I really should read more manga.
Oh, I have excuses. I spend far too much money on North American comics as it is. If I keep going at this rate, I’ll be spending even more for a new book case. And it’s all so overwhelming – everything seems to have about 25 volumes, and many of them look alike. I presume this is how the traditional comics market looks to outsiders.
But help is close at hand in the form of a familiar friend. Dark Horse, purveyors of Hellboy and Buffy, among many others, offer an increasingly impressive selection of manga. And while Tokyopop and Viz may corner the market on teenage angst books, Dark Horse is importing some of the more unusual and off-beat books aimed at more mature readers.
I’ve sampled a few of these to varied results, but am pretty happy with my most recent venture into Japanese sequential art: The first volume of The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, the story of a group of Buddhist university students looking for extra credit and a bit of cash by helping the dead resolve any outstanding problems or mysteries.
It is, as one might guess, rather a morbid book. It’s fairly versatile, once you get past all the corpses, and it alternates between horror and black comedy. A bit of the clinical treatment of death on Six Feet Under mixed with the grotesquery and outrageousness of a Takashi Miike film, if you will.
Mild-mannered Kuro is looking for a job when he’s unwittingly sucked into Ao Sasaki’s scheme to apply Buddhist principles to the real world. It turns out to be a good thing, as Kuro is kind of psychic. His colleagues have equally versatile skills: Numata is a dowser whose pendulum leads him to corpses instead of water; Makino has studied embalming abroad and is an expert in her field; Yata channels a space alien through a puppet.
Kurosagi is fairly episodic. Their first case, in which they discover that helping to align corpse karma offers both spiritual and financial rewards, involves a lovers’ suicide pact with complications. Then it’s off to find the proper resting place for an abandoned grandmother, and from there to a problem that involves a bit of dismemberment. And finally comes the story of an insurance agent who is able to predict, and possibly influence, the deaths of his clients.
While the plots vary in mystery and effectiveness – a serial killer is identified and caught a wee bit too easily, for example – the real appeal of the book lies in its effective blend of suspense, comedy, and horror. This isn’t a book for the faint of heart: One of the first images in this volume is a hanged corpse, bloated and surrounded by a swarm of flies. There are, obviously, quite a few dead people to be found here, and most of them are pretty obviously dead.
Writer Eiji Otsuka keeps things lively with properly timed dashes of humour. Yata’s alien puppet provides the occasional dose of profanity. The comedy value of hauling a deceased senior citizen across town in a cabinet is obvious enough. And thankfully everyone seems to realize the absurdity of traipsing about with corpses. Housui Yamazaki’s art is on the same page, thankfully. He captures death in all its gruesome detail and can crank up the moody-spooky dial to 11, but still keeps the Kurosagi crew themselves in the light.
The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service isn’t particularly revolutionary, but it is one of the more unusual books you’re likely find, nation of origin be damned. It’s certainly for mature readers who aren’t afraid of some disturbing content and situations, but it’s worth the time and money if you’re looking for some morbid entertainment.