The story opens in 1942 as the battle for Guadalcanal rages in the South Pacific during World War II. When two Japanese soldiers, Adachigahara Kitaro and Seki Ichimatsu, run across a dying American soldier who is repeating the word “Zephyrus” over and over and clutching a photograph of a strikingly beautiful woman. From that moment on, the two are ensnared by the beauty with whom all men fall in love with at first sight. Twenty years after the end of the war, the two still can’t get the lovely Zephyrus out of their minds, and when they discover a woman with an uncanny resemblance and the same name is in Japan they send Seki’s son, Gohonmatsu – a Neanderthal-like perpetually-drunken sailor whose only goal is to drink all the liquor in the world – to find out more about her.