Review by Comix
Death is the dark mistress who awaits every living creature at the end of their time on Earth. When that final bell strikes, we will find ourselves existing beyond our pitiful lives; lives that were once immersed in pain, hate, sorrow, and, if we’re lucky, love and happiness. But for some poor souls, and many ghost stories, the human spirit refuses to pass on and is instead stuck to the material plane suffering the plight of “unfinished business.” This is where the Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service comes in! Are you recently deceased with a grudge? Do you have a family member or a friend that you desperately need to get a hold of but your decomposed, greasy body won’t let you? Or do you just feel like getting buried in the sweet, sweet earth because you’re sick of hanging off that noose in the woods? Well, you’re in luck! The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service will not only hear your cries of the undead, but will (for a small fee) deliver your body whereever you need to go! Wanna scare your cheating wife? Done! Want to stick it to your boss one last time? Done! No project too big, no request too small, they do it all.
The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service is a fantastic horror manga currently published by Dark Horse Comics. It centers around a group of college students at a Buddhist University in Japan (and yes, they actually have those), who, to make ends meet, go corpse hunting and deliver the bodies to their final resting place. Of course, you must be wondering, how exactly do they know where the bodies want to go? Well, thanks to their resident psychic, Kuro Karatsu, talking to bodies is a breeze. With his ability to talk to the dead, he and his eclectic crew of misfits, made up of an embalmer, a dowser, a computer hacker, and a guy with a possessed puppet have no problem fulfilling requests. Of course, the requests are as strange as the bodies themselves, such as the ear that can only communicate in song or the body stuck in a robotic suit fighting to get free. There is also a longer story that entangles all the members of the crew, and its center is Karatsu and his guardian spirit. A fantastically morbid trip into Japan’s death and funeral practices, Kurosagi is as spooky as it is educational, and has gained a following both locally and abroad.
Kurosagi is a seriously great work of horror. This is not one of those Japanese horror comics that only appeals to fans of manga. It manages to translate very well for audiences around the world and despite focusing mostly on Eastern concepts of death, it’s the way it handles the subject that makes it so accessible. With a mix of black humor and genuine human emotion, the comic comes off as something that everyone, no matter where they’re from, can understand: death and the ghosts it leaves behind. Another part of its mass appeal is its ever-topical focus on issues of death and the morbid nature of human beings. Once again, it is mostly Japanese related, but who doesn’t want to know more about death in Japan? They address such interesting issues such as coin-locker babies (newborn babies left to die in subway station coin-lockers by young mothers), a little girl accused of murder which is reminiscent of real-life Nevada-chan, and the crying woman, a reflection of women in Japan who are hired to be mourners at funerals of not-so-popular people. One of my favorites is their take on postmortem weddings, where a woman is married off to a photograph of a man who didn’t live long enough to get his own bride. The characters even trot off to actual suicide spots, like Aokigahara Woods at the foot of Mount Fuji, where every year, they have teams of real volunteers scour the area for bodies.
The comic was first started in 2002 and published in the monthly Japanese comic magazine, Shonen Ace. It was later picked up by Young Ace (in which it still runs) and has totaled sixteen volumes in Japan. One unique aspect of the comic is that, unlike most manga, it has a separate artist and writer, instead of one person doing both. The author, Eiji Otsuka, is a type of scholar on the culture of manga and has also written for the comic MPD Psycho with artist Housui Yamazaki, who is also the artist for Kurosagi. Yamazaki, though, tends to be a bit of mystery. All that is known about him is that he illustrated the two previous comics and has written and drawn his own work called Mail. All three of the series seems (but are not officially confirmed) to be in the same universe and characters from one comic tend to find themselves making guest appearances in others. Yamazaki’s art, by the way, is amazing. The sequential art gets a bit choppy in places, but when it comes to large, gory splash pages, he can’t be beaten. His attention to detail is almost medical, bringing all the little bloody tidbits to life in a fantastically gruesome way. If anything, the art alone is worth the purchase.
The translated Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service is currently on volume 13 and comes with a whole grab-bag of extra stuff. Each volume has an afterword from the author and several pages of explanations on all those little Japanese intricacies that readers come across in the comics. They are also bound in nice, heavy stock cover but unfortunately are being changed to the glossy version due to costs. The good thing is that a lot of the comics are self-contained, so you don’t really have to read them in order. I mean, if you want to get the background story, then read in order, but if you just want to read some of the fun, side stories, it’s not necessary. Also, both MPD Psycho and Mail are both printed by Dark Horse and are easily available, so, you know, you don’t have any excuse.