Manga Monday/Graphic Is Great: Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service

Ah, summer reading programs.  Love them or hate them, anticipate them or fear them, if you're in the business of public library science, they are unavoidable.  Personally, I embrace them, as they get people reading, enhance statistics, and are good publicity.  At the little library where I'm director, the summer reading program has been going great, with more than 100 children signed up to read and earn prizes.  There are smaller programs for high school students and adults, too, with the potential to win prizes from drawings at the end of the program.

My hometown library also has a robust summer reading program for adults, and since I don't work there, I can participate.  Every checkout of books or audiobooks gets me an entry slip that I can fill out and put into a prize box of my choice.

And the easiest way to get in a lot of entry forms is reading manga.  Which brings us to this review.

Statistics
Checkouts: N/A
Number of volumes available: 13 in English, 17 in Japanese (ongoing)
Typical reader: Adults who like dark, edgy manga
Source: My local library

Summary: Five students at a Buddhist university are united by unique skills - some mundane, some supernatural - involving the dead.  They form a business of getting corpses to wherever they need to go to free the souls.  Sometimes they profit from this.

My Goodreads rating: 4 to 5 stars

As I tend to review books for the school library setting, let me say this right off the bat: This series is not for children, or even most teens.  It is a very adult horror series, with graphically portrayed dead bodies, full frontal nudity (mostly on corpses), violence, and occasional sex.  The last couple of volumes available have "PARENTAL ADVISORY: EXPLICIT CONTENT" stickers on the covers.  Get over the American idea that comic books are for children.

That said, if you're into dark horror with macabre humor and plenty of social commentary, that keeps things fresh and interesting, this is a great series.  Thirteen volumes are available in English, with more to be translated, and the series is ongoing in its home country.  I was a bit sad to finish volume 13, and hope that the fourteenth will soon be ready stateside.

Most volumes are filled with vignettes of cases that the team takes, which are often one to three chapters long.  (Volume two is a single story arc.)  The stories are influenced by a variety of sources, from traditional lore to urban legends, and from cultural quirks to ripped-from-headline sagas.  The manner of storytelling, and the fact that many jobs do not actually lead to money, makes this series a bit reminiscent of the classic anime, Cowboy Bebop.

Don't miss the glossary and notes at the end of each volume!  I had initially just skimmed the one in the first volume, until I got to one peculiar note.  "196.1 FX: PAKIII - sound of a bolt falling through glasses at terminal velocity into eye socket." (Volume 1, page 215)  Whoa, that's pretty specific.  So I read the rest of the notes.  They're worthwhile, for the humorous specificity as in the above quote, and also the interesting trivia they impart about aspects of Japanese culture, history, locations, and lore that I had previously known nothing of.  You can really learn a lot from the notes.

Which brings me to a last aspect I want to bring up.  While it's not to the level of Gantz for dark social commentary, Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service definitely is -not- afraid to touch on taboo subjects.  Not only does the team go searching for suicide victims in Aokigahara Forest, they also deal with the Iraq War, the remnants of the biological weapons research the Japanese committed in Occupied China during World War II, the Japanese justice system, illegal immigration, athlete doping, infanticide, and more.

In sum, if you like dark humor, social commentary, and vengeful reanimated corpses, check out this series.

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Manga Mondays is a meme used by many book review blogs, and is sort of hosted by Alison Can Read.