jelloapocalypse
patreon
Manga Book Club returns MARCH 1st! - Golden Kamuy (Ch. 1-100)
🕑 Added 2025-02-13 04:31:58 +0000 UTCHey 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!
Comments
иосиф вобла
the amount of giddiness i felt hearing jello say that ogata might be his favorite character in the first stream. then i join the patreon just for GK book club, and read this post, and lo and behold, my pirate wife is also mentioned as one of the standouts. this one's gonna be so so much fun and i'm shaking your hand in solidarity on faves in this case
Benedict Ide
I wasn't able to make the book club meeting last Saturday (prior commitment- March 1 was this all-day marathon TTRPG mega-session my friend had been planning for like a decade, so I couldn't move it.), but I just finished the first reading and I'm having a great time. I've been meaning to read this series for ages, so it's great to have an excuse. It took a while for it to really hook me, honestly- the main skin-hunting plot in and of itself felt kinda weak, just an excuse to pit the protagonists against the Weirdo of the Week. Hard to be invested in a bunch of random soldiers and thugs with paper-thin motivations when you don't know who matters and who's about to get unceremoniously killed. Now that there's a recognizable core cast and they're developing their dynamics, though, it's starting to fire on all cylinders. Far and away my favorite character- and I think also the mangaka's favorite?- is Shiraishi. This stupid fucker gets *all* the best punchlines. I've been assembling a collection of delightful out-of-context Shiraishi panels and they just don't stop coming. He's useless! He's a mermaid! He broke out of prison! Animals don't bite him anymore! He got a girlfriend! And to top it all off, all of a sudden he's getting this kind of emotionally powerful character arc about trust and betrayal?? And there's this open question about his hidden ruthless side and what dark lengths it'll drive him to??? I was not expecting a guy introduced as the Excrement King to be this compelling. Also a big fan of Tsurumi's crew. This freak is just a magnet for other freaks, and encourages their freakishness in delightful ways. There is something so, so wrong with him, and it infects everyone around him until they're unrecognizable. Oh, a kitty! A kitty! There have been, uh... some low points! Some low points for sure. The Buffalo Bill murder hotelier character is, uh, *not* great. That bit is really extremely not great at all. It gave us a fun Scooby-Doo chase sequence, and Asirpa's hanpen gag, but uhhhhh. Hoo boy. And I'm not sure what to make of that segment with the gay yakuza guys who get eaten by bears. And that whole interlude about Hijikata's crew running a proxy war between some random gangsters in a fishing village kinda put me to sleep. I guess I've put up with worse in service of lesser stories, though. I also, like... I dunno, it's well-executed, but I just don't get much out of the cooking/survivalism stuff. I'm not gonna be stranded in the Hokkaido wilderness during the winter- I *guess* I'm learning stuff, but it's constantly just making me go "ugh! augh! oh, gross! i'm so glad i'm not in this situation!" I'm a picky eater who can barely tolerate half the stuff we regularly eat in the west, and every time they make a meal it's just a nightmare to me. The faces Sugimoto makes every time Asirpa goes "no, yeah, we eat it like this" were highly relatable. (They do make pretty cool use of it sometimes, though, like repurposing hunting tricks for the fight scenes, or that fake village arc that's like a pop quiz on whether you were paying attention to the Ainu cultural details.) There's so many good gags in this comic that it's kind of impossible to pick a favorite, but I think the one that got the biggest laugh from me was that bit where Tsurumi's introducing the inventor guy to Youhei in his hospital room, and he's like "I'd like you to meet someone" and it cuts to just. A real fuckin' character design-ass character design, at who Youhei screeches "WHO IS THAT?!?" and you expect that Tsurumi is about to introduce the latest freak in his Freak Squad- and he just goes "What?! I don't know! That's scary! Who is that? Get out of here, you!" Dude is not a character at all. He just walked into the room for absolutely no reason. I hope this guy keeps showing up as a recurring background character, in situations he has zero reason to be present in, for the whole rest of the story. I hope they do this and there's never any reveal that he was spying on them all along, or that he had a secret agenda, or anything. I hope he just keeps showing up, never gets a single line of dialogue, and we learn nothing about him whatsoever. This is my dream. Anyway I guess I'll go watch the book club vod now and get your takes on it- I should be able to make the next one.
