There’s no question the past few episodes of Bartender had lost a lot of their luster for me. I was starting to drift away from it to be honest, but boy – what a difference a week makes. This was the series totally back in form, doing what it does well. If this wasn’t the finest episode so far it was certainly close. It even kept the Suntory product placement tastefully modest – even if did shoehorn a gratuitous bottle of Jim Beam (which is owned by Suntory) in prominently. It was fitting at least that it was in a dive bar in Kabukicho. I love bourbon but all Beam – even their premium stuff – just tastes like peanut shells to me.
This week’s events are set off by Miwa taking Sasakura-san to a bar she’s heard good things about, even though it’s in a sketchy part of town (in Japan, that’s relative). It’s upstairs, but the joint on the first floor – “North Wind” – had a face familiar to Ryuu. Kitakata-san is his old sempai, though it’s clear their career paths have taken quite different directions since then. This is no Edenhall, and Sasakura orders them as basic a cocktail as it gets – a Bloody Mary. Except Kitakata makes them a Bloody Caesar, which uses Clamato and Worcestershire sauce among other ingredients. Oh, and 176 proof Balkan vodka. For once Bartender features a non-Suntory ingredient, but I guess Beam-Suntory doesn’t own any Everclear-caliber vodka labels.
This scene is interesting in many different ways (starting with the fact that neither Miwa or Ryuu corrected Kitakata when he called her his girlfriend). First of all Kitakata made the drink that strong to help a friend, a hard-luck hostess who gets guys drunk and fleeces them out of their money. Sasakura-san gets rather high-handed and starts lecturing the older man, who I frankly expected to get angrier than he did. “There are all sorts of hospitals”, Kitakata tells his kouhai, and it really comes down a philosophical disagreement about what a bar is.
When the tables are turned and Kitakata brings the hostess to Edenhall, she says she only ever drinks shochu or beer. So Ryuu makes her a caipirinha, the national cocktail of Brazil. It’s built around cachaça, rum’s cousin, made in a similar fashion to shochu. But he makes their drinks quite differently based on the experience level of their palates. Talk turns to philosophy again, specifically the philosophy of bartending of their old mentor, Kase-san. He was fond of saying that bartending wasn’t a career, but a lifestyle choice. And if anyone seems to embody that, it’s Sasakura Ryuu.
As it turns out, Kase-san had a stroke seven years earlier and had to close his bar, all of which is news to Sasakura. The pair zip off to Kawasaki (about 45 minutes from central Tokyo), where Kase-san remains in the hospital. Kitakata says the old man is an object lesson in what happens when you make bartending your lifestyle, and urges Ryuu to choose another while he’s still young enough. But his heart isn’t in it – he still lives that life himself, in a bar he named after Kase-san’s place.
Back at the hotel, Kyouko is starting at the lounge bar – but the one behind the felt rope still hasn’t opened. Miwa is feeling guilty about continuing to hound Sasakura to leave Edenhall and take it over, and frankly she should – it’s obnoxious. Her grandfather has gone to far as to try and buy off Edenhall’s owner behind Ryuu’s back. There is more to this story – in fact Kitakata tells Miwa that Ryuu is haunted by trauma of a customer (in Paris, presumably) having died as a result of his actions. I suspect he really didn’t do anything wrong and blames himself anyway, but his connection to Edenhall is obviously closely tied this incident and we certainly haven’t heard the last of it.
It would be hard to overstate how much better this worked than the last couple of arcs. The tone felt so much more in synch with the material, and the focus being back on Sasakura-san was long overdue. He’s not the only bartender in the story but he’s still the one at the heart of it, and his weird perspective is what really defines the series. The less conventional the stories in Bartender, the better off it is, and I’ll be very happy if it stays in this groove until the end of the series.
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