Written by: Eiji Otsuka
Art by: Housui Yamazaki
Publisher: Dark Horse
Dark Horse managed to release yet another killer omnibus and I feel like this is one of their best manga releases to date, if not the best. This omnibus collects volumes 1-3 of the manga and is 640 pages long which is a hefty collection for sure.
Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service is an absolute delight of a manga that expertly combines numerous genres to create one hell of a title. It’s horror at heart but there’s heavy doses of comedy and drama that manage to set this apart from other horror titles that are big in scares and gore but don’t have much else going for them.
Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service follows a ragtag group of students at a Buddhist college in Japan. After discovering that they all have rather unusual skills, they decide to start a business that grants the dead their final wishes so that their souls can move on. This could have by all means been yet another generic ghost story about talking to ghosts (or whatever) but writer Eiji Otsuka gives the whole thing so much unique weirdness that it ends up being a hell of a lot of fun.
Part of what makes Kurosagi so good is the cast of characters. Each of them have their own skill that helps the business along in a wide variety of ways. A man named Kuro Karatsu is the main character and his skill is both the most important to the business and pretty much the entire reason it exists. You see, when Karatsu touches a dead body he ends up being able to speak to it, or rather they manage to speak through him. This enables the group to figure out exactly what each dead person needs to move on. Dead bodies aren’t just found in the middle of the street, however, and that’s where a man named Numata shines. Numata can use a pendulum to dowse for the dead which finds the team their clients. Rounding out the rest of the crew is a girl named Makino who is a licensed embalmer, a girl named Ao Sasaki who is the brains of the operation and can pretty much find any piece of information on the internet, and a boy named Yata who can allegedly channel an alien through a puppet that he wears on his left hand at all times.
These characters all have their own strong personalities and I found myself liking them all more and more as the story progressed. Horror manga often either has 1 dominant character who seems to outshine all the others or lacks any real character progression as they’re just fodder for whatever horrors exist in that universe. Kurosagi is very heavily character driven which is most likely due to Otsuka making all of the action and the plots themselves dependent on the characters and their gifts. After all, if Numata wasn’t finding these bodies and Karatsu wasn’t talking to them they’d just be a bunch of weird college students studying for finals (or whatever). It’s an interesting concept that leads to some very interesting stories.
The stories within Kurosagi start out fairly routine and get more and more complex as they go. The first arc is a fairly routine story about a guy who killed himself who can only rest once he’s with his girlfriend. The plot gets deeper and more involved from there but its a great way for the series to start as you get used to all of the characters and their gifts as well as how the “Corpse Delivery Service” gets started.
However, the fun really starts once they get past all the formalities and the stories start taking more and more bizarre twists and turns. There’s murders, a corpse with amnesia, talking body parts, and wild plots of revenge to name a few of the more interesting turns that Kurosagi takes. Not only do these things help make Kurosagi a fun title and unique title; they also make it a title that’s nearly impossible to put down.
Housui Yamazaki does the art for the series and it’s a great looking title. The characters are wonderfully varied in appearance and there’s some absolutely stunning backgrounds and landscapes. Of course though, with this being a horror title, some of Yamazaki’s best work comes during the key moments of horror. There’s some delightful gore that only tends to pop up during these moments and it makes all the bit more shocking.
Yamazaki also utilizes panels in a way that tips off key information. Many times I finished a chapter only to realize that a crucial clue was actually already given to us in a previous panel. Almost any detailed close-up is being done for a reason and it helps to keep you on your toes as you continue to read.
At the end of every chapter there’s also a list of editor’s notes. While most of these things are fairly unimportant and just list various sound effects, there are also quite a few key pieces of information about Japan and Japanese culture that is sure to be of interest to people. For example, the opening of the series features the crew in Japan’s famed Aokigahara forest with our new crew searching for dead bodies. Known for being a hotspot for suicides, it makes sense that the crew would search for corpses there but the notes give readers a ton of information about the place if they were confused as to why our cast would be walking around random forests for bodies.
Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service is a title that will appeal to many people and I can’t think of any better reason to jump into the series than I can with this collection. For roughly $20 you get 640 pages of horror, comedy, and some key information on Japanese history and Japanese culture. I couldn’t put this omnibus down and I can’t wait for Book Two to release in November to give me more mystery and more corpses. Buy this immediately.
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