The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service by Eiji Otsuka & Housui Yamazaki

by Chriss Cornish on 11/26/07 No Comments

This Book Is About

Front cover of The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service

Your body is their business! Five young students at a Buddhist university find there’s little call for their job skills in today’s Tokyo…among the living, that is! But their studies give them a direct line to the dead-the dead who are still trapped in their corpses, and can’t move on to their next reincarnation! Whether you died from suicide, murder, sickness, or madness, they’ll carry your body anywhere it needs to go to free your soul!

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My Thoughts On This Book

scanned page from The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service Here’s another book I picked up over my Thanksgiving vacation. I discovered this goody on the graphic novels bookshelf at Borderlands on Valencia Street in San Francisco. Kurosagi Corpse Delivery is mild horror in a more spiritually supernatural vein, the degree of which varies with each story in accent to the plot of the ‘delivery’ involved.

I rather enjoyed volume one of this manga. The characters are human and interesting people, the plots are engaging and there’s a touch of every day humor in the dialog. Each volume contains a series of corpse deliveries presented in an episodic short story style. In each delivery, the corpse itself or, rather, the spirit trapped in it, is the Kurosagi group’s client.

‘Kurosagi’ is apparently Japanese for the black heron (a type of water bird). In the introduction to one story, the main character tells the reader that, “We aren’t the white stork that brings you into this world. We’re the kurosagi–the black heron that takes you out of it.”

What I like is that the characters aren’t really detectives. They don’t contact the law because it’s the needs of the spirits trapped in the bodies that are their goal. They thwart a serial killer in one of the more supernaturally touched stories as almost a side effect of the delivery.

Scan of a naked corpse from a page in The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service Nudity warning! Be aware, this is not a manga for youngsters. There is at least one dead body in every single story and they are sometimes naked (volume one has at least four nude corpses). When the group’s clients are skin-wrapped it’s either due to plot device or forensic needs. Because this is a realistic comic the genitalia is drawn where and when appropriate. However, ‘the naughty bits’ are always rendered with a modest discretion and the average adult reader would not be shocked or offended.

I only had one little minor complaint and that is the editor’s choice not to translate the sound effects kanji. I can pretty much figure out roughly what sound the writer had in mind, but still… This is particularly disappointing since the back of the book has a lexicon about the sound effects, which I can’t reference to anything because the lexicon uses roman characters (English letters) for the sounds but the story uses kanji (Japanese characters) for them.

Everything else, including the artwork and lettering, was good.

Shade-tastic Or Blank-Space-City?: How Well This B&W Comic Was Shaded

Scan of a page from The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service Well shaded, definitely. I had no trouble at all following the action or figuring out what was going on.

Most black-and-white comics give me trouble because of the low level of shading. My abstractly-natured brain is distracted by massive amounts of white space and my attention wanders off instantly.

No such problem at all with The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service. I was able to pick up the book and start reading instantly, something that happens for me with few B&W comics.