Manga Review: Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service Omnibus Edition 5 story by Eiji Otsuka, art by Hosui Yamazaki
Well, it’s been a long time since I looked at this series. Mainly because Dark Horse decided that sales weren’t good enough to economically produce the individual volumes, so they started reprinting Kurosagi in an omnibus edition that has three normal volumes in one big block. This volume includes #13-15 and came out in 2022–the next volume is due out January 2026.
Quick recap: Five students at a small Buddhist college discover that each of them has unusual powers or skills related to death. A corpse asks for assistance with its last wish, they help it out, and receive a reward. Thus they stick together as a small business, the Kurosagi (Black Heron) Corpse Delivery Service. They find the dead and help them to rest–and do odd jobs during dry spells.
The five members are: Kuro Karatsu, who has mediumistic powers that allow him to communicate with and temporarily reanimate the dead; Makoto Numanta, who has dowsing powers, but only to find corpses; Ao Sasaki, a hacker and business major that acts as the manager of the business; Keiko Makino, who trained in embalming in America and is the closest thing the team has to a coroner; and Yuji Yata, who apparently channels the alien mind Kereellis through a sock puppet.
They’re often unofficially hired by social worker Sasayama, a former police detective that was invalided out of the force.
In most of the volumes, there’s three “cases”, often dealing with social issues, “weird” Japanese cultural oddities, or modern retellings of folklore.
The volume opens with Karatsu and Sasaki returning from a vacation where Sasaki discovered she’s more closely connected to her coworker than she knew. It’s not clear if she told Karatsu about it. Sasayama calls the team in on a series of vehicular accidents/suicides. They are all men in their 20s/30s, wearing Mookey Mouse hats. There’s obviously a connection, but what?
Karatsu’s powers are on the fritz for…reasons, so the Kurosagi crew has to use more mundane methods to investigate. It turns out that the killer may already be dead. Also, the mysterious Shirosagi (White Heron) group are lurking in the background, but don’t expect any explanations or movement on their subplot.
Next up, Sasaki is called up to act as a “lay judge” in a murder case. It’s kind of like being on a jury in the U.S., but with its own twists. Even though the accused has already confessed, there still has to be a fact-finding trial. One of the other lay judges mentions that he’s getting the distinct feeling that the accused isn’t the murderer, but he can’t prove anything, so is shut down by the chief judge.
Sasaki is interested, though, because she’s noticed some anomalies in the evidence, and that the chief judge seems awfully invested in making sure they rush to a predetermined conclusion. The poetry of Rimbaud is a major clue, and with the help of her team, Sasaki is able to pull a Perry Mason-style courtroom trick to expose the truth.
Then it’s time for an odd job, helping clean up an abandoned construction site in preparation for turning it into a park. There’s an unusual abundance of ancient grains here, but also a buried corpse that’s been chopped up, along with a dogu statuette that radiates anger. Could this have something to do with the disappearance of a graduate student?
Skipping to the next section, the Kurosagi crew has become something of an urban legend themselves, which has inspired a set of imposters who make corpses disappear for a fee. The trail leads to a corrupt politician and a dam project that’s finally outlasted the protestors.
There’s also a fellow who’s apparently created a smartphone app that detects the thoughts of the angry dead.
Of interest is that the imposters have special skills of their own that allow them to evade immediate traps.
Then there’s a short story which has an American cartoon version of the crew, adapting them for stereotypical American roles and making them pizza delivery people between jobs. The villains are making leather goods of tattooed human skin,
This turns out to be a bootleg DVD for an unsold pilot that Numata bought, but one of the items in the story turns out to be very real.
Next up, there’s a story about a museum of execution devices that’s being shuttered just as the legislature is looking into suspected embezzling of government funds. The truth is rather more bizarre.
On to the newest volume! Sasayama offers the team a job checking up on centenarians, people who are supposedly over a hundred years old and still pulling down government assistance. In some cases, it’s known, the elder has died and the family conceals this to keep getting that sweet government cash. Those dead people could be clients for Kurosagi.
This turns out to be something of a wild goose chase at first, as many of the files simply have old addresses that no longer exist, and the people who lived there are long gone, so it’s just fixing the records.
But then the fellows find what looks like a corpse in the garbage outside a upper-income house. It’s just an elderly bag lady, but she claims to be dead, possibly because of the old head wound affecting her brain. She suffers from partial amnesia and fugue states, and wants to go to her family grave. Things get more complicated when it turns out the person who gave the old woman the head wound is still around, and still wants the fortune he was trying to steal from her.
This turns out to be a modern version of the “spirited away” folklore.
The next case involves a feud between two motorcycle gangs complicated by a third group of headless bikers. This turns out to be a sequel to the execution museum case, and also bring back the three robotics students whose wacky inventions inconvenience our heroes.
The volume concludes with a story about a survivor of an attack by an Aum Shinrikyo-style cult who has the ability to draw recreations of anything he sees on television. It turns out he’s not been doing this randomly, but every time the man who attacked him was in the background of a news show presentation. The man has just been seen in the background of a story about the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
So the boy has gone into the irradiated area to look for his attacker, and the Kurosagi crew goes after him to try to rescue him. It turns out the cult member has an evil plan to make Japan suffer, and that has to be stopped too.
The art continues to be excellent, and the writing is thick with references and research. So much so, that each volume comes with copious translation notes explaining what we’re reading that might be missed.
The big block of book is rather clumsy to read, but packs a lot of interest into one package. I am given to understand that there will only need to be two omnibus volumes after this one to complete the series.
Content note: Murder, suicide, other violence. Human sacrifice. Corpses in various stages of mutilation and decay. Sexual assault. Nudity. Stalking. Incontinence. Definitely older teens up, this is strong stuff.
Recommended for cerebral horror fans.
