The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, Volume 1

The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service #1

by Eiji Otsuka, Housui Yamazaki (Illustrator), Toshifumi Yoshida (Translator)

'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!

Genres: Manga, Horror, Graphic Novels, Comics, Fiction, Fantasy, Mystery

208 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2002

About the author

大塚英志

Social anthropologist and novelist. Graduated from college with degree in anthropology, women's folklore, human sacrifice and post-war manga. In addition to his work with manga he is a critic, essayist, and author of several successful non-fiction books on Japanese popular and “otaku” sub-cultures. One of his first animation script works was Maho no Rouge Lipstick, an adult lolicon OVA. Otsuka was the editor for the bishojo lolicon manga series Petit Apple Pie.

In the 80s, Otsuka was editor-in-chief of Manga Burikko, a leading women's manga magazine where he pioneered research on the “otaku” sub-culture in modern Japan. In 1988 he published "Manga no Koro" (The Structure of Comics), a serious study of Japanese comics and their social significance. Also as critic, Otsuka Eiji, summarized the case of the Japanese red army's 1972 murders as a conflict between the masculine and the feminine principles as they were both embodied by women and against women (Otsuka,1994).

Reviews

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 3 out of 5]

Imagine if Scooby-Doo just wasn’t that good and Butterfly by Crazy Town was the theme song. That’s the succinct version of my thoughts on Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, a manga from Eiji Otsuks with lots of promise and lively premise but delivers…well a corpse of a story. Does anyone remember that weird early aughts Scooby Doo reboot where Scooby spoke full ass paragraphs but the need to keep up his classic speech patterns made it unbearable and Freddy runs off to be homeless and “find himself” and returns to find Shaggy in his military recruit buzzcut and Daphne dating the werewolf guy from Twilight? Imagine that but like, if the main character looked like Ang from Avatar with a cigarette addiction instead of blue tattoos but hey don’t worry, they still have the Mystery Machine. Kind of.

Okay I’m being harsh but like, this just felt really clunky. It’s the start of a fairly lengthy series so maybe it finds it’s footing but I must admit I’m not invested enough to find out. The premise is pretty cool though. These volunteer students each with their own unique paranormal skills&mdash:talking to the dead, being a medium through an eerie frog hand puppet, being the unsettling Lolita-esque girl, having cool hair, that sort of thing—team up to solve some death mysteries. The dead don’t like to stay dead though and hijinks ensue. It’s alright, it just had a rather jumpy delivery and never really came together that well. But ghost talker Ang is cool and haunted and shit so that’s fun.

I did really like the art a lot, I will give it that. The landscapes are crisp, the characters have a lot of expression and the ghastly stuff really pops off. I love the corpse violence, it’s just real good.

There are also a ton of pretty badass group photo shots. But each one just seems to assert a repeat of the theme song should play over the frame as cool hair guy puts on sunglasses but instead of Roger Daltrey shouting “yeaaaaaaaAAAAHH!” over windmill guitar it’s just “come my lady / come come my lady / You're my butterfly / shu-gah bay-bay.” Why would I put that in you’re head? I heartily apologize.

YeaaaaaAAAAH!

Okay fine, this was kind of fun. But like the kind of fun you don’t want to admit. Don’t look at my Hoopla downloads in the coming weeks 👀

2.5/5

[Sam Quixote · Rating 1 out of 5]

If I’d known this book was by the hack who wrote the execrable MPD Psycho I wouldn’t have bothered. Eiji Otsuka: remember this name and steer well clear - Kurosagi Corpse is gaahbage!

They’re called “kurosagi” because those are black storks that take away the dead as opposed to white storks that bring babies. That’s literally the only detail in the entire book that was worth reading. The rest of it - wow. It’s a masterclass in shite comics!

A Buddhist student needs money - so he joins a volunteer service?! Right away it doesn’t make sense - volunteers don’t get paid, ya dummy! But he just happens to get recruited by the person running the shitshow and he just happens to have special powers and the rest of the group just happen to have special powers, all conveniently required to do this bizarre service of… corpse… saving… or something? How do corpses pay you to avenge them or carry out their final wishes?? This series doesn’t make ANY SENSE!!

Oh and speaking of convenient powers, one guy with a skull ring is able to stop a speeding van by punching it - it’s never established that he has this power and he never does it again. It’s the shoddiest writing.

