Golden Kamuy – 49 (S4 Fin) – Two Sides of the Coin

Spring has sprung in Hokkaido, and Asirpa as always proves a valuable font of Ainu knowledge when it comes to the usefulness of the various woods in the forest. Back in Sapporo, Usami is still hard at work on a different kind of wood, continuing to jack it as he rants about Ogata having killed his own brother for his father’s love.

When he didn’t get it, he killed his father so he’d get Tsurumi’s love. Usami, being both infatuated with and extremely possessive of the lieutenant, got into it with Ogata while he was still in the hospital, but Ogata got the final word: hitting Usami in the face with his bedpan and calling him “the cheapest” of Tsurumi’s pawns.

Ogata’s practice shooting lefty is paying off; he’s able to kill fowl for Hijikata’s crew. But he won’t call himself a sniper until he’s shot a human. We don’t get any Sapporo standoff this week, but you can bet Ogata and Usami will be facing off for all the marbles at some point, and Usami better bring more than cum to a gunfight!

Already pre-convinced that Sugimoto will leave her if they find the gold, and wondering if they should really find it at all or simply remain together forever, she finally tries to ask him directly, only for him to be distracted by strange marks on the trees. When one is felled, others fall like dominoes around them, trapping them under branches.

Back in town, Tsukishima and Koito catch a glimpse of Sofia, someone they identify only as someone to look out for. Indeed, Sofia is looking for revenge against Koito, but is biding her time until Asirpa is found.

Under the fallen tree, both Sugimoto and Asirpa are wounded but otherwise fine (Asirpa probably has a concussion). She asks him again what he’ll do with the gold, and he tells her about Umeko, to whom he was betrothed but couldn’t marry when his family died of TB. Ume-chan married their mutual childhood friend Toraji instead, but Toraji died in battle.

Sugimoto tells Asirpa he promised Toraji he’d return home to give Umeko the money. Asirpa is relieved his reason is “the Sugimoto she knows”. He also says he’ll remain her partner until she’s “satisfied with how things have turned out”. She notes it’s not the reply she wanted, but that means it’s ultimately her choice when, or even if he leaves.

Shiraishi manages to find them just as they’re in agreement he should know that Asirpa knows how to crack the code; his staying with her at Karafuto while Sugimoto was gone proves he’s trustworthy enough. We know Shiraishi is a convicted criminal and a greedy motherfucker, but I like to think his time with Asirpa and Sugimoto has at convinced him that betraying them is not in his best interest.

Now free of the fallen trees, Asirpa and Sugimoto survey the deforested field, and Asirpa says the Ainu chop trees and kill animals too, because they need to, but they take care not to take too much, and to leave a little behind. Sugimoto hopes that future generations will remember the kamuy who protect the Ainu.

Finding the gold is sure to determine the odds of that happening, and once Botaro is welcomed into the fold, he provides the vital next piece of the puzzle: a coin with an Ainu symbol of unity he found at the bottom of a lake. This coin convinces Asirpa that her father wasn’t responsible for killing the Ainu, but as he told Sofia, he wanted to unite all of the oppressed ethnic minorities far east Asia.

Asirpa is now certain what she has to do for the Ainu. She doesn’t share that with us, but with the post-credits announcement that the fifth and final season of Golden Kamuy is greenlit, we will find out for sure in due time. The bombshells left to be dropped and battles left to be fought are sure to be mixed with more Ainu lore, gross-out comedy, and, of course, generously marbled beefcake.

Golden Kamuy – 48 – Jacking the Ripper

Not five minutes pass after forging an alliance, Botaro the Pirate happens upon Sugimoto’s backpack and the evidence they’ve been looking for him. He distracts Sugimoto on the deck so his partner can pull a gun on him from behind, but Asirpa jams the revolver with a perfectly shot arrow. When the ship captain steers into some branches, Sugimoto and Botaro are tossed overboard.

Botaro is a high endurance diver who is as at home underwater as Michael Phelps, while Sugimoto…is not, so I knew this was going to be a tough fight. Hilariously, Shiraishi dives under to be an oxygen-giving guardian angel, only to be scorned by Sugimoto when he’s a little overzealous about giving mouth-to-mouth. Sugimoto is bailed out by a school of sturgeons, of all things, and when Botaro’s long hair is caught in the paddle wheel, Sugimoto saves him, and the truce continues.

