Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Honestly, I passed this in the bookstore on my way to picking up a knitting book. You could not know less about manga than I do. I found the story lines riveting and the art engaging. I've already ordered Volume 2 and 3. Definitely adult content but a very engrossing read!

Are you dead on your feet? Do you find yourself struggling to voice your wishes to others? Then check out Kurosagi Corpse Delivery!

This manga follows a group of college graduates around as they struggle to put their talents (such as they are) to good use by discovering what the dead want & trying to fulfill their wishes. The group is mixed with one guy who can actually speak to the dead (and sometimes animate them), a woman who is a top rate hacker, a guy who can use a pendulum to discover dead bodies, a young man who channels an alien through a puppet worn on his left hand & a cute little girl who is an expert embalmer. Some of their cases are sad, some are disgusting, but they all share one thing in common- the undead need to have their stories told.

This isn't the best manga I've read, but it's entertaining. I like that each story is self contained & that you can start in on almost any chapter & be able to understand what is going on. There's a lot of gratuitious nudity, but for the most part it is used as a part of the story line- if there isn't a reason for the character to be naked, they aren't. But there is a lot of nudity. At times through the volume I got the impression that the manga artist was channeling a vibe similar to Junji Ito's works, but the artist hasn't yet hit the perfect balance that Ito so frequently gets.

There's a lot of promise to this manga & the stories are pretty interesting, but so far it's all stuff I've seen before- just with added nudity & gore. I will say that future volumes do improve story & art-wise as the author starts to gain momentum & pick up some truly good ideas, though. In this volume though, it's all stuff I've seen before in various other horror/ghost/mystery solving types of manga.

I will tell you that i enjoyed reading this very much.It's strangely different from most of the other graphic novels i have read in the past.The characters in the stories make it a great read.A must have.I cant wait too read the rest.

Other reviews have explained the concept in depth, but just to reiterate; it's a story about a group of young liberal arts graduates whose traumatic backgrounds have left them with talents for working with the dead. Armed with these talents, and with Kuro Karatsu's supernatural ability to speak with the dead, they seek to make a living by carrying out their last wishes.

Just to get this out there, this isn't a series for everyone. It's a series about death, and neither the writing nor the art ever shy away from that. Of course, with a series whose plot revolves around characters speaking with and working for dead people, you expect to see a lot of corpses; but there's nothing pretty or glorified about death in this series. Many of the deaths are quite gruesome, and in addition to the violence and gore we see corpses in various stages of decomposition and decay -- and if there's a less or a more gruesome way to die, you can bet that this manga takes the second route.

That said, if you're willing to stomach that, this series has a lot to offer. Much of its enjoyment is lent by the brilliant and witty translation of Carl Gustav Horn, but he's got a lot of quality to work with. The story is complex, often funny, often touching and profound. And there are a few things that this manga brings to the table that very few others do.

The first is that for all the dark gallows-style humor and lighthearted wisecracks in the face of suffering and death, and the unromantic and down-to-earth approach with which they handle the corpses, the story and the characters can be astonishingly compassionate. The fact that the characters are Buddhists is brought up only occasionally, but the characters live by their principles rather than talking about them. It probably explains a lot to consider that in Japan, most people are "Shinto in their daily lives, Christian at weddings, and Buddhist at funerals," since the Buddhist priests take over most of the rituals of death that Shinto (and Japanese culture at large) shrinks away from.

In the very first pages of this volume, when introducing the protagonist Kuro Karatsu, Ao Sasaki puts her finger right on it: the dead speak to him because he's the kind of guy who can't say no to them. Karatsu feels great sympathy for the lost souls of the dead and will go to lengths beyond the pale to try to fill their last wishes -- even carrying a corpse halfway across the world into a war zone in order to return him to his home soil! But he's not in the business of revenge, or even pursuit of justice -- his focus is always on helping dead souls find peace. The introduction of Sasayama halfway through the series -- a balding and crippled government worker with a colorful background -- adds another dimension to this strange compassion. In Sasayama's character you can get a glimpse of what Karatsu will probably look like after the world has had fifty more years or so to crush his idealism; he's a miserly, cynical, embittered hardass with a shady past and a collection of violent skills... who works long hours in a low-paid social service job trying to save as many people as best as he can.

The second thing this series brings to the table is that for possibly the first time in a horror series centering around corpses and zombies, the human dead are not monsters. Although they can be frightening, they're usually portrayed as sad and sympathetic, and the main characters want to help them, not to destroy them. The villains of the piece are usually -- not always -- the murderer who killed them in the first place, which makes a lot more sense if you think about it. It's a unique story angle not often seen in manga. Compare this to MAIL, another series by the Housui Yamazaki. That series, like Kurosagi, is a horror series centering around the spirits of the departed -- but there the ghosts are merely monsters that have to be defeated, rather than people who need to be helped. Kurosagi offers a much more subtle and nuanced approach to good, evil, and humanity.

