Review: Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service

Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, vols. 1 and 2
Story by Eiji Otsuka
Art by Hosui Yamazaki
Not rated
Dark Horse, $10.95

You can’t beat the concept of Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service: An otherwise unemployable group of Buddhist students set up a business to help the dead find eternal peace. There’s the ensemble of talented misfits, the puzzle of how they can get the dead to pay for the service, and the many logistical difficulties involved in transporting decaying corpses back to headquarters and then to their final resting places.

What’s missing from most of these stories is the human element. The task of helping the souls of the dead find peace crops up often in Japanese and world literature, and usually it involves the living as well—offering comfort, completing unfinished tasks, tying up loose ends. Kurosagi shies away from that emotional territory. The departed, even an executed murderer, are sympathetic creatures, and the students themselves are a fine and likeable group, but the people they deal with are just grotesque. It’s hard to say “These stories are unrealistic” when they start with a man who can talk to the dead, but there is an emotional truth to them that vanishes once the friends and relatives come into focus.

The first volume contains four short stories, each well told and neatly resolved but varying in their gross-out factor. The first and the third are simple gore-fests in which dead victims wreak horrific revenge on their tormentors. Fair enough, but that gets old in a hurry. I thought the other two stories were more satisfying. One is about an old woman who sacrifices herself to save her family, and it’s not only poignant but makes a larger point. The other, about an evil actuary, is quite clever and a fun read.

The second volume is a single long story about a mortuary that offers a new service: re-animating the dead so the relatives of their victims can wreak revenge. Yes, it’s grotesque, but it wraps in a good whodunit and some glimpses of human longing.

Yamazaki’s clean-lined style is sterile enough that even the drawings of slashed or decaying corpses didn’t gross me out. What got to me was the leering father leaning over his dead, naked daughter, or the naked woman suspended on a wall in an obvious S&M position. These scenes aren’t gratuitous—they are necessary to the story being told—but that necrophiliac vibe was just a bit too creepy for me. Less would have been more in some of the other sequences; a decaying hand with flies buzzing around it is plenty scary, while a full view of a bloody, animated corpse lurching across the room, guts plopping on the floor, is more cartoony and ultimately less effective.

Despite these flaws, there is a lot to like about Kurosagi. I really enjoyed watching the students try to get to the bottom of each case; the characters are well defined and work nicely together, although the kid with the puppet is a bit much. Yamazaki’s art style is clear and expressive, and Dark Horse does a great job with production: high-quality paper, attractive design, and copious endnotes by editor Carl Gustav Horn. The endnotes are mainly translations of the sound effects (such as yurai, the sound of a body floating in water). Horn also adds cultural and personal notes, which make this section much more entertaining than most endnotes.

Kurosagi is definitely not for younger or more sensitive readers. The corpses are plentiful and right in your face. If you can handle that, though, it’s a worthwhile read, wrapping mystery, horror, and ensemble humor into a very attractive package.

(This review is based on complimentary copies supplied by the publisher.)

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Comments

  1. Cool review, Brigid. :-)

    Now, a lack of emotional truth tends to kill a story for me, despite other skillful elements such as great art or interesting plotting (one of the reasons I find Asimov challenging…). But from your review, it sound like there was enough other stuff going on that you still found it worthwhile.

    I’m curious — where does emotional truth — characters acting in a believable and motivated fashion — fit into your appreciation of a work? Is it high up on the list or just one part of the overall package?

  2. Emotional truth is very important to me. Without it, nothing will fit together right—the plot won’t move smoothly, the characters won’t seem solid. It’s really the framework on which the whole book hangs.

    Which is why Kurosagi was such a mixed bag. I thought the students were very believable, even though their jobs are so outlandish. But some of the other characters were one-dimensional, as if the writer thought up the plot first and then did the bare minimum to animate the characters so they could act it out.

    It’s still a pretty entertaining book, it just falls flat in a few places. When it’s good, though, as in the wicked actuary story, it’s very good.

  3. Hm I really feel that Kurosagi has some human element. Some of the people whom the students deal have been through a lot in their lives and get brutally murdered because of injustice. In addition, in either Volume 7, 9, or 10, there is a very emotional episode about the girl (I forgot whether her name is Maki) and the guy with the puppet. I think that chapter contains very strong emotions and yet still being very outlandish and creepy. You should check it out.

    I think Kurosagi’s one of the most underrated series. I’m really happy that Eiji Otsuka created this manga to cater to our desires for something that is different from boring, mainstream mangas.

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  1. […] Brigid Alverson reviews the first two volumes of Eiji Otsuka and Hosui Yamazaki’s horror series, Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service. […]