Volumes 31 (List of volumes)
Anime television series Directed by Hitoshi Nanba (S1–3) Shizutaka Sugahara (S4)
Produced by Ryousuke Mori, Kazuaki Takahashi, Naokado Fujiyama, Toshihiro Suzuki, Shunsuke Hasegawa (S1) Satoshi Tanaka (S1–3), Rie Ukai (S1–3), Yukitoshi Suyama (S2), Rei Kudou (S3–4), Kenji Kuroda (S4), Mai Tani[b] (S4)
Written by Noboru Takagi
Music by Kenichiro Suehiro
Studio Geno Studio (S1–3) Brain’s Base (S4)
Licensed by Crunchyroll, SEA: Muse Communication
Original run April 9, 2018 – present Episodes
Original net animation Golden Dōga Gekijō
Directed by Kenshirō Morii
Studio DMM.futureworks, W-Toon Studio,
Released April 16, 2018 – June 27, 2023
Episodes 47 + 6 OVAs (List of episodes)
Movie:
Director Shigeaki Kubo
Writers Tsutomu Kuroiwa Satoru Noda
Top cast
Kento Yamazaki Saichi Sugimoto
Anna Yamada Asirpa
Yûma Yamoto Yoshitake Shiraishi
Gordon Maeda Hyakunosuke Ogata
Ryôhei Ohtani Genjirô Tanigaki
Shuntarô Yanagi Yôhei…
Katsuya Takagi Tatsûma Ushiyama(as Katsuya)
Katsumi Kiba Shinpachi Nagakura
Hisako Ôkata Huci
Makita Sports Takechiyo Gotô
Asuka Kudô Hajime Tsukishima
Debo Akibe Asirpa’s great uncle
Hiroshi Tamaki Tokushirô Tsurumi
Hiroshi Tachi Toshizô Hijikata
Ken Aoki Naoaki Noma
David Cui Cui Nozaki(English version)(voice)
Keisuke Horibe Kouji Wada
Arata Iura Wilk
Golden Kumay is, at its core, a treasure hunt story. It is a hugely successful manga series, a much-praised anime, and now a live-action feature movie.
We actually stopped watching the anime in the second season because it got a bit creepy. The co-protagonist is Asirpa, an Ainu girl. In the anime, she appears about twelve, and the sexual tension in her interaction with some of the other characters got a bit icky. In the live action, she’s clearly in her late teens (played by Anna Yamada), and more matter-of-fact in her approach to others. Also, one character in the anime starts wearing human skins as a sort of fetish, whereas in the live action he does it to smuggle a treasure map away from other gold hunters.
It was still a good anime, and a better movie. It offers a fascinating glimpse into the old culture of the Ainu (“The Hairy Ones”) who lived as a separate culture in the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido.
The story begins with the Russia-Japan war of 1905, a bloody and pointless war that resulted in victory for Japan and humiliation for Czarist Russia at great expense to both sides. Japan went on to develop into the militaristic nightmare of the twenties, thirties and forties, and it was the first step toward the fall of the Czars.
Immortal Sugimoto (Kento Yamazaki) is a survivor of that war, horribly scarred and convinced, because he survived, that he is, in fact, Immortal. He stumbles across a plot to uncover a vast horde of gold, hidden somewhere in Ainu country. A mad veteran, Shinsegumi Vice-Commander Toshizou Hijikata (Hiroshi Tachi), knows the location of the gold, and has tattooed portions of a map on the backs of a couple of dozen convicts. The map is useless unless assembled, and can only be done so if the wearers of the map portion are skinned. A rival group, the infamous 7th Division of the Imperial Japanese Army, have gotten wind of this and are also seeking the convicts, now escaped and scattered. Thier leader is the grotesque First Lieutenant Tokushirou Tsurumi (Hiroshi Tamaki), a man missing most of his fore skull.
Sugimoto quickly finds himself in trouble in Hokkaido, home to some of the deepest snows on Earth, and is rescued by Asirpa and her kumay, a great white wolf. He sees her as a valuable survival asset, and she hopes he will end up protecting the gold which she believes embodies the spirit of the Ainu people.
It’s an eerie, sometimes troubling action tale, but brilliantly told and with a nice balance of action and character development, performing strongly in both.
Ainu culture still exists, and some of the supporting actors in the live-action are of that remote and mysterious group, one so different from the rest of Japan.
Now on Netflix.