Golden Kamuy

Saichi Sugimoto, a decorated and traumatised veteran, learns of a cache of gold stolen from the Ainu and hidden by a man who tattooed a map across the skins of twenty-four prison escapees.

He partners with Asirpa, a young Ainu hunter whose father was among the murdered, and they compete for the tattooed skins against an army division and a surviving shogunate loyalist.

A treasure map tattooed across twenty-four convicts, and three parties collecting them.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

The series' most substantial achievement is its depiction of Ainu life: language, hunting practice, food preparation, spiritual belief, clothing and the effects of Japanese colonisation.

Noda consulted an Ainu language scholar throughout, and the material is integrated into the adventure rather than presented as background. For many Japanese readers it was a first substantial encounter with the culture.

Cooking and eating occupy an enormous proportion of the page count, particularly Ainu preparations of game, and the series treats each meal as an event.

The food scenes are a genuine pleasure and are also how the ethnography is delivered: a reader learns the culture by watching what is made and how it is shared.

It moves between brutal violence, historical drama and sustained absurd comedy, frequently within a chapter, and several recurring gags run for volumes.

The tonal range is extreme and is the series' defining quality. Readers who cannot accept a torture sequence followed immediately by a joke about a mushroom will struggle.

Lieutenant Tsurumi and Toshizo Hijikata are both given coherent political projects, substantial charisma and genuine followings, and neither is simply an obstacle.

The competing parties all want the gold for reasons connected to the period's actual politics, which gives the treasure hunt a historical seriousness it would not otherwise have.

It is graphic and frequent, including torture, mutilation and detailed hunting sequences, and the series does not treat killing as clean.

Sugimoto's wartime trauma is a constant, and his capacity for violence is presented as damage rather than as competence. The hunting sequences in particular are drawn with the same unflinching attention as the combat, and the series makes no distinction between the two in how it looks at a body.

She is twelve or thereabouts, entirely competent in her own environment, and the series lets her be the authority in every situation involving the land.

Her relationship with Sugimoto is the emotional centre, and the series is careful that she is never simply a guide to her own culture for his benefit.

Noda's drawing is detailed and functional, exceptionally good at animals, weapons, period clothing and snow, and less concerned with visual beauty than with accuracy.

The hunting and butchery sequences are drawn with a precision that makes the ethnographic material convincing. Noda's snow in particular is worth noting, since a substantial portion of the series takes place in it and the drawing never lets it become a blank background.

Thirty-one volumes, with a plot that accumulates characters continuously and several long digressions that appear irrelevant and are not.

The series is unusually good at making a minor character introduced for a joke turn out to matter considerably later. Noda has said he planned the ending early, and the density of foreshadowing across the middle volumes supports that account.

It concludes the treasure plot and the political material, and the final arc is large, fast and somewhat compressed relative to the leisurely middle.

Opinion on the ending is mixed, with the most common complaint being that several characters are resolved more quickly than their development warranted.

It won the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize and has been credited with a significant increase in public interest in Ainu culture in Japan.

Ainu commentators have generally responded positively while noting that a single popular work carries more attention than it should have to. The series also prompted a museum exhibition and collaborations with Ainu cultural institutions, which is an unusual afterlife for an adventure comic.

Readers who want historical adventure with genuine research, and who can accept extreme tonal swings and graphic content.

It is complete, long, and among the most distinctive things in this section. Readers who want consistency of tone will find it actively uninterested in providing any.