Character · Golden Kamuy
Saichi Sugimoto
They called him immortal at Port Arthur because the bayonets kept going in and he kept getting up.
In Otakana the clue reads: Russo-Japanese war veteran hunting gold
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Golden Kamuy
- Letters
- 8 · Hard
Sugimoto came home from the Russo-Japanese War with a reputation, a body covered in scar tissue and nothing else. He is panning a river for gold to pay for an old friend's widow to see a doctor in America when a drunk tells him about a hoard of Ainu gold, hidden by a man who tattooed the map onto the skin of twenty-four convicts and then sent them running. The drunk turns out to be telling the truth.
What follows is a manhunt in which every faction wants the same skins. Sugimoto is not the sharpest hunter in it, and he is nowhere near the best planner, but he has an unreasonable tolerance for injury and a habit of closing distance when a sane man would run. Asirpa handles the wilderness. He handles the part where someone has to be knocked down a slope.
The pairing works because of what it does to him. He eats whatever she puts in front of him, learns the words for it, and slowly stops treating survival as a debt he owes the dead. Studio Geno animated the series from 2018, and the anime kept the manga's habit of pausing a gunfight to explain how a squirrel is skinned.
Spelling SUGIMOTO
SUGIMOTO is the family name, so the given name Saichi is not what the row wants. Eight letters, four beats, su-gi-mo-to. The G is hard, as it is in every Japanese word, and the pattern ends on the same O it hit in position six. Nothing is dropped in romanisation here, which makes it one of the easier long answers once the first two tiles land.