Since the ship can’t dock due to wheel damage, the group takes a smaller boat, and on the way Asirpa not only sharpens a spear but kills herself a giant sturgeon. Thus we get the first “Hinna, hinna” culinary scene in a good long while, with Botaro the new variable in the equation. Every time he inquires as to the precise relationship of Sugimoto and Asirpa, they are both evasive, and Asirpa’s ears turn red. Meanwhile, we see Sofia is in Otaru. What could she be planning?

We then dash over to Sapporo, where Usami and Kikuta are investigating the serial killings. Usami does so with his rather unique special power: he’s a sperm detective, fapping in order to get into the killer’s state of mind.

His dick turns out to be correct that the killer will return that very night, and he and the killer end up in a fapping duel, Matrixing away from one anothers’ loads while Kikuta, the audience surrogate, continually asks what the hell is going on.

Kikuta manages to hop on the killer’s getaway horse and puts his pistol to his head, but the killer once again fires away, and a disgusted Kikuta is thrown from the horse…but not before getting a good look at his face.

The next day we see that Hijikata’s group is spread throughout the public areas of Sapporo disguised as merchants and beggars. Among them is Private Ariko, with whom Kikuta has a chat about allegiances. Ariko laments that neither Tsurumi nor Nagakura trust him, which I guess makes him an unfit double agent.

The newspaper publisher Ishikawa determines from the occupation of the victims and the timing of the murders that the killer is a Jack the Ripper wannabe, or possible fanboy. Jack is only credited with five murders before disappearing and the final murder came 40 days after the previous one.

Of course, this Jack copycat isn’t the only thing they have to contend with: there’s also Ueji Keiji, the creepy guy with the face tattoos capturing children. Sugimoto, Asirpa, and Shiraishi are arriving at Sapporo when it is quite the happening tinderbox. I’m sure we’ll be in for some serious (or possibly hilariously gross) fireworks in the season 4 finale.

O Maidens in Your Savage Season – 01 (First Impressions) – Crazy Train

Onodera Kazusa is an almost aggressively normal high school girl. She doesn’t really stand out anywhere, and is part of a literature club whose members include both a budding author, a glasses-wearing prudish type, and a serene senpai who is perfectly comfortable reciting very steamy sex scenes in the book they’re all reading.

Kazusa has a best friend in fellow lit club member Sudou Momoko, and she has a childhood friend in the train-loving Norimoto Izumi. She and Momoko are each other’s main source of verbal and emotional support in these trying adolescent times. She and Izumi were once as close as brother and sister, but have drawn further apart due to his increasing popularity—particularly with other girls.

Kazusa is voiced by relative newcomer Kono Hiyori, who does a splendid job modulating her voice for Kazusa’s vulnerable and frustrated inner monologues. It also helps that she closely resembles Shizuku from Whisper of the Heart, a rare Ghibli film grounded in contemporary life and one of my favorite anime works.

It helps because Shizuku never strayed past the “pure and innocent” phase of her romance with Seiji; the film ended (spoilers!) with her suddenly proposing marriage after they bike up the highest points in West Tokyo and watch the sun rise on the city. It’s beautiful, and it marks a major milestone in their trudge toward adulthood…but it’s incomplete.

O Maidens in Your Savage Season (written by the great Okada Mari) is not incomplete. It reveals all of the insecurities and worries and downright dilemmas far beyond simply developing feelings for someone and being frustrated by one’s comparative lack of accomplishment. By the end, we have a nearly complete picture of who Kazusa is (just a kid), what she is gradually becoming mentally and physically (an adult) and how she feels about that (not so great so far!)

When Kazusa’s mom—whom she says many describe as “child-like” even though she’s most definitely not a virgin due to Kazusa’s existence—asks her to take some food to Izumi’s next door, the comfort of their familiarity is evident, but so is a growing awkwardness punctuated when Izumi asks if he should talk to her around other people.

Kazusa’s wishy-washy reply (depends on who and where) doesn’t help matters. Talking about their issues clearly would be optimal, but again…these are kids. She’s aware enough to know she didn’t handle her interaction with Izumi in a satisfying way, leaving so much up in the air and unclear, but she doesn’t yet possess the tools to do so, hence her frustration and very Shizuku-like private mope on Izumi’s front stoop.

