It took 55 episodes, but it finally happened. We got our title drop, and I can’t quibble with the timing and placement in any way. It means exactly what it should mean, it was exactly the right character who said it, and it came at the culmination of a spellbinding tour de force of an episode. Golden Kamuy goes through stretches where it’s unbridled insanity that are long enough to forget just how versatile it is. There are many ways it can compel as a narrative, and this sort of quiet and unsettling slow burn is one of the best.
What can’t be denied is that this story is overflowing with characters who are impossibly badass and at least half crazy. That certainly applies to Lt. Tsurumi and then some, but also the names who populate the story he recounts to Asirpa and Sofia. Especially Wilk, who was so badass – and crazy – that he ripped off his own face in order to convince Tsurumi (and Kiroranke) that he was dead. But Wilk wasn’t just badass and crazy – he was also a true believer. And that’s something else this story is packed with – zealots. And single-minded ones, too.
That’s why this mystery about Tsurumi’s true motives is so critical, and so fascinating. True believers define Golden Kamuy. and Tsurumi more than anyone has been the one pulling the strings. With some it’s politics and ethnic identity – Kiroranke and Sofia and their Far East Federation. Wilk and his Ainu (Hokkaido only) homeland. Hijikata and his Ezo Republic. But it doesn’t have to be so grand. With the immortal Sugimoto it’s Asirpa – he believes in protecting her no less zealously or single-mindedly. With some it’s just plain greed – the Ainu gold and what it can do for them.
This is why Tsurumi is so astute and so terrifying. He can make any argument sound reasonable. And most of the positions he takes aren’t that outlandish to begin with. His point about the golden kamuy being the evilest, most disastrous of all – can one really disagree with him? That’s the thing, see – the gold (or rather, the prospect of it) brings out the zealotry in everyone who knows about it. Including Tsurumi himself, of course. Yet at the same time, this is the man who dons Wilk’s face and dances around in front of Asirpa like a madman (another thing GK has in plenty). Because he is a madman of course – the key being that he was mad before the gold was even a glint in his eye. He just happens to be an exceptionally persuasive madman.
I’m not 100% convinced I take Tsurumi’s final declaration at face value. I think Tsukishima and Koito (much the easier of the two to convince) do, and they may be right. But he’s such a superb liar that it’s hard to know for sure. He isn’t wrong in that if it were simply revenge he were after, he’s had ample opportunities to exact it. Wilk is the target for it, ultimately, if indeed he’s telling the truth about whose bullets killed his wife and daughter (which lets Sofia off the hook for that crime). And Kiroranke has already ended Wilk, even if that sort of revenge were something Tsurumi wanted. But it’s not hard to imagine a madman who’s had done to him what Tsurumi has seeing Wilk’s daughter as a suitable proxy target.
Tsurumi may well be playing a long game with that in mind. As I said Koito and Tsukishima may be convinced, but I’m not yet. But if we take him at this word, his vision for the gold is the modernist, nationalist one that would prevail in contemporary Japan. He praises the Ainu who fought and died for “their country”, and seek to integrate. He rails against the dangers of immigration and asserts the importance of purity, the essence of Japanese xenophobia both in the past and present. If indeed this is Tsurumi’s true zealotry, it’s no less compelling – both to him and many others – than what Hijikata, Wilk, and Kiroranke dedicated their lives to.
At the center of all this is Asirpa, of course. The key to the gold, but the only one who’s not made clear what her own vision for it is. For now she’s in the viper’s nest, but Sugimoto and Shiraishi have made contact with Ipopte – the private in the 7th whose father was one of the seven Ainu who died in the hunt for Kimuspu (who was Cikapasi’s grandfather, it seems). Ipopte pledges to try and get to Asirpa, and manages to distract Nikaidou easily enough. But nobody trusts Ipopte, and we don’t fully know his motives, either. In the end, I think, everyone is out for themselves – that’s just what the gold does to people. That’s what makes what exists between Asirpa and Sugimoto so discordant, and the one unshakable truth at the heart of Golden Kamuy.