Jack Patterson
Just finished reading 1-100. I can't wait to talk about it this Saturday, but before that, I wanted to ask what everyone's thoughts on Shiraishi are. Because I'm gonna be honest, I'm not the biggest Shiraishi fan at this moment in the series. Now don't get me wrong, I really like Shiraishi. I think he's hilarious and has a cool and unique skill set that adds a lot to the group. I think that he's PERFECT for the first 20 chapters or so. Him being introduced as an antagonist who then bonds with them after he and Sugimoto almost freeze to death is awesome, and him coming back to help Asirpa rescue Sugimoto after he gets captured is perfect! The problems start to arise when more party members get added and we lose that three-man dynamic we had at the beginning. Shiraishi ends up being used as the comic relief most times, overused in my opinion. What happens is Shiraishi will do something like get stuck in a trap and the rest of the party will take turns telling him how useless he is. The beginning of this manga was so smart about trading the straight-man dynamic around. Sometimes it's Asirpa and sometimes it's Sugimoto, but it flips between those two depending on the situation. With Shiraishi always being the comic relief, the party is a gang of straight men and Shiraishi is their gay best friend who they keep picking on. It's a little mean-spirited. But Shiraishi has his own problems. As the series goes on, Shiraishi ends up taking the lead on in more situations, like how he chooses to go to the murder hotel. And Shiraishi's personality is very dominant and very take-chargy. He has the Scrappy-Doo problem where he pulls attention away from Sugimoto and Asirpa, so the longer the series goes on I resent Shiraishi more for taking away the fun interactions we had at the beginning. And once he turns traitor, you really don't have any idea as to what his intentions are. This is definitely an intriguing part of the story, but you're just waiting for the shoe to drop for so long. But the thing that annoys me the most is Shiraishi not trusting Sugimoto and turning himself in to the police! BIG SPOILERS: once we find out that Apirpa is Noppera-Bou's daughter and the parties combine to try and talk with him, Shiraishi suddenly becomes the most important character on the team. Sugimoto and especially Asirpa take a big backfoot for like 30 chapters (Which sucks because we should focus on what her thoughts about seeing her father will be), But Shiraishi is main character for a minute, but when Sugimoto finds out he gave tattoo copy to Old-man samurai, he flips out and turns himself in, making the rest of the parties goals impossible. I kinda hate this part of the story because Shiraishi should trust Sugimoto at this point. Sugi owes him for saving his life, and also SHIRAISHI knows that he gave a fake copy to Samurai guy, so HE KNOWS he has nothing to fear. When he's in the river, why does Shiraishi not grab on to Kiroranke's hand??? Could he not grab on to it and say, "Please protect me from Sugi, I got to explain myself." or could he not have just grabbed his hand and then pushed him in the water?? It's so dumb. And because Shiraishi turns himself in and forces his friends to rescue him, Sugimoto almost dies and the Con artist gets shot in the face. I still like Shiraishi, I think he's funny and I still think he adds enough to justify being there, but I thought these complaints were valid and may spark a conversation.
Psycho
Chapter 67, wowie
Psycho
Just got to chapter 41. You weren’t kidding huh
PurpleIsDebeste
Well yeah, you need to know where they all lie on the Official Dick Size Chart, which is another thing this manga has
PurpleIsDebeste
Lmao Gen 3 Pokémon manga callout! It deserves it tho. That was awful.
JelloApocalypse
Just us!
Defahn
Sadly won't be able to make it to this meeting, but I will check it out! I know this one was one of the ones I was interested in!
Azelhia
Shoutout to Everyday Heroes, they did very similar things with their Dungeon Meshi translation and it added quite a bit to my experience.
MonsterGF
Oh it's mentioned in the post but I will warn new readers that the official publication/books do frequently have changes from the original scans, including adding 10+ new pages per book and changing dialogue and character expressions and such. There's nothing that would significantly change the story that I can remember but it does change the way some scenes are read + adds new ones. Anyway Fun reading idea is to keep a count of how often a new character is introduced butt ass naked. Once you hit the halfway point you start meeting every character dick first it's insane.
MonsterGF
Hooray!! Golden Kamuy is one of the best Manga I've ever read, I'm psyched that its finally here 🙌
Psycho
Any guests or just you and aloha?
Psycho
WHOOOO EXCUSE TO READ THIS
Jack Patterson
I’m so excited! I started reading this a while ago, so I’ve got a head start. See y’all in March!!
John Sextro
oh boy, friend convinced me to read 2 completed series a month on a manga challenge, and now I've got more reading lol
Ignis Astrorum
I've been meaning to read golden kamuy for years. Now I have a great reason to.
Drednot
Woo! I can't wait!!
