Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service 1
Posted: October 17, 2007 Filed under: Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service 10 Comments »This volume helped me save money on car insurance! Or it would have, if I was an editor. Alas.
I was thinking about reading this series, and I picked up all the current volumes in the most recent Dark Horse sale at Right Stuf. Glad I did, I like it quite a bit better than MPD Psycho, the writer’s other work.
It’s a bit easier to swallow and makes a great deal more sense than MPD Psycho, but it’s still not anything fantastic, like something everyone has to own as an example of the horror/comedy genre. It does mix the brutal sight of dead bodies quite well with a really weird sense of humor though, which is quite a feat.
The first volume consists mostly of one-shot short stories about the formation of the Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, a gathering of misfit college students who reap karmic rewards for helping dead bodies with their last wishes. Two of the members have practical skills, like the ability to tap into a huge social information network or to embalm a body (a skill that is apparently almost nonexistant in Japan since almost all dead bodies are cremated, I understand). One, for whatever reason, is handy at dowsing dead bodies instead of water, which is only somewhat supernatural, I suppose. The main character is the one who’s got the full-blown psychic ability, since he can lay his hand on a body and let it speak its wishes through him. And then there’s one character who, for whatever reason, has an alien spirit inhabiting his hand (clothed in a puppet) which speaks foul-mouthed truisms in most situations. I’m not sure when that skill will come in handy, but I’d love to see it when it does.
Two or three cases are taken on in this volume, and each case does a good job of using some or all of the characters prominently. There’s the occasional really bizarre joke, but for the most part you get a lot of gore and detective work, with many conclusions featuring the bodies coming back to life to have their revenge. One conclusion, at the end of the volume, was particularly gory and awesome, and involved quite a bit of figuring out to determine how the man was causing all the accidents. He got his comeuppance, though.
The notes in the back of the volume are pretty awesome, too. There’s a long article about how the different Japanese writing systems work together, then several pages worth of sound effect translations with notes and anecdotes mixed in throughout, some having more to do with the manga than others (the car insurance tangent being one of the more strange, but extremely welcome, entries). It’s the most thorough index ever.
I like this because I like horror manga a lot, but if horror manga isn’t something you read much of, there are certainly things you should try before Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service. Red Snake is the one that pops into my mind immediately, because it is certainly the best horror manga one-shot available in English.
[...] carinsur wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptThis volume helped me save money on car insurance! Or it would have, if I was an editor. Alas. I was thinking about reading this series, and I picked up all the current volumes in the most recent Dark Horse sale at Right Stuf. … [...]
[...] Slightly Biased Manga, and she gives her take on vol. 2 of 3×3 Eyes, vol. 21 of Bleach, vols. 1, 2, and 3 of Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, and vol. 3 of Click. At Manganews, Jiji reviews vol. [...]
So, I plan to start this soon and even bought 2-6 recently. Then last night, I was flipping through v1 and encountered one particularly disturbing image. Are they all as gross as v1? I didn’t run away screaming or anything, but I /did/ put a little piece of paper there so I wouldn’t have to see it again when I read the volume for real. :)
Hm… Thinking back on it without the volumes in front of me, I can’t rid myself of the infamous image from MPD Psycho 1, so it’s sort of blocking my memory for the stuff in Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service. I want to say yes and no. They do usually show the body, and sometimes it is pretty gross, but some of the stuff I’m thinking of from later volumes is gross mostly because they’re decomposed more than anything that was actually done to them (which is still pretty gross, but not as brutal as some of the stuff I’m thinking of from MPD Psycho). They also generally get embalmed pretty quickly so the gross-out factor is reduced. I think I notice it less since I’m reading MPD Psycho at the same time. The violence and gore in that one can be so brutal that Kurosagi looks pretty tame in comparison, but Kurosagi can be pretty nasty in brief when they stumble onto the bodies.
I read the first volume. The review is here.
I’ve ordered the first 2 volumes of MPD, but yeah, I worry about my reaction to it. It’s, as you say, what’s been done to them that gets to me. Especially if they’re still alive and terrified.
woo woo, nice html skills, me!
Ah, happens all the time. I fixed it for you.
I’ve got the fourth volume of MPD Psycho but haven’t read it yet. So far, nothing has been nearly as bad as the first volume, which has two scenes in particular which have the highest gross-out factor of anything else I think I’ve ever seen, including the end of the movie Hannibal. I haven’t liked either the plot or the characters very much so far, though.
Yeah, MPD sounds awfully cool, but I don’t know whether it’ll eventually pay off and make sense and be awesome or just continue on being confusing. :)
I liked the first volume. It’s a bit weird but OK. I will surely buy more volumes.
It gets better and better as the series goes on. I think I was totally won over by volume 3 or 4. It gets much weirder, but there are still some pretty straightforward stories that come up every now and again. I’m still waiting for my copy of volume 7 to arrive, the cliffhanger at the end of volume 6 was brutal.