Manga Thoughts: Golden Kamuy 1-2
May. 19th, 2018 09:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerIt still managed to surprise me a bit when I once more managed to make the quick decisions to watch a reasonable number of new anime series this season the way "everyone else" says they do it these modern days, via official online streaming. However, I was a little aware all of these "new" shows had been given a bit of a boost in being the latest instalments of established franchises. Even the series I was adding to my schedule in my own fashion off of Blu-Ray discs were similar extensions upon already experienced properties. A thought or two of the "domestic movie franchises" and "sitcom revivals" I only sometimes look into did come to mind. As for what altogether new anime series did defy that possible contemporary trend I've just alluded to, some of them did get my attention, but in such a way as to have some negative opinions push me away at the same time. One historical action series seemed to include some interesting concepts, but the first reports of it mentioned some unappealing-looking animation, including modern tricks dismissed as "gratuitous" or "lazy," regardless of whether computer animation is actually "cheaper" than "drawn" stuff.
The anime series, though, was part of a more old-fashioned (and therefore seemingly more acceptable) sort of "franchise" in that it was an adaptation of an existing manga. Going straight to the source, the "program-length commercial" having done its work without actually having been watched at all, I sought out a manga series I hadn't really noticed before in the discussions of which I do follow and bought the first volume of Golden Kamuy. When I started reading it, I got through the whole volume a lot faster than it cam take me with manga (which can be read a chapter at a time and therefore doesn't demand the deliberate time expense of anime), and went back to the bookstore for the next one.
Set not long after the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Russo-Japanese War, Golden Kamuy opens with the dishonourably discharged, scarfaced (although he's the least of the grotesques discovered or generated in the course of the first two volumes) Saichi Sugimoto panning for gold and not finding it on the underpopulated, wintry northern island of Hokkaido. When he happens to hear of a lost trove of gold stolen from the indigenous Ainu, he gets into a "you've got to be tougher than anyone else to survive and defeat the worst of humanity" race for the treasure. What makes the story something other, and more interesting to me, than the performative bleakness of the infliction of ultraviolence (which can get me thinking of series like Black Lagoon) is the steady stream of woodcraft lessons from Asirpa, the young Ainu huntress Sugimoto falls in with. There's an odd, yet engaging and familiar, earnestness to all the cultural information (with a page of bibliography at the back of each volume, although I presume the titles were all in Japanese to begin with), which includes the pleasure Sugimoto takes in food (once he's got past Asirpa's Ainu delicacies such as squirrel brain, rabbit eyes, and cooked otter head). That did have me remembering "The Hunger Games"; beyond that, I did think in a general way of contemporary Westerns and started contrasting the manga's snowy Hokkaido to even the more northern parts of "the American West." It was almost a surprise to think of the Klondike Gold Rush after that; the "man versus nature" parts of the manga at least might be compared to some of Jack London's tales of adventure. Perhaps, though, it's my awareness of the British tradition of control clamped down on the Canadian North by the Mounted Police that established the first, perhaps even comforting distance.
The path to the gold established in the first volume seems one that could be stretched out for quite a while so long as the manga keeps selling, although that volume also establishes (a bit at a time, such that I had to look back for all the pieces to fall together) Sugimoto has a pressing reason to strike it rich beyond simple greed. I know two more volumes have already been translated; past them, I suppose I'll be coasting on the impetus of the first extended and pretty impressive burst of adventure.
The anime series, though, was part of a more old-fashioned (and therefore seemingly more acceptable) sort of "franchise" in that it was an adaptation of an existing manga. Going straight to the source, the "program-length commercial" having done its work without actually having been watched at all, I sought out a manga series I hadn't really noticed before in the discussions of which I do follow and bought the first volume of Golden Kamuy. When I started reading it, I got through the whole volume a lot faster than it cam take me with manga (which can be read a chapter at a time and therefore doesn't demand the deliberate time expense of anime), and went back to the bookstore for the next one.
Set not long after the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Russo-Japanese War, Golden Kamuy opens with the dishonourably discharged, scarfaced (although he's the least of the grotesques discovered or generated in the course of the first two volumes) Saichi Sugimoto panning for gold and not finding it on the underpopulated, wintry northern island of Hokkaido. When he happens to hear of a lost trove of gold stolen from the indigenous Ainu, he gets into a "you've got to be tougher than anyone else to survive and defeat the worst of humanity" race for the treasure. What makes the story something other, and more interesting to me, than the performative bleakness of the infliction of ultraviolence (which can get me thinking of series like Black Lagoon) is the steady stream of woodcraft lessons from Asirpa, the young Ainu huntress Sugimoto falls in with. There's an odd, yet engaging and familiar, earnestness to all the cultural information (with a page of bibliography at the back of each volume, although I presume the titles were all in Japanese to begin with), which includes the pleasure Sugimoto takes in food (once he's got past Asirpa's Ainu delicacies such as squirrel brain, rabbit eyes, and cooked otter head). That did have me remembering "The Hunger Games"; beyond that, I did think in a general way of contemporary Westerns and started contrasting the manga's snowy Hokkaido to even the more northern parts of "the American West." It was almost a surprise to think of the Klondike Gold Rush after that; the "man versus nature" parts of the manga at least might be compared to some of Jack London's tales of adventure. Perhaps, though, it's my awareness of the British tradition of control clamped down on the Canadian North by the Mounted Police that established the first, perhaps even comforting distance.
The path to the gold established in the first volume seems one that could be stretched out for quite a while so long as the manga keeps selling, although that volume also establishes (a bit at a time, such that I had to look back for all the pieces to fall together) Sugimoto has a pressing reason to strike it rich beyond simple greed. I know two more volumes have already been translated; past them, I suppose I'll be coasting on the impetus of the first extended and pretty impressive burst of adventure.