Manga Monday: THE KUROSAGI CORPSE DELIVERY SERVICE VOL. 14

06/29/2015 12:20pm
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen—to be said in the voice of MF Doom from “Hey!,” a cut I feel should be on any Kurosagi movie soundtrack (if you think it’s taking a while for such a film to materialize, bear in mind it took half a century for The Avengers). Like a body at the touch of Kuro Karatsu, this manga has risen again, with vol. 14 of The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service lurching its way toward a bookstore near you. And as you’ll learn in this volume, there’s no point aiming for the head. Only one thing can lay it to rest—your purchasing it!
If you’re not familiar with the story, the basic premise is five students (plus a hand puppet that channels an alien intelligence) at a Buddhist college in Japan start a business where they find dead bodies, and, using their spiritual and scientific abilities, communicate with the corpses, offering to carry out their last wishes so their spirits can move on without regrets. If this business plan seems like a recipe for trouble, you’re right, and the Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service gets into plenty of it, because if you find a dead person who’s just lying around, odds are there’s some dark reasons as to how they got there…
If it also seems like it’d be tough to get the dead to pay you for your services, you’re right again—much of the time, action is their reward, and like Peter Parker, they’ve got to pay the bills somehow working in the everyday world. I’ve often said that despite its weird and supernatural elements, Kurosagi is one of the best manga you can read for getting a sense of the real Japan, through the simple plot device writer Eiji Otsuka uses of requiring his characters to live the way so many real Japanese do, making ends meet through odd jobs and part-time employment—and as you might guess, it’s often these very jobs that lead them to run across the next body!
The fact their boss, hacker Ao Sasaki, rarely joins them in the field—preferring to stay behind her laptop—is often a gag at the expense of Karatsu, Numata, and Yata/Kereellis, who despite all possessing paranormal abilities, find themselves doing the sweaty gruntwork (well, Kereellis doesn’t sweat, yet surely he must require frequent darning). But events in vol. 14 demonstrate how while it may admittedly be tough work to haul a body around, without Sasaki’s deft typing on a keyboard covering their tracks, they might be making some awkward explanations to the cops about how they came by the corpse! (Makino, the team’s embalmer/coroner, may be the true slacker among the gang. But then again, try getting Quincy, M.E. to cosplay as a magical girl. While railing against Numata’s tastes in music). 
As a series, Kurosagi does have story arcs and revelations that occur over time, but if you’re curious about the series, don’t feel too intimidated about jumping in right now with vol. 14, as it consists of three self-contained stories. And if you want to check out the beginning, too, we'll be talking soon again about this series when the first omnibus edition (containing volumes one through three) of The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service comes out in August, for a bargain price of $19.99. Discover this great series for yourself!
—Carl Horn
Manga Editor
Those meddling kids of The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service are (from right to left): Kuro Karatsu, Yuji Yata/Kereellis, Keiko Makino, Ao Sasaki, and Makoto Numata.


Good evening, ladies and gentlemen—to be said in the voice of MF Doom from “Hey!,” a cut I feel should be on any Kurosagi movie soundtrack (if you think it’s taking a while for such a film to materialize, bear in mind it took half a century for The Avengers). Like a body at the touch of Kuro Karatsu, this manga has risen again, with vol. 14 of The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service lurching its way toward a bookstore near you. And as you’ll learn in this volume, there’s no point aiming for the head. Only one thing can lay it to rest—your purchasing it!

If you’re not familiar with the story, the basic premise is five students (plus a hand puppet that channels an alien intelligence) at a Buddhist college in Japan start a business where they find dead bodies, and, using their spiritual and scientific abilities, communicate with the corpses, offering to carry out their last wishes so their spirits can move on without regrets. If this business plan seems like a recipe for trouble, you’re right, and the Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service gets into plenty of it, because if you find a dead person who’s just lying around, odds are there’s some dark reasons as to how they got there…

If it also seems like it’d be tough to get the dead to pay you for your services, you’re right again—much of the time, action is their reward, and like Peter Parker, they’ve got to pay the bills somehow working in the everyday world. I’ve often said that despite its weird and supernatural elements, Kurosagi is one of the best manga you can read for getting a sense of the real Japan, through the simple plot device writer Eiji Otsuka uses of requiring his characters to live the way so many real Japanese do, making ends meet through odd jobs and part-time employment—and as you might guess, it’s often these very jobs that lead them to run across the next body!

The fact their boss, hacker Ao Sasaki, rarely joins them in the field—preferring to stay behind her laptop—is often a gag at the expense of Karatsu, Numata, and Yata/Kereellis, who despite all possessing paranormal abilities, find themselves doing the sweaty gruntwork (well, Kereellis doesn’t sweat, yet surely he must require frequent darning). But events in vol. 14 demonstrate how while it may admittedly be tough work to haul a body around, without Sasaki’s deft typing on a keyboard covering their tracks, they might be making some awkward explanations to the cops about how they came by the corpse! (Makino, the team’s embalmer/coroner, may be the true slacker among the gang. But then again, try getting Quincy, M.E. to cosplay as a magical girl. While railing against Numata’s tastes in music). 

As a series, Kurosagi does have story arcs and revelations that occur over time, but if you’re curious about the series, don’t feel too intimidated about jumping in right now with vol. 14, as it consists of three self-contained stories. And if you want to check out the beginning, too, we'll be talking soon again about this series when the first omnibus edition (containing volumes one through three) of The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service comes out in August, for a bargain price of $19.99. Discover this great series for yourself!

—Carl Horn
Manga Editor

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manga service monday carl horn Kurosagi Corpse Delivery
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