Manga Monday: The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service Omnibus Edition Book One

Follow Dark Horse Comics:

Manga Monday: The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service Omnibus Edition Book One

08/17/2015 4:24pm

The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service…from the customer’s perspective. Left to right: Ao Sasaki, Kuro Karatsu, Yuji Yata, Kereellis (on Yata’s hand), Makoto Numata, and Keiko Makino.

Scooby-Doo meets Se7en. Genshiken meets The X-Files. These are some of the ways The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service has been described. Book One of the Kurosagi omnibus edition is hitting stores this month, and we hope it will introduce this great manga series to a new group of readers. Last week, we had an entire column just on Kurosagi’s distinctive cover designer, Bunpei Yorifuji. But now it’s time to start turning the pages, and talk about what you get inside, courtesy of writer Eiji Otsuka and artist Housui Yamazaki!

The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, pictured above, is the name of a small business formed by five students (and a hand puppet) at the fictitious Chiyoda University School of Buddhism in Tokyo. Kurosagi isn’t exactly a hot start-up, like forming Facebook at Harvard; either you enroll at this school because your family owns a Buddhist temple or funeral home and you actually need a religious studies degree—or, like our main cast, you enroll because you don’t have the grades to get into a better school.

Faced with low job prospects upon graduation, hacker, social engineer, and abnormal psychology expert Ao Sasaki organizes a group of her fellow misfits to form their own company. Their business model: resolve whatever issues dead people had about their former lives, so their spirits can move on. And by dead people, they mean corpses, because if you find a body in the woods, or an alley, or a car trunk, odds are it had some issues! To clear them up, the Kurosagi crew routinely finds themselves investigating murders, suicides, obsessions, and strange and bizarre happenings and secrets of all sorts.

The person who makes this whole business possible is the guy with the monk’s shaved head who’s reaching out his hand—Kuro Karatsu, who, with the help of Yaichi, a frighteningly scarred (and possibly ancestral) spirit companion, can touch a corpse and not only communicate with it, but animate the dead body long enough for it to finish whatever business it left behind! These are zombies in the classic 1950s EC horror tradition—not monsters mindlessly killing, but the rotting remains of people, staggering and clawing towards some kind of justice.

Kurosagi’s “clients” are located with the help of the guy with the shades and leather jacket: tough guy Makoto Numata (the crew is not afraid of a fight, although they leave the wrestling moves to Numata and Karatsu) who has talent as a dowser—except instead of gold or water, he can only find corpses! And because their clients are literally decomposing, the skills of the girl on the far right, Keiko Makino, come in handy, as she studied embalming in America (there’s less call for it in Japan, where people are usually cremated). Competing for top stakes in the weirdness category is the mop-top dude in the center, Yuji Yata, who channels a foul-mouthed alien intelligence, Kereellis, through his hand puppet.

As you might guess, there’s a lot of humor as well as horror in The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, from the black comedy of the grotesque situations the company finds themselves in, to their arguing over their precarious corpse-based lifestyle. It’s hard to get the dead to pay you, after all, and they often have to be content with the good karma, relying on more ordinary deliveries (like the Scooby-Doo gang, they own a van—but Kurosagi operates a moving service as their cover) to make ends meet while waiting for the next corpse to come along; in fact, it’s often these “ordinary” jobs that lead them to the body.

Kurosagi is an ongoing series, with the most recent individual volume out this last June, but if you’re brand new to the series or want to get others into it, this first omnibus collection is the place. Book One contains volumes 1-3 of the regular series; its 640 pages include nine different stories. Despite the weird and bizarre tales, Kurosagi is also an excellent manga to learn about the real, everyday Japan, as the characters need to earn a living in Japan’s stagnant economy, and writer Eiji Otsuka frequently reveals the darker aspects of Japanese life, both present and past. Yet the series is always grounded in its likeable cast, portrayed by artist Housui Yamazaki, who despite his skill in depicting the gruesome and horrific, has a style that’s somehow friendly, open, and human (Greg McElhatton compared him to Mike Allred). We hope you’ll discover The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service for yourself.

—Carl Horn

Manga Editor

The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service Vol. 1 is available as a free digital download Monday only! Download it here!

Dark Horse Comics

Manga Monday: The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service Omnibus Edition Book One

Tags

Recent Posts

Archive

Services

Sites

Company

Contact & News

Dark Horse Comics

Manga Monday: The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service Omnibus Edition Book One

Tags

Subscribe

Recent Posts

Archive

Services

Sites

Company

Contact & News