The third thing this series has to offer is a very un-idealized, often scathingly critical look at Japanese society. How many manga have you read that talk about Unit 731 and Japan's actions during the Chinese occupation of World War II? Even Sasayama lampshades it when he says "Now that they're teaching 'patriotism' in schools again, you've probably never heard of it." Otsuka is not attempting to demonize Japan, but he doesn't refrain lashing out where criticism is due -- nor does he shrink from portraying the less scenic or elegant portions of Japanese society. A storyline in volume 8 discusses the history of abortion and infanticide in Japan, from the perspective of a young nurse whose grandmother served as a 'midwife' for desperate mothers wanting to be rid of their babies. It's hard stuff and the author doesn't back down from it.

This series is not without flaws and criticisms, and as mentioned several times in this review, not everyone will be able to stomach such a bittersweet mix of dark story elements and hard-hitting illustration. But if you're ready for that, and you read Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, you'll take away some things from this series that you'll never regret.

Five students in a buddhist school are trying to find their way in the world. The only problem is that they come from irregular families and they have irregular commections when it comes to the dead. Some can see things about the dead, others can commune with spirits, one knows Western techniques that include embalming, and one can actually cause things to happen around him. The last one has some frightening things that follow him around, too, with spirits sometimes coming around or bodies atually getting up and taking care of business. And when the five come together, things go from strange to downright dangerous, as the dead find solace in communication and wrapping up loose ends - not to mention funding a little venture called The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service.

The thing I was expecting from this book and the thing I received were two different things. I say this happily, too, because i was skeptical about the venture when it came to this book. The descriptions made this sound like it was going to be a tutoring lesson on how bodies are dealt with - not exactly the excitement I want when I read a little horror - but it turned out to be so much more. When I read it the first panels I saw the nature of the business that the characters were delving into, and when I read the stories here I saw that it had a bleak overtone being installed and that the characters were going to be oddly fixating. All in all that meant I was in for something different, and different normally means that I am in for a real treat. That made me happy, and happier still when i noticed how the art and storylines combined to make something really dark and twisted.

I also like the things that could be learned from this book in a cultural aspect - even though the book is about dealing with the dead, Buddhism has certain laws pertaining to that. I had never really thought of a Buddhist school until now, and having a B.S. in buddhism seemed almost alien to me. The book made me done some research into that topic, and learning is always a good things. On top of that, the book explains some of this outright and allows novices to the culture to understand other things by watching what is presented to the viewer, making me a happy camper when everything was said and done. It didn't make me feel stupid or talk down to me, but it did not treat me like a complete fool and leave a lot to over-examination.

This is a book that reads the correct way and gives translations when they are needed. That is a great thing in the world of books that oftentimes do not do what we need done, and it makes for a better set-up when everything is said and done. If the book itself sounds interesting to you, check out the first volume and be surprised by some of the story set-ups. i certainly was one of the people who waited around until I finally needed something new to try out, then found myself happy with what I saw emerging from the backdrop.

Eiji Otsuka, <strong>The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, vol. 1</strong> (Dark Horse Books, 2002)

Eiji Otsuka's best-known work by far is <em>MPD Psycho</em>, adapted into a successful TV miniseries by Takashi Miike in 2000. I was always more intrigued, though, by <em>The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service</em>. I mean, how can you not be intrigued by a title like that? Took me years to finally track down a library in my network that actually has the books, but the first two finally came in for me last night, and I tore into them as soon as I sat down with the day's library haul. Not nearly as gore-a-rific as I expected, but a great deal of fun nonetheless.

The first volume gives us four stories, the background arc to which is the formation of the KCDS. It's made up of five kids attending a Buddhist university in Tokyo as we open. Kuro Karatsu (if the book, an ensemble piece, has a single central character, it's Karatsu) is approaching graduation basically unemployable, aimless, unsure what to do with his life other than finding a way to use his special power: he can speak to the dead. In the first few scenes, he's checking out the school's message board, reading about a trip into the local woods to search for suicides, when he's approached by Ao Sasaki, the school's resident computer hacker and the organizer of the trip, who invites him along. There, Karatsu meets the other three people who will eventually become KCDS with him and Sasaki: Yata, a channeller harboring an alien who speaks through a dirty sock puppet; Numata, a dowser who's incapable of finding water, but aces at sniffing out dead bodies; and Makino, who has just returned from studying embalming in the States (despite looking like she's about twelve years old).

It's necessarily episodic, as we get a feel for what the characters do and how Sasaki goes about turning it into a business. It's also much more a traditional ghost story (or series of ghost stories) than one would expect form the creator of <em>MPD Psycho</em> (Otsuka mentions in an afterword to vol. 2 that he did, in fact, set out to create a traditional ghost story with this one). As far as ghost stories go, however, you could do a lot worse than this. I have, many times. Strong characterization, solid stories, and just the right amount of gore make this first volume of this one a winner. ****

I found the book to be engrossing and entertaining. The art is pretty good, and the characters likeable, especially Numata. It's a fun book, though there is some gruesome stuff in it.