Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service 11

Eiji Otsuka / Housui Yamazaki – Dark Horse – 2010 – 14+ volumes

Unusually, we see a little bit of Sasayama in this volume. The stories tend to spotlight a member of the delivery service, in most cases lately revealing everything about their background. Sasayama is a special case, since presumably we will find out about him in MPD Psycho. This story is about a troubled little girl he took in, and the crimes surrounding her life a few years ago and in the present. It’s a genuinely creepy story, and the motives of the little girl are pretty ambiguous almost until the end. Unsurprisingly, she possesses a kind of strange sight in one eye. It’s not… really the same as the various specialties of the Kurosagi group, but it is interesting, and she puts it to good use.

Also unusual is that the Kurosagi members don’t really play prominent roles in this story. It’s largely all the little girl, she does the investigating, gets involved in the incidents, et cetera. The story starts with Makino and Yata getting student teaching positions at the school in question and Numata getting a guard position. Karatsu and Sasaki appear periodically with information relevant to the girl’s case.

While this volume is definitely awesome, I’m still waiting for all the fun details about what happened to Karatsu several volumes ago, or the whole story behind him. I’m willing to bet that’s more of an “end of the series”-type revelation, but I’m still curious.

I’m also a little worried the series is moving away from the “Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service” as a group, since the characters are so clearly unsuccessful at making a living at what they do best. The scenes with Sasaki and Karatsu in the meeting room by themselves were particularly eerie.

While the story of the little girl takes up most of the volume, there’s a one-off case included in the back that… I don’t know, I think the bodies are zombies, and it has something to do with performance-enhancing drugs. It was everything you’ve come to expect from the series… creepy, a little funny, lots of science, pop culture, urban legends, and other stuff come into play, and with a fantastic walking dead ending. The gigantic, bloated rats were particularly memorable, and they didn’t even play a part, really.

I still enjoy this series as much as I did when I picked up the first volume. Even more, in fact. It’s one of my absolute favorites coming out right now, and I hope desperately that it’s popular enough that Dark Horse sees it through to the finish.