Anyways, they’re off to the mega-contrived races, just like that, and the stories are ultra-dumb - imagine a trashy Scooby-Doo but even derpier. One guy stitches together body pieces from multiple corpses to make a “perfect corpse” just because he’s fucked up! And the characters know immediately that he’s the guy doing it and in that moment they looked as bored as I was reading it!

One guy is an insurance claims adjuster who can control the weather through maths or something?! One priest has scores of corpses in his hut in the middle of Tokyo - why? Don’t they have regulations for disposing of the dead?!

Utterly ‘tarded from start to finish, Kurosagi Corpse is an extremely boring and brain dead manga!

[Lois Bujold · Rating 3 out of 5]

Probably pop it up one star if you like horror.

Okay then...

Horror is not my preferred reading genre, but this was pretty good. Some of the events might have been horrible, but our crew of young protagonists was charming. In brief, five unemployed students at a Buddhist university, all with talents -- some supernatural, some not, or not yet apparent -- band together to start a service finding and helping the lost, hidden, or mislaid corpses of souls unable to move on for one reason or another. They consider their clients to be the souls, mind you, not relatives or such. Negotiating payment gets peculiar. Each of the first four chapters is a separate mystery-adventure centered on a different deceased.

Amusing if you have a high tolerance for gruesome.

Ta, L.

[Melki · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hundreds of people die in this country every day. How many die the way they wanted to...with all their wishes fulfilled?

If you're dead and need some tending above and beyond the usual after-death requirements, this service is for you. A gang of misfits will help you get what you need, be it vengeance on your murderer, or burial in the field of your dreams. I'm still not completely sure how they turn a profit, but they all seem to be decked out in the latest fashions, Jack Skellington barrettes and designer sock puppets.

The whole thing kind of reminded me of an unfunny Pushing Daisies.

My library has slapped a PARENTAL ADVISORY sticker on this book - funny, I didn't see any stickers on the Sin City series... There are naked corpses - lying on slabs, tied to chairs, and occasionally walking around, lots of b&w blood splatters, AND icky, disturbing themes like incestuous necrophilia. You don't see that one too often.

Creepy? A serial killer who stitches his victims together to form the "perfect" corpse.
Creepier? He keeps the extra body parts in the freezer.
Creepiest? The body parts come alive looking for revenge.

If you're in the mood for something different, this one should do the trick.

[Mizuki · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service series is, hand down, one of the greatest and most original manga series which you probably had never heard of.

The main characters are a group of college students, who came together by chance when they found themselves accidentally encountering one abandoned corpse after another (partly because one of the students happened to be a corpse-finding-psychic), in order to put those poor victims to rest, they would do hacking, illegally handling and moving corpses around, communicating with the dead and even raising the dead in order to find out the truth beyond those dead bodies and bring them to their final resting place.

The series is formed in a short stories collection kind of format, I won't tell you every story is great, but it's still an interesting series to invest your time with.

[maria · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was just so weird...but I absolutely loved it? I'll be honest, I first picked this one up because the cover is really intriguing and well designed in my opinion and it also helped that it was on sale via comixology! I didn't really know what to expect going into it as I didn't really do any research on it before picking it up. I ended up absolutely loving it! It was strange and obscure which made it the perfect read for me! I can't wait to pick up the next volumes!

[Emma Sea · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was fine. A nice idea and the art was OK without being amazeballs.

The translator hasn't shown the sound effects on each page, they're in an appendix at the back, and this was slightly frustrating. However I do like very much that there are FX for: "PORO: parts coming off face," "DO: an organ hitting floor,"and "GEBOBOBO: vomiting blood."

Image is for Steelwhisper and Kyn only. NSFW!

[Aoife · Rating 5 out of 5]

A van these meddling kids may have, Scooby Doo this is not. Graduating from a Buddhist university with no practical skills suitable for employment a group bands together in hopes of turning their unusual skill set into something profitable (Or at least, that pays the rent)

The problem being that their skills comprise of such esoteric talents such as corpse-dowsing, ESP, channeling the restless spirits of the dead....Resolving to help the dead with their unfinished business (for a fee naturally) Our intrepid deadbeats try to keep their rent paid.

