Shu Okimoto is a Japanese manga artist best known as the illustrator of the long-running and internationally acclaimed wine-themed manga series The Drops of God. Born in Yamaguchi Prefecture, Japan, in 1965, Okimoto has built a career centered on creating detailed sequential art for a variety of manga publications. They are the artist, not the writer, for their most famous works; the narrative and story are credited to Tadashi Agi, the collective pen name for the sibling writing team of Yuko and Shin Kibayashi.

Okimoto’s most significant and defining work is The Drops of God, which began serialization in Kodansha’s Weekly Morning magazine in November 2004 and concluded in June 2014, spanning 44 collected volumes. The series follows Shizuku Kanzaki, a young man who must compete against a rival to identify thirteen legendary wines described in his late father’s will. While the Kibayashi siblings crafted the story and extensive wine knowledge, Okimoto’s role as the illustrator was to bring their detailed and poetic descriptions of wine to visual life. This required rendering not only characters and settings but also the abstract sensations and synesthetic imagery—fields of flowers, classical paintings, and landscapes—that the story uses to evoke the taste and aroma of specific vintages. Following the success of the original, Okimoto continued as the illustrator for its sequels: Drops of God: Mariage, serialized from 2015 to 2020 and collected into 26 volumes, and Drops of God deuxième, which ran from September 2023 to April 2024 and was collected into two volumes.

Beyond The Drops of God franchise, Okimoto’s artistic credits include the manga Psycho Doctor Kai Kyousuke, published in 2004, as well as Le Vin, Wine Burglar, released in two volumes from 2014 to 2015, and Yoshiwara Platonic, which ran from 2021 to 2023. Okimoto’s artistic identity is closely tied to their long collaboration with the Tadashi Agi writing team. In a 2007 interview, the writers noted that Okimoto initially had little knowledge of wine at the start of The Drops of God project but developed a deep understanding over time, becoming nearly a professional level of knowledgeable through the research required for the detailed illustrations. This reflects the broader industry significance of the series, which is credited with introducing wine culture to a wide audience in Asia and even influencing real-world wine sales. An anime television series adaptation of The Drops of God, featuring Okimoto’s character designs, premiered in April 2026. Through their sustained work on one of the most globally successful manga of the twenty-first century, Shu Okimoto stands as the essential visual interpreter of a story that turned wine appreciation into a dramatic and popular art form.