Back in lit club, Sugawara Niina, with her confident stride, ever-calm tone, and shorter skirt, all indicate she’s more mature than the other four members. To put it far more harshly, some boys consider her a diamond atop a pile of dung. But when a story with the premise of “doing something before you die” comes up, she blurts out “have sex,” because as mature as she looks and sounds, she’s still a virgin—still in the bubble with the rest of them. Despite all the classy smut they’ve read, it’s still a totally unknown world.

But her stated desire to have sex before death brings that subject too the forefront, like poking at the bubble until it bursts. Now sex is the first thing on the minds of the four other girls, from Rika (glasses) telling some gals to shut up about sex and being verbally abused by some classmates and then complimented by another; to Kazusa overhearing two of the girls who like Izumi talk very openly about wanting to take his virginity.

The more Kazusa hears about Izumi and sex, the more those two seem like something possible and thus terrifying—a far cry from the little boy with which she used to run around, fall over, and wade in the kiddy pool. The boy who’s crazy about trains. With the bubble of obliviousness popped by Niina, Kazusa finds herself on the deep end, her surroundings growing darker and more morose. But she has to kick and swim and breathe, or she’ll drown.

Things already feel like they’re starting to spiral out of all control for Kazusa, who asserts that she doesn’t like this and isn’t ready for it at all, but she has no idea what’s coming down the track to knock her off the rails of innocence for good, where she was once only teetering and threatening to fall. In an absolutely stunning sequence that plays like, well, a train wreck, Kazusa hears music inside Izumi’s, and so enters through the unlocked front door.

She makes her way up the stairs to Izumi’s room, where the door is cracked but not closed, and lets herself in without knocking. Izumi is inside, his pants down and his feet on the desk, masturbating to porn on the internet. The director lets the two just sit there in the moment of horror, completely silent but for the (likely fake) orgasmic screams of the woman on the laptop. Izumi gives a half-hearted “Hey,” then asks if she’ll keep this a secret. Pretty smooth, considering one of every guy’s worst nightmares just came true.

Kazusa…snaps. She bolts out of the house screaming and just…keeps running and screaming (the action animation is superb) through a market district. Naturally, every food sign is a double entendre, lending credence to her lament that there’s just too much god damn sex in the world.

Worse, her pure, innocent Izumi has changed forever. The boy is dead; a man has taken his place. The last time he saw her penis it was tiny and harmless. Now, not so much. As she stops on a bridge over a train track to catch her breath, she tearfully declares out loud that “that won’t fit in there!” Then, in a moment perhaps almost too on the nose but also pretty damn effective, a train passes beneath her, lining right up between her legs, and enters a very tight tunnel. “It fit,” she says, relieved, but she soon collapses back into a heap of adolescent frustration.

O Maidens is a refreshingly bold, sincere, brutally frank depiction of sexual awakening and its maaaany pitfalls. So far the experience is largely horrifying, terrifying, and overwhelming for Kazusa, and it’s sure to continue to be so. But the show balances the drama and comedy, never letting you forget these are human beings with human being minds and parts, all of which are in a state of open rebellion, but all of which are also very complicated.

The stakes for Kazusa and her friends are far higher than looking fit in a bikini for the summer. This is for all the marbles. All we as viewers can do is ball our fists and hope she hangs on for dear life to this train ride that can’t be stopped, until the ride becomes at least little smoother, if not joyful. I’ll be in the cafe car, quietly cheering on these maidens in their savage season.

Shimoneta – 06

With the porn of Yotsuga Forest successfully distributed, Ayame decides the next issue SOX should tackle is the development and distribution of sex aids, from lubes to mechanical vibrators. These things have to be made/built from scratch because they’re no longer in store. Their task is akin to building the pyramids with only the original tech on hand.

It’s tiring work, most of all for Tanukichi, who has to endure a constant stream of dirty talk from Ayame and Otome, but is called “sick” and a “pervert” when he suggest they focus equally on male and female “products for health and beauty.” It’s a hypcrisy that persists in Ayame, who at the end of the day is more naive than Okuma, who had a father in the trade.

