The UnCorker

Wine on the Web: Kami no Shizuku (The Drops of the Gods)

March 27, 2009 | In DIRT | 1 Comment

Shizuku is approachable, a bit scruffy and rebellious, but with a pedigree inherited from his deep family roots in the wine business.  He is modeled after Bordeaux.  Issei inherits his personality from Burgundy – tight and complex, arrogant, and, well, ok let’s just say it – anal.   These are the dueling protagonists in the Japanese wine themed comic – Kami no Shizuku.  This is a wine nerd’s fantasy – a place where a cultured young lad can score babes with a bit of daredevil decanting:

The comic series is so insanely popular in Japan and Korea that the wines it mentions sell out immediately.  Obtaining a copy of this manga has become an obsession – but unfortunately nobody at the UnCorker reads Japanese.  So what to do? Spend hours with a Kanji dictionary just to experience a 2001 Chateau Mont Perat compared to the ’sweet and husky’ voice of Queen lead singer, Freddy Mercury?   Apparently there are no plans for an English translation – even though the French now have one.  The manga market in the US & UK is focused primarily on minors, who legally aren’t allowed to experience a ‘99 Richebourg in “full bloom” even if they could manage Shizuku’s high-wire aerial decanting technique – so it’s no wonder there are no plans in the works for an official published version in English.   Kami no Shizuku targets young-ish men (mostly) and women, many of who are in their thirties – with the express goal of educating them on the basics of being an insufferable old-world wine snob.   Only one option remains if you want to read this in English translation… enter the nerdy counter-culture of online comic book traders and find a “scanlation” (or unauthorized translated copy.)

Well, it’s worth mentioning at this point that we’re procrastinators in all things except drinking and aging wines (“sure it would be great in a couple of years, but why not drink it now?”)  The first move therefore is to call some friends with more pop-culture cred than ourselves and see if we can get our hands on this without resorting to trolling the file sharing networks… which frankly, sounds like a lot of work.  Within about five minutes, our friends at Del Ray Manga clue us into a couple of scan sites that have a taste of Kami no Shizuku in English.  One’s called mangafox.com and the other is called ncismanga.net.  Mangafox has the first 5 chapters of volume 1 in a very easy to access format – the pages render in large, crisp images directly in the browser with no annoying logging in or downloading involved.  Ncismanga has their download links disabled – indicating one must use IRC to find and download the files, a technology not used here since our TRS-80 went on the fritz.  Five segments of the popular Japanese TV show, with English subtitles, is available here at Iron Chevsky.

Ok. First lesson learned when it comes to reading manga translations – they make a lot more sense if you remember to read from right to left (although, this being Japanese pop culture… not as much as you’d think.)  In anime circles – of which we admittedly didn’t know existed until now – scanlations have a reputation for sloppy translations – particularly when it comes to the more subtle cultural references and idioms.   We’re sure that such awkward translations (if any) only add to the giddy delight and wierdness of reading Kami no Shizuku – for instance, when our hero feels “sick in the back-teeth” from all the blathering from his annoying parents, it contributes cultural terroir to the story.

It turns out that loads of people rightfully enjoy this as a pure manga experience – even without a strong interest in it’s wine aspects.  It has great art, a fun story line with dramatic tension, and even though it doesn’t have a lot of shonen (exaggerated martial arts style action), or fan service (POV style panty shots and other non-plot related sexual inferences), it’s surprisingly physical and in the spirit of the genre, especially given it’s fussy subject matter. The plot is centered on Shizuku and Issei tracking down twelve great bottles of wine that will unlock the keys to the kingdom – which in this case is their deceased father’s priceless wine collection.  The plot unfolds with compelling twists and turns, but never hesitates to slow down and linger on the great delights of the wine itself.  Long sequences of detailed sniffing, swirling, and ecstatic facial expressions accompany most of the wine sequences – which are based on real wines with real vintages.  Despite the dated, and franco-philiac!, nature of their particular breed of wine snobbery, the characters show great emotion and reverence for the godly liquids they imbibe – and refreshingly never resort to a Parker-style rating system.  It’s this sort of enthusiasm that does exactly what a lot of wine criticism fails to do – puts the fun back into talking about wine.   If wine is nothing else, it’s a rich mileau for storytelling, full of colorful characters and locations.  We can’t wait for these ’scanalators’ to get us more.