The characters and their set-up actually turns out to be original enough to stand on its own two feet. The characters are fun and grounded. This is a manga for grown-ups and is cheerfully as far as you can get from Typical 'zombie' fare.

The corpses are meticulously rendered in perfect detail and despite the gratuitious nudity they are carefully desexualised for the story. A corpse is just a corpse, that much is made casually clear, but it was once a person which is the source of all the drama.

Delving into traditional funeral traditions and death in a modern metropolis this manga swings from quirky to sad while touching on all sorts of supernatural, paranormal and sci-fi themes.

I like it because it's different. The art can be occasionally ugly and the characters are sometimes dressed ridiculously but the stories are different and the setting is a nice change from the rest of the market.

I will note that the Dark Horse translation is an exceptional job and the footnotes are useful and interesting. The cover design is also worth praising and suceeds in being different from anything else on the market.

It's definitely worth a look but it is a horror so the generous depictions of corpses in various stages of mutilation and/or decay may not be to your taste.

[Rod Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

A Japanese Scooby gang drives around in their version of the Mystery Machine seeking out corpses that haven't been properly buried and helping their restless spirits find karmic closure.

The members of the group have skills that help in the quest: a dowser who can find corpses, a medium to talk for the spirits, an embalmer to care for the bodies, a puppeteer who can channel advice from an alien entity, and a business manager to make sure the corpses and karma provide them a little bit of cash to fund their endeavors.

The chapters in this first book are all self-contained little adventures with the college students venturing out to face heavy stuff like a suicide, child molestation, elder abuse, a serial killer, and . . . ~shudder~ . . . an insurance actuary. The bickering oddballs manage to keep the tone light even as the corpses pile up.

I have a couple more volumes on hand and a looking forward to seeing where this goes.

[Caro the Helmet Lady · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite not bad for the first volume in series, but so far packed with many cliches - corpses with stories, quirky "everyone is special" characters, the idea of a group of students working on something - we've been there, we've seen that so many times, ah. And watta hell is that ghost thing? But I know Otsuka can create pretty crazy and paranoid stories with many surprises. I've read his MPD Psycho series 多重人格探偵サイコ 1 till I could recognize who was who (if you read it, you know what I mean), so I expect this to become better. Anyway, I'm hooked enough to keep going on.

Artwork, while technically perfect, isn't that special, but good enough not to be boring.

[Mur Lafferty]

I liked it. Could do without the frequent naked dead female bodies though. Or at least give us some naked male bodies for balance.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Karatsu is a student at a Buddhist college, looking for a job now that he's graduated. For some reason one flyer jumps out at him from the job postings board, one that reads, "Let's go look at some dead people!" Little did he know what he was getting into. With Karatsu's ability to hear the wishes of dead people, the volunteer group meant to pray over the corpses of murder victims is now able to do so much more, and the Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service is born.

Karatsu tells the group what their "client" (corpse) wishes, after Numato "dowses" to find the bodies. Keiko will then often embalm the bodies. Sasaki is the brains behind the service, trying to find out ways to get compensation from the dead bodies. I'm not quite sure of the function of Yata and his puppet except to swear at people. In this first volume, 4 mysteries are solved and justice brought, often by Karatsu's strange ability to reanimate corpses when he's possessed by a spirit.

It's an interesting, quirky concept although very episodic in nature. The group dynamics are fun. There is, however, a lot of full frontal nudity (of corpses and generally not sexual in nature), gore, and language, and some disturbing images. There are moments of gruesomeness but overall the tone is kept light.

[Charles Dee Mitchell · Rating 4 out of 5]

What do you do if you are about to graduate from a small Buddhist college but do not come from a priestly family and therefore have no job opportunities open to you. If you have the proper skills, and a strong stomach, you might join The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service. This group sees to it that corpses abandoned in garbage dumps or found in the woods or the trunks of cars make it home to where their remains truly belong. But special skills do come in handy. One is a computer hacker; one is a dowser able to find corpses not water; one channels a foul-mouthed alien through a hand puppet; another, who for some reason appears to be a little girl, is an embalmer; and, most helpful of all is Kuro Kuratsu who is able to speak to the recently deceased.

