Don't miss the next Book Club meeting in one week on Saturday, March 15th at 2pm EST. We are covering up through Chapter 200.
Also, for those reading official releases, I noticed a few strange name localization choices in the Viz print regarding two characters. i just want to clarify so we all use the same names when we're talking about them at the next meeting, kind of like how we did with the Pokemon Manga re: Blue/Green's name localization swap.
The man on the left who first appears in Volume 11 has a name with a few different translations, but his name is Kirawus.
In Japanese, everything is made up of little blocks of sounds that get romanized into two-letter pairs. For instance: "Cupcake" is a loan word they use from English, but they pronounce it "Kappukēki" (cup-pu-kay-kee) so it fits the format of the language.
The initial translators at Viz working on Golden Kamuy were pretty diligent about translating Ainu proper nouns into English directly instead of romanizing the Japanese spelling. Ainu is its own language, after all. For some reason they don't do this with Kirawus and instead translate his name as Kiraushi, among other things. We're going to call him Kirawus.
The man on the right is Asirpa's father. The Viz chooses to use the romanized Japanese version of his name, Uiruku, which looks pretty clunky. His actual name and the way we will be referring to him is Wilk. We learn later in the story that Wilk is partially of Polish descent, hence he and Asirpa having their distinctive blue eyes. "Wilk" means "wolf" in Polish. Asirpa has a history of "wolves" looking after her, i.e. Retar in the early chapters. It's thematic. You get it. The Viz translators didn't didn't catch this early, which is fair. They're being paid to translate Japanese to English, knowing Polish isn't part of the skill set.
Anyways his name is Wilk.
See you Saturday!