On April 28, 2022, the eight-year serialization of Mr. Noda's comic "Golden Kamui" was announced. Sugimoto Saichi and Ainu girl Ashripa's journey to find the gold nugget and the truth has finally come to an end. What kind of work is "Golden God"? This is a very difficult question. However, Noda-sensei's strong screenwriting ability, detailed investigation, and repeated jumps in the content of serious historical materials/violent aesthetics/black humor, make people feel that this is undoubtedly a work that can be called "classic".
In 2019, the Japanese Manga Exhibition at the British Museum even put the heroine Ashripa on the cover of the official website to show that the compatibility of Japanese manga is a global phenomenon of multimedia. Ashripa is not just Ashripa of Ainu, but "Ashrippa of the whole world". 1 Image source: The official website of the British Museum Comic Con Banner Design The 2019 British Museum's Japanese Manga Exhibition, the official website cover directly put the heroine Ashley Pa. The reason why it is difficult to explain what kind of work "Golden Kamui" is, is because "Golden Kamuy" can be said to be a work about "mixing" and "collage". Its main storyline - various factions (Sugimoto, Hijikata, Tsurumi three parties) search for fugitives from Abashiri prison, collect tattooed human skins, and assemble human skins to compete for information about the gold buried by the Ainu people. Its themes bounce back and forth between history, food, Ainu culture, hunting, and battles between men (both violent and philosophical).
The timeline of the story returns between the Russo-Japanese War, the Meiji Restoration, the Hakodate War, and the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, and the locations span across Liaodong in China, the Far East in Russia, and Hokkaido in Japan. The area is vast, the time jumps, and the topics to be discussed are so diverse, as if different ingredients need to be stewed in the same pot of soup. In the propaganda slogan of the serialization of "Golden Kamuy", the editorial department of Shueisha often calls it "Japanese-style dark pot western", which describes the Westernized Japanese Meiji society described in "Golden Kamuy", but retains the "Japanese" style of its own culture.