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Synopsis

In post–Russo-Japanese War Hokkaido, Saichi Sugimoto, an ex-soldier famed for surviving deadly encounters, works as a gold prospector to honor a promise to a fallen comrade: provide for his family, particularly a widow who needs treatment overseas for failing eyesight. A drunken man recounts a story of a murderer who slaughtered Ainu people and hid a stolen fortune before being captured; the killer encoded the map to the stash by tattooing it onto the bodies of his cellmates. When Sugimoto later finds that same drunken man dead with matching tattoos, he faces a grizzly bear and is rescued by Asirpa, a young Ainu hunter whose father was among the victims. Bound by intersecting motives—Sugimoto’s vow to aid his friend’s family and Asirpa’s desire to reclaim what belonged to her people—the two form an uneasy partnership, combining hunting skill and battlefield-honed survival to pursue the concealed gold while confronting the legacy of violence that surrounds it.