Character · Golden Kamuy
Asirpa
A twelve-year-old Ainu hunter who can gut a deer in a clearing and will absolutely lie to you about what is in the stew.
In Otakana the clue reads: Ainu girl who hunts and skins with a bow
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Golden Kamuy
- Letters
- 6 · Hard
Asirpa hunts in the Hokkaido interior with a short bow and arrows tipped with surku, the aconite poison her people prepare from monkshood root. She tracks, skins and butchers faster than the grown soldiers around her, and she treats a carcass as something owed respect rather than something conquered. When Saichi Sugimoto starts chasing a stolen fortune in Ainu gold, she attaches herself to him because the trail runs through the man who killed her father.
Most of what readers learn about Ainu life arrives through her cooking. She minces meat and bone into citatap while everyone at the fire chants the word, she serves brains raw because that is the good part, and she says hinna over food worth being grateful for. She is also the source of the series most famous gag, refusing to touch miso for chapters on end because she is convinced it is somebody else's business.
Satoru Noda began Golden Kamuy in Weekly Young Jump in 2014 and worked with an Ainu language specialist at Chiba University on the vocabulary and customs. The result is a treasure-hunt adventure that stops dead every few chapters to explain how a trap is set or a hide is tanned, and Asirpa is nearly always the one explaining.
Spelling ASIRPA
ASIRPA is six letters with no H in it, which is the whole difficulty. Older translations wrote Ashiripa, because Japanese has no bare S before I, and the Ainu original アシㇼパ uses a small ri that English has no letter for. The official spelling keeps the R hard against the P. In Ainu it reads as new year: asir, new, and pa, year.