Tanukichi also falls victim to a misunderstanding when he pays a visit to Hyouka to pick up the wireless, remote control mini-vibrators she built for them. Not only is Hyouka naked under her robe (after accidentally falling into a water tank), but she wants Tanukichi to repay him by showing her how his “cucumber prepares for battle.”

They’re very close when Anna barges in, and Tanukichi has to come up with a lie to satisfy her in a hurry. He manages to succeed by offering one of the two vibrators to Anna, calling it a “Power Stone.”

Anna makes a blingy pendant of it, but when the remote malfuncitons, it’s stuck on, vibrating her bust, resulting in what can only be described as a hilariously ridiculous spectacle. It also turns Anna on, to the extent she dismisses Goriki, locks herself in the StuCo office with Tanukichi, and proceeds to hold him down.

Tanukichi, about to be raped by someone who has no idea what rape entails, finds his own member barely able to withstand the onslaught of Anna on top of him, but he manages to “preserve his chastity” until the vibrator breaks from overuse, ending the immediate crisis.

The longer-term crisis for Tanukichi, of course, is that Anna immediately demands a new “Power Stone” to replace the one that broke. Worse, whenever he so much as looks or speaks to another girl, Anna grows violently jealous. SOX has truly created a monster.

With the daughter of a high-ranking Morality official getting excited about SOX’s terrorist activities, it looks like he’ll soon have one more girl filling his ears with dirty talk and threatening to incur more of Anna’s wrath.

What had been Tanukichi’s Boring World Where the Concept of Dirty Jokes Doesn’t Exist has now become an annoying, stressful, often life-threatening world where dirty jokes—and acts—are rampant and unpredictable. But definitely not boring.

Shimoneta – 02

To borrow a couple of sophomoric double entendres from Blue Snow, Okuma is in a tight spot; between a rock and a hard place. He admires and idolizes the pure, perfect Anna (who shows no signs of being anything other than that, with no hidden dark side), but is being forced through blackmail and coersion by Ayame to undermine her.

I will say, both Ayame and Okuma are well-positioned in terms of hiding in plain sight, and Okuma’s story of how he was ostracized when his “terrorist” father was put away and met the “guardian angel” Anna in grade school (something she doesn’t remember) that inspired him to live a purer life, is a great cover story.

But Ayame is stripping the primacy of his goal away as she exposes him to more and more misbehavior, as Okuma can’t deny the thrill he gets from finding ultra-rare smutty mags in an abandoned cabin, like buried treasure. When the imagery therein is copied and distributed around school, Anna is so ignorant to its insidiousness she herself frames a picture of a girl performing fellatio in the StuCo office!

That gets to another bigger social issue about the whole anti-dirty-joke law and PM devices: real-world Japan’s brith rate can’t keep up with its aging population; if laws were put into place to block the people’s natural sexual development and keep them in the dark about reproduction (if such a thing were even possible), it would be a de facto form of population control. Maybe the Japan of Shimoneta wants the population to decrease.

In any case, Anna’s powerful, driven politician mother is introducing a new bill that would step up the oppression even further, legalizing the monitoring of every action and conversation in the country. With no stones unturned, Ayame’s terrorism could not continue, her crusade to educate the ignorant masses would end in defeat, and most importantly, the people would have no privacy whatsoever in the new surveillance state. Ayame makes sure to impress upon Okuma that while she has her own selfish reasons for doing what she does, she’s also working in best interests of a free society.

Thus, the fight must not only continue, but be stepped up. Ayame dresses Okuma up like a Blue Snow decoy to give students dirty word eye exams during school physicals while she steals the boys’ urine samples, hoping to start a scandal in the school when tests reveal high levels of masturbation. The operation also results in Anna yelling out the howler above.

Anna isn’t portrayed as an idol fool here, but actually comes quite close to exposing and capturing Okuma-in-drag more than once, and presses her pursuit of him with heretofore unseen (and somewhat frightening) superhuman strength and speed. Game Over for Okuma and Ayame is rarely less than a few seconds or inches (heh-heh) away, but with one last misdirection, Ayame manages to save Okuma and make off with the urine.

The fact that the entire final exchange is witnessed by a painter in a crow’s nest—likely the same painter who painted the pure “Sound of Music”-style painting Okuma lingered on—means the ranks of Ayame’s SOX are likely to swell in the near future, which bodes well for defeating Anna and stopping her mom’s overreaching legislation.