Genre Horror
Age Rating 18+
Price $10.99

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.

My initial impression of the first volume of Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service is that it's one of the few manga that was given the utmost care when it comes to translating and adapting it for the English-speaking market. The cover, which is printed on thicker-than-normal paper stock, remains faithful to its Japanese counterpart and involved in the translation and editing are Toshifumi Yoshida and Carl Gustav Horn respectively, two prominent names in the US anime/manga scene. The Japanese sound effects were retained and at the back of the volume is a comprehensive glossary and explanation on how those sound effects work.

But enough of all this geeky talk about how faithful the adaptation is. How does Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service fare? One thing I can say about it is that it's clearly original. Despite the horror genre label attached to it by Dark Horse, this manga is really more of a supernatural mystery. The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service are a ragtag bunch of unemployed Buddhist monks who try to earn money by fulfilling the final wishes of the dead. Each member of the group fulfills a certain niche in the business, such as one can find dead bodies, another can embalm them to preserve them, and our main character, Kuro, can talk to the dead.

For me, this series is more of a supernatural mystery and not horror mainly because the story doesn't intent to scare you. However, it has a lot of gruesome, morbid, and even perverse scenes that are well-drawn and illustrated that it easily rivals, if not outmatches, any of the C.S.I. and Cold Case shows you see on TV. And since we're talking about dead bodies here, our intrepid protagonists typically have to figure out how how the person in question died in the first place and how that relates to their final wishes. There's not lots of violence or fighting in the manga but there are lots of investigation.

There are four chapters in the first volume and each one stands well on its own, although the first chapter introduces the group's origin and premise. Still, readers won't have trouble jumping blindly from one chapter to another as they are self-contained. Yamazaki is talented enough to be the artist for the series and able to draw detailed pictures--especially that of dead bodies--that are quite expressive. The title is strictly for adults although there are some stories that are suitable enough for kids, it's just that parents might want to shield them from the realistic corpses. Aside from that, well, the title certainly isn't for everybody, especially if you're looking for lots of action or even horror. There is lots of investigation however and is probably the type that will tickle the sci-fi reader's fancy.

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