Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service 2

Unlike the first volume, this one was one continuous story about a rival company, and the dead body and villian this time around formed a story that focused on the background for the head of the group, the girl who’s the social networker/computer geek. 

Another character that got a lot of focus was the kid with the alien hand.  He actually got quite a bit of the spotlight while simultaneously admitting he wasn’t sure what his role in Kurosagi was.  The main character (the monk) and the guy who finds the bodies are constantly together and wisecracking, but the monk seems quite driven to help the body apologize for what it had done.  Lots of good character stuff, and I appreciate that since the series could probably be carried on the interesting plot alone.

The rival company actually has a kind of revenge service set up which is quite twisted.  In the end, it tries to buy out the Kurosagi Delivery Company and hire on all the staff, but the two remain separate for the time being (kind of an odd move, especially since we’re lead to believe Kurosagi actually isn’t doing all that well).

Still really weird, horrible, and funny, though.

Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service 1

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.