Embalmer 1

As much as I complained bitterly all the way through Doll until the end (which was amazing and worth it), I’ve gone back for more Mitsukazu Mihara several times now.  I really liked both the one-shots I read by her (IC in a Sunflower and R.I.P.), and I recently realized that Embalmer was a series I’d heard about a long time ago.  I picked up all four volumes on sale, so let’s see how this works out.

It has some of Doll’s bad habits, which I disliked for being extremely disturbing and moralistic and just boring and hard to read.  This one is better, far less boring and violent and not really difficult to read at all, but it’s still more heavy-handed than I like.  For instance, one of the stories, called “Narcissus,” is about a man who is so obsessed with his appearance that he basically disregards all attention paid to him as jealousy and dies when he apparently falls into the bath while looking at his own reflection in the water (the story is torn on whether or not his death is a suicide or an accident).  Then the main character shows how good embalming actually is.  A lot of the plot revolves him being sort of misunderstood as tinkering with the dead, with the end result of him providing beautiful wakes for otherwise mangled bodies.

I think this would be better if I could chase every volume with a volume of Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, but alas, I cannot.  The character in that volume who knows how to embalm is less of an outcast than the main character in this series.  The point of contention is mentioned a few times, but the clients he gets never seem to have a problem with him.

The structure is basically that each chapter shows the life of a person who will eventally become a client of the main character.  The main character gets some focus in that he has a romantic interest, but is also a sex addict and doesn’t like to turn his appetites on the girl he likes.  It’s weird, but not as graphic as I make it sound, and he actually has a reason for what he does… sort of.

I like it well enough.  I wonder if the plot will pick up and finish off as well as it did in Doll.  Actually, I kind of like her plots a lot.  There wasn’t too much in this volume aside from the one-shot chapters, but there will almost certainly be something that builds up as the series continues.