Manga Book Club returns MARCH 1st! - Golden Kamuy (Ch. 1-100)

Hey all. Aloha and I are both finished moving, which mean we can finally get back to Book Club! Continuing the previously established pattern of Chat Picks, We Pick, Chat Picks, We Pick, the next series we'll be reading is our selection: Golden Kamuy (sometimes spelled Golden Kamui).

For those new to Book Club, we give a reading assignment for a specific manga and anyone interested can join the discussion two weeks later. Simply read the allotted chapters before the club meeting (this one will be on March 1st at 2pm EST), then we talk about what we think. It's fun! Unless we're reading Gen III Pokemanga. That was not fun at all, lmao.

Normally these meetings are Patron-exclusive, but the first of a multi-part series is always available to the public, meaning anyone can join our next meeting.

So, what is this series?

Golden Kamuy is a historical fiction, a violent gunslinging western, and a wholesome cooking manga, all at once. And sometimes it's just yaoi.

The story follows Saichi Sugimoto, a veteran of the Russo-Japanese war, and his partner Asirpa, an Ainu hunter.

Rumor has it that many years ago a group of Ainu (a minority ethnic group native to Japan) came into the possession of an absolutely unbelievable amount of gold. The only survivor of said group was captured by the Japanese government and locked in prison. The officials hoped for a confession, but the man never gave up the gold's location. Instead, he tattoo'd a complex map to the treasure across the bodies of his fellow inmates, the most dangerous men in 1900s Japan.

The prisoners staged a breakout, and now they've all turned on one another, desperate to claim the gold for themselves. Several groups form, resulting in a bloody battle across the snowy expanses of the Hokkaido wilderness. The only way to get the treasure's location is gather all the prisoners together... Or to kill them and take their skins.

Golden Kamuy is one of my favorite manga of all time, second to maybe only Chainsaw Man. I think the characters, humor, pacing, artwork, and storytelling are all very on point. This is the manga I've been most excited to read since we started manga book club. The story contains an incredible amount of research on the time period and a commendable amount of respect for the Ainu people who are so central in its storytelling. This series is as good of a historical fiction as it is an action-adventure story.

One of the biggest ways it explores both the Ainu culture and the culture of Japan at the turn of the century is via the focus on cooking. The characters spend most of their time out in the wild and ready access to meals is never a given. The cast has to make pit stops and diversions to hunt in order to eat the meat and sell the furs. These moments are a big part of the journey.

If you're the kind of person who enjoys learning about a culture through a specific lens like cooking or if you enjoyed the nitty-gritty culinary fantasy of our Dungeon Meshi read-through, this might be for you!

However, I do have to warn new viewers: Golden Kamuy is a very violent manga. This is absolutely not something any minors should be reading. GK goes to some very dark places and it's very, very gory. I'm talking "a-guy's-face-gets-ripped-off-by-a-bear-and-you-see-his-face-dangling-from-the-head" levels of gory. It's intense.

CONTENT WARNINGS: 
Gore, intense violence, blood, war trauma/PTSD, animal violence (lots of hunting where you see them prepare the food and life-or-death encounters with wildlife, especially bears), intense psychosexual stuff (most of the arc villains are repeated felons and many have some kind of paraphilia). There is a one-off villain who is into bestiality. There's a fight where two guys cum on each other and, yeah, you do see it.

GK is not all like this, but it does go there and it's only fair to warn you up front.

Also, of note: This series is unfathomably gay. There is so much male nudity. Just an absolutely absurd amount. You technically never see a penis but sometimes you wonder how the author gets away with as much as he does. If you are in to big buff men, rejoice. Golden Kamuy is a buffet of sexy guybutt made just for you.

I hope you guys will join us for this one! I seriously love Golden Kamuy so much. It has some of my favorite characters of all time.

Including my freaky Pirate Husband, who I love so, so much.

This read-through will be three sittings, around 100 chapters each. Golden Kamuy can legally be purchased through most major book retailers, both physically and digitally, including on Viz. This is the first book club where I myself will be reading physical copies instead of digital, so I'm not sure if I'll be doing an imgur album this time. Though, who knows? Maybe I'll end up reading scans alongside my copies just to see the differences in layout. Bo says the author frequently changes things up for the volume releases and redraws pages so they look better and I'm curious to see that in action.

If you're looking for less costly ways to read GK, a quick Google search backed up by Ublock origin + Adblock will net you more than a few options.

I highly encourage supporting the original release through official channels, but if you do choose to sail the seven seas then I cannot recommend reading scans from the EverydayHeroes group enough (see below). They have incredible additional context for all historical figures and locations mentioned at the end of every single chapter. Reading these was one of my favorite parts of the series when I was following along with weekly updates. It's like the opposite of SBS.

Once the story was nearing its end, they even began taking the time to point out all the incredible foreshadowing the series has been doing since the early chapters, and that's made me so excited to revisit the series outside of a serial format.

I hope many of you decide join us for this series! It's kind of intense and I think the start is the slowest part, but it really is one of my favorite reads of all time.

See you March 1st!