I must confess, I enjoyed that quite a bit. If you’d pressed me, I’d have said that between the two reboots of old chestnuts this season, Bartender was the more likely to hold my interest. If for no other reason, it’s even older than Spice and Wolf and I remember less about it. There’s also the fact that my interest in booze has markedly leveled up in the intervening 18 years (albeit whisk(e)y, Belgian beer, and wine more than mixology). Booze and bars are interesting subjects, and in theory there’s no reason an anime about them shouldn’t be interesting,
me)That’s certainly proven to be the case so far. Spice and Wolf still bores me silly, but I rather like this Bartender revival. While the underlying subplot of the hotel pair trying to recruit Sasakura is seemingly not going away for a while (and is the least enjoyable part of the story for , the format this week seems like the more typical for the series. That is to say telling the stories of people who walk into Sasakura’s bar and thus his life (even if one of them here is intricately connected to the Hotel Cardinal thing).
The first story is that of an old man who walks into the bar – as he does on the 22nd of every month – Sasakura is helping out at. This gent is pretty clearly rich and old-school, and Sasakura’s sempai doesn’t get the chance to warn him that the codger has a habit of ordering and rejecting an endless chain of cocktails as a sort of tribute to the former owner, an old friend passed on. Sasakura runs through several choices, only to have them all figuratively (and almost literally, ROFL) spat in his face.
When the old fellow goes out to take a call, Sempai explains the guy’s backstory – and Sasakura-kun flies with this and finally finds the perfect cocktail, an Old Pal (at least it’s a whiskey cocktail – a Boulevardier with rye instead of bourbon and dry vermouth instead of sweet). The key – he serves it at a temp the man would have gotten it at from his “old pal” in the days when refrigeration and aircon weren’t so omnipresent. As it turns out this is Kurushima Taizou (played by Mugihito, still going strong at 79), owner of the Hotel Cardinal and grandfather of Miwa (one of the two who won’t take no for an answer).
The next story takes place on a rainy night at Eden Hall. A drenched woman in a black business suit walks in and asks for “one drink, to get out of the rain”. She too sports quite an attitude, and first calls bartenders assholes and then hypocrites (Sasakura says he prefers the former). She’s pretty clearly projecting, and he’s already deduced from her Dulles bag (named for former Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, as is the airport in D.C.) that she’s a lawyer. She hates what her job sometimes forces her to be, but he shows her another way to think about it. Like a bartender, she’s someone people turn to when they’re in a dark place.
The cocktail Sasakura prepares for the lawyer has a double meaning, just as the Old Pal (and I suspect all of his drinks) do. It’s a Bull Shot, kind of a Bloody Mary with beef broth or bouillon subbed in for tomato juice (a Bloody Bull is basically a hybrid of the two). It’s also (though she doesn’t know it yet) the title of a novel (part of a series by Gabrielle Kraft, all with cocktail titles) about an L.A. lawyer with a foul mouth and a heart of gold. The Bull Shot warms the lawyer’s cold heart in more ways than one.
The symbolism of all this isn’t exactly subtle, but there’s a reason bars and bartenders are such a timeless and integral part of fiction. These stories are rather elegantly spun, with an old-fashioned earnestness which, if I may say so, feels very much like the throwback this series is. The product placement is off the charts but I can sort of laugh at that. I’m less than thrilled with Miwa and Yukari (her sidekick) constantly badgering Sasakura to leave his job and come work for them. That sort of recruitment is actually sleazy business practice, and I don’t especially like seeing it made light of. The guy wants to honor his commitment, so piss off and let him do it. Apart from that, though, Bartender: Kami no Glass is working for me to a greater extent than I expected.
The post Second Impressions – Bartender: Kami no Glass appeared first on Lost in Anime.