Eiji Otsuka's manga series promises to be ghoulish fun. One story involves a necrophiliac father, another a hair dresser determined to assemble the perfect woman. Most surprising is Eiji's ability to write funny dialogue, something you don't get a lot of in manga. There may be visual gags and outrageous situations in most series, but The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service at times has the verbal spark of good comic film writing. In one scene the group argues over whether they need to buy a train ticket for a corpse. Numata, the dowser, has the group constantly eating the same brand of instant noodles so he can collect the labels and enter a contest for a Prada windbreaker. Throughout, they banter and give one another a hard time like any group of twenty-year-olds, they just happen to be carrying around dead bodies.

[Baal Of · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm on the fence about this one. The premise has potential, but the implementation is wanting. The characters, described as weird by other reviewers, are just barely that, because they are so paper thin. I picked this up because I've been desperate to find a good new horror comic, but this just doesn't fit the bill. Even though there are a few mildly gruesome images, I never felt the slightest since of dread that I can get from the best horror comics, such as those by Junji Ito, so for me this doesn't even qualify as horror. The best story of the four in this volume was the one about the serial killing hairstylist but it was flawed by lack of information about the killer's motivations and psychology (again, paper thin characterization), which made it come across as just an attempt at shock. I think I've almost talked myself into dropping this rating to two stars, and I don't think I'll bother picking up any more of the volumes.

[Michelle Leung · Rating 4 out of 5]

This horror manga takes place in modern Japan and follows the exploits of 5 students from a Buddhist college that form a company aiming to fulfil the last wishes of the dead. Most of the group have some sort of supernatural ability , including Kuro who can speak to the dead and hear their last wishes. As you can imagine , not all deaths and bodies they discover die cleanly or of natural causes or accidents so they soon find themselves intertwined with criminals and other nefarious people. Really interesting plot and lots of gore involving the dead bodies here. 😵

[Michael mister.is.me · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nice, fun read, a little dark with a unique perspective.

[kaseii · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

so weird but normal at the same time.

[Lindsay · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting, but a bit too episodic for my tastes.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[M. P. · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first volume of The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service compiles the first four chapters of this still ongoing Japanese comic. The story follows a group of five recently graduated Buddhist university students working in a company dealing with delivering/disposing the dead according to the deceased's own wishes.

I started reading this due to finding the overall concept interesting, as well as for enjoying the cultural differences in funerary practices. Without any prior knowledge of the funerary traditions practiced in Japan, some of the stories may not open up as well as Otsuka clearly has intended. These practices are generally familiar to Japanese readers themselves, hence there is usually a marked absence of explaining any of them in the story. The English translation doesn't bother explaining these very varied traditions alien to most Western readers. It might be best to just try and indulge in the unfamiliar if one is to read this comic without prior knowledge of Japanese funerary rituals and general attitudes towards death.

There is, however, at least a glossary of sound effects at the end of the volume, showcasing many onomatopoetic and mimetic words present in the artwork (for example: Dosa = the sound of body thudding on ground, ba ba = looking around quickly, and pan pan = brushing dirt off pants). I thought that as a fun addition, as sound effects rarely get explained further in translated works of this nature.

The general drawing style seems to have received some flack from quite a few readers displeased with how bland it can seem. True enough, the art isn't flashy or even particularly unique. However, there is a sense of realism and bleakness to it that I enjoy, especially considering the subject matter. It fits the dry humour presented in the story, not to mention, I feel it resents allusions to other horror manga works similar in their artistic atmosphere. I imagine the locations are meant to look familiar, hence they are more bland than fantastic. It all goes to giving off an atmosphere of "this could be going on anywhere". I'm not too sure how I feel about the character designs, though. I enjoy the regular people look they have going on - or would enjoy, if their individual quirks didn't seem so forced. In particular, I'm finding it hard to fully enjoy the character of Yuji, who always wears a talking sock puppet around. Without these sort of things, I'd likely enjoy the designs much, much more. They just seem silly and a little out of place, yes, even in a comic series dealing with supernatural elements.

The chapters itself are a bit too predictable in this volume, but make for some good light reading. The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service is apparently marketed as a horror manga, though I must admit I don't find it scary in any sense of the word. It's too humorous and, well, a little too dull in terms of atmosphere so far to be considered horror. Dead bodies don't automatically count as horror elements to me anyway. I guess you can get the heeby-jeebies if you are a little faint of heart, what with all the images of dismembered bodies, blood, mummified corpses, and the like. Maybe I have my standards high for my disgust'o'meter due to having read much worse things in my life, but I really thought this comic didn't overdo the gory bits in the name of increasing its shock factor.

