It slams you between throats being opened and a girl gagging on miso in the same five minutes, and somehow both land. Sugimoto is the rare action lead who earns the word broken: 203 Hill lives behind his eyes, he swings a bayonet like a man who has already accepted he is going to hell, and every step is a debt owed to Toraji and Ume. Asirpa isn't a mascot, she's the one who knows how to butcher the deer, prep citatap, and read the woods, and the show treats Ainu language, food and cosmology with a specificity most historical anime won't bother with. Then it hands you Tsurumi grinning under the plate in his skull, Hijikata Toshizo swinging steel in the twentieth century, and Shiraishi popping out of frozen rivers like a mole. Yes, the CGI bears are rough. You'll still be muttering hinna hinna over your own dinner.</response>

Sugimoto survived the Russo-Japanese War, but peacetime has left him with next to nothing. Scraping by in Hokkaido's wilderness, he discovers a coded map pointing to a fortune in Ainu gold, and suddenly his future has direction. The problem: he's not the only one hunting it. Criminals and rogue Japanese soldiers converge on the same prize, each willing to shed blood to claim it first. Sugimoto can't survive this alone. He partners with Asirpa, a young Ainu girl whose father was among the Ainu murdered for the gold. Together they push deeper into the harsh north, where the land itself is as dangerous as any rival. What follows mixes action, adventure and comedy.