Golden Kamuy vol. 21

…and that’s a wrap.  At least, it is until the next time I go eight months without reviewing a volume of this series.

Vol. 19 may have been this title’s most recent high point, but it didn’t quite herald the next stage of its story the way this volume does.  That’s at the end of vol. 21, however, and before that we’ve got some action, wackiness, history, double-crossing, and general confusion to work through.  Things start off with the main cast facing off against a sniper in a village and finding out that an unusual character has been tailing them.  In the next village they meet up with a pair of men who have embraced the hot new trend that is sweeping the world:  Filmmaking!  Asirpa sees this as a way to help preserve Ainu legends and traditions, which means we get a couple chapters of Sugimoto, Shiraishi, and company hamming things up for the camera.  We also find out that most Ainu legends are penis-based, which fits this series quite well.  While their efforts do result in an actual movie, it’s the footage tacked on at the end that proves to be the volume’s emotional high point for reasons which the reader is best left to see for themselves.  It also provokes a thoughtful discussion between Sugimoto and Asirpa about the latter’s role in relation to her people, which feeds into the volume’s climax.

There’s a bit of rough going before we get to said climax, however, as we return to Ariko, the Ainu serving in the 7th Division, and see that he’s at the center of a scheme by Tsurumi to confuse Hijikata about which of the tattooed skins are real.  The level of backstabbing and double-dealing here left me more confused than anything else as keeping track of who has which skins and which skins are real is approaching “Death Note” levels of complexity.  That’s not a compliment — “Death Note’s” complexity turned the series into a joke before its end.

After that is a bit of a mixed bag as the business with Cikapasi was touching, while the stuff with Koito — following on from his flashback in the previous volume — feels like mangaka Satoru Noda is jumping through too many hoops to get this character’s motivation just right.  Then Tsurumi shows up to meet Asirpa for the first time and all hell breaks loose.  The end result does seem like it’s going to jettison a lot of the confusion I talked about here and leave the narrative in a more streamlined place going forward.  Still, for such an important shift in “Golden Kamury’s” story, I was hoping that the execution would be better than what we were given here.