Overall, the first volume was just about fascinating enough that I'll probably read the second volume and see whether the story keeps being about separate cases or if it'll present a bigger underlying plot later on. Either way, depending on the execution of it all of course, is fine with me.

[#ReadAllTheBooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Mon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not to be confused with what Michael C Hall does in Six Feet Under (that's all I know about funeral practices), the Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service doesn't bother itself with the conventional world of undertakers and those other people who dress in black in funeral homes. It's an odd mix of CSI and the Ghost Whisperer, minus the hot girl. The characters can be described as weird, and nothing much beyond that. It's a bit like a competition of 'draw the quirkiest character you can think of', and all the contestants got included in this book. Also, the religious overtone annoyed me a great deal. I've done theology and its depiction of Buddhism is neither accurate nor entertaining. But then, the protagonist's meant to be a crappy student (like every other male manga teenage lead), so I guess it evens out.

[Anne Barwell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed this manga - sadly the library only has the first vol, and apparently there are 11 to date so I've asked them to purchase more *crosses fingers*. It's offbeat, gothic humour and the banter is great. The characters are a bit different and that's a lot of the appeal of it. One can talk to the dead, another communicates through a glove puppet on his hand who he says is an alien, another has studied embalming, another is a dowser, can't find water but great at finding dead bodies.

I enjoyed the artwork too - that makes or breaks for me - but be warned there is some nudity, disturbing images in there but that goes along with the plot considering they are dealing with corpses, often murdered ones.

[Meepelous · Rating 2 out of 5]

So I'm not sure if 2/5 is exactly the right rating for this book, it's certainly a high 2/5 for me. But the actual premises of the cases did feel extremely easy and cliche. Sexual violence against women and women sacrificing themselves is what it means to be a woman... But this is certainly not unique to Otsuka and otherwise I did feel like he brought a lot of elements to the table that were at least new to me. Especially the non Abrahamic religion part! I will be picking up a few more book in the series at the very least to see how things go.

[Svetlana · Rating 3 out of 5]

This volume doesn’t look like a story with a some plot, but instead 4 separate stories only connected by the same idea and the same characters.
The stories are okay, but there no contribution neither to the storyline not to the characters. In the stories the characters and their abilities introduced again and again. Because there no characters development they look flat.
Will try another volume to see if the story will get some development.

[Derek Royal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reread in preparation for the September manga episode of The Comics Alternative: http://comicsalternative.com/manga-re.... This is one of the first examples of manga I really got to know, so I have a fondness for this series. It's like Scooby-Doo meets Rockford Files meets Stephen King.

[Rosie · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you love creepy and messed up things this is the book for you! It was just a tad too creepy for me.

[Kristina Robbins · Rating 4 out of 5]

That was all sorts of strange. I wasn't sure about it at first but it's growing on me. Will probably get Vol. 2 from the library.

[Noninuna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another Goodreads' recommendation that I've tried and good job, algorithm, for pointing this to me! I give full-mark, no question asked. 👍👍

It's about 5 students who're facing the impending unemployment after they graduate from a Buddhist university, creating opportunity out of the talents that they have; one mastermind, one can talk to the corpse, one can detect them, one expert in embalming and another one can channel... alien. This is what 'if you cannot have the job, create one' mentality at it best! I still cant quite grasp the job's scope of the last one tho I already finished omnibus 1. Haven't read anything horror that quite like this. It was shocking in the sense of I was not expecting anything like it is but not too gruesome or gross. Still, glad that I read it before dark. 😅

Art style? It's pleasant, nothing too fancy. Would I continue with the series? Of course!😋

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed reading this manga. Maybe because I’m a fan of the paranormal as well as being interested in death.

The book focuses on the members of a group, who create a company to deliver corpse to where they want to be. I think it’s quite an honourable thing when you think about how many people leave things behind when they die.

There were a lot of interesting stories, from a pop star that has a creep for a father, a serial killer and a serial killer by probability?

I thought the stories were entertaining and there was some humour in them. I would recommend it if you are like me and are darkly inclined or have an interest in crime stories.