Golden Kamuy vol. 25

Sapporo may be one of Japan’s northernmost cities, but the action in the city is heating up in this volume.  That’s because all of the major characters and their associated groups have converged on the town as they hunt for not one, but two tattooed convicts.  One has additional tattoos on his face and a predilection for killing disappointed children.  The other… may actually be Jack the Ripper.  That’s right, mangaka Satoru Noda is doubling down on the Ripper connection he established in the previous volume in some surprisingly plausible ways here.  This leads to some unexpected team-ups between the various parties and some unorthodox thinking in terms of luring out the Ripper (involving crossdressing, of course).  While all this is going on, Asirpa manages to get a look at many of the tattooed skins in order to see if she can determine a pattern to them.  The problem there is that Lieutenant Tsurumi’s plans to mix fake skins alongside the real ones may be working exactly as he planned here.

Vol. 25 is another “business as usual” installment for the series.  This means that while it still entertains, there’s not a lot of surprises here to make it stand out among the previous volumes.  Given all the craziness that we’ve seen in the series to date, I’m willing to concede that asking it to continue to surprise me is a very tall order at this point.  Still, the Ripper stuff is interesting, we get an impressively outlandish fight featuring some quality slapstick from Ushiyama, and Private Usami continues his quest to establish himself as the most mentally unstable character in the series.  He made great strides towards that with his “jizz detective” antics, and he makes further strides here with his analysis of Ogata and Tsurumi’s mindsets.  You get the feeling that Noda is trying to position him as less of a joke than he has before as the series moves into its endgame.  If that’s the case then Tsurumi is likely to rue the day that he didn’t just shoot this private in the head as opposed to trying to twist him towards his own ends.