The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, Vol. 1 (v. 1) [Paperback]

Eiji Otsuka (Author), Housui Yamazaki (Illustrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: 2006

Your body is their business! Five young students at a Buddhist university, three guys and two girls, find little call for their job skills in today's Tokyo... among the living, that is! But all that stuff in college they were told would never pay off - you know, channeling, dowsing, ESP - gives them a direct line to the dead... the dead who are still trapped in their corpses and can't move on to the next reincarnation. The five form the Kurosagi ("Black Heron" - their ominous bird logo) Corpse Delivery Service: whether suicide, murder, accident, or illness, they'll carry your body wherever it needs to go to free your soul! The kids from Kurosagi can smell a customer a mile away - it's a good thing one of the girls majored in embalming!

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Sometimes when people die, their souls can't move on without help. In Tokyo, five Buddhist university students find how to use their unique skills to provide the help the city's dead need. Kuro Karatsu can hear the voices of the dead, who mostly just want to tell him where they want to go before they can move on, and Ao Sasaki leads a group of student volunteers to find and chant prayers over the dead. When a suicide requests burial with his secret love, a faded pop idol, the helpers afterward find the dead man's winning lottery ticket. Entrepreneurial Ao sees this as a sign that the dead will pay for the unique services they provide. The ensuing dark comedy fearlessly embraces adult humor, including nudity and plenty of gore, yet Otsuka preserves the reverent spirit of the original premise so well that one chuckles but feels a little wrong. The art, too, is more sophisticated than in traditional manga. Fans of Shaun of the Dead and other zombie flicks ought to love this. Tina Coleman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Dark Horse (2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1593075553
• ISBN-13: 978-1593075552
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 5.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #350,016 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Grim and Dim with a glint of humor, June 2, 2009

By 

J. Holt (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, Vol. 1 (v. 1) (Paperback)

The design of this book originally pulled me in. Having checked the original on amazon.co.jp, I see that Dark Horse wisely took it as it was and localized it. Overall, I think the book excels in its design both in terms of art and story. Ootsuka and Yamazaki neatly introduce the characters, give us four tightly woven stories, and leave us wanting...something else. I agree with other reviewers here that I probably will not read the next volume.

Although I enjoyed the group dynamic here -- a fresh band of dysfunctional personalities who manage to function just long enough to resolve their task -- overall the manga convinces you of its intelligence and skill, but it's lacking heart. One thing that I appreciate in the manga is the way that the manga authors are able to bring in aspects of contemporary Japanese society as story hooks, but overall the emphasis is on getting the characters to show their quirkiness, and then, harness and downplay their quirkiness so they can achieve their mission. You admire the way the stories maintain a tight pace, but in the end "Kurosagi," like the films of the new wave of Japan Horror, capitalize on cruelty and bloodshed in order to generate a new corpse. Its the conspicuous consumption of corpses not only by the team of protagonists, but also by you the audience, that the two manga authors are counting on. People have to die, sometimes for no other reason than simply to have the Delivery Service (and us) process them.

Dark Horse should be praised for their translation of the work. It is an easy read, like Dana Lewis' translation of Lone Wolf and Cub. Yoshida Toshifumi has the skill to make even this manga, whether you agree that it is palatable or not, at the very least into light reading American audiences can enjoy.

23 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars At times morbidly funny, but poorly written and overdone, January 10, 2009

By 

Mike (NYC) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, Vol. 1 (v. 1) (Paperback)

I'd heard some really great things about this series, so I picked up the first book. After reading it, I probably won't pick up any others.

The character designs are ugly, and the art in general wasn't particularly impressive. The stories are very episodic, which I thought was nice, but they were't particularly engaging or interesting apart from one involving an elderly lady looking for her final resting place which was well-executed - it was touching and grimly funny. The other stories were pretty standard mysteries with mild supernatural elements and genrally, a twist ending you can see from a mile away. Not bad, but nothing great, either. Kind of like Stephen J. Cannell does manga (but with more gore). The plots all follow the same basic pattern.

In short, the book is too funny for the horror crowd and not enough funny for the comedy crowd. Also, I'm reasonably familiar with Japanese cultural studies and I was often baffled by some of the religious practices, which are almost never explained in footnotes. This book does not translate well to Western audiences because death and funerary practices differ so much across societies.

At times, the humor in the book is good - the cynicism of the monk, for instance, was often funny but there wasn't enough of it. It doesn't seem very reaistic that people would joke so little around so much gore (and yes, people IRL have a lot more of a sense of humor about this stuff).

I have a VERY strong stomach (I used to be an EMT), but, fair warning, the execution of themes (incest and serial killing for instance, fill 2 episodes) in this book are often mean spirited. At times, the book seems like an excuse for the author to show women naked, humiliated, and dismembered. Not really my cup of tea. I'm not even vaguely a feminist or anything like that, either. I have no problem reading seinen like Berserk, which is loaded with gore and violence against women - but that fits the story. Most of the blood and guts in this book just felt gratuitous and wasn't being used for the plot, or as a springboard for comedy.

It's not as bad as I make it sound, but it's not as good as everyone else seems to think.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinatingly Macabre, March 17, 2007

By 

MoMo (Bethlehem, PA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, Vol. 1 (v. 1) (Paperback)

This book is definitely strange and gruesome but it is also brilliantly funny in a similarly dark way. The characters are interesting and vary nicely. The story is about a volunteer group of students who have banded together to help the dead find peace. The team includes a psychic, a dowser, an embalmer, and a channeler. If you have a strong stomach, an appreciation for the macabre, and a dark sense of humor I highly recommend this series.