Toru Muhyo and Jiro Kusano, the title leads in Yoskiyuki Nishi's Shonen Jump manga series Muhyo & Roji's Bureau of Supernatural Investigation (Viz Media), look pretty unprepossessing to be a pair of professional ghostbusters. Executor Muhyo, in particular, appears too child-like to wield the mighty Book of Magic Law. Cartoonishly rendered, short and possessing a head one character describes as shaped like a turnip, the magical prodigy nonetheless possesses the power and authority to send troublesome spirits to the afterlife. His second clerk Jiro (a.k.a. Roji) is taller and a few undefined years older, but looks even more like a wide-eyed innocent. Yet, per this teen-rated series, the duo is adept at corralling rampaging supernatural entities.
Clearly, it's a job that needs to be done. "Over 80,000 people go missing in Japan each year," Roji explains to a client. "A full tenth of that is thought to be due to ghosts." Our heroes, it should be noted, operate under a broader definition of ghost than you might initially expect. In one of the six cases featured in the first volume of Muhyo & Roji's BSI, a musical prodigy is harassed by the jealous emotions of her audience made manifest: a featureless creature with arms that reach to the floor and great snapping teeth. ("He bites," Muhyo helpfully explains.) In another, an antique chair becomes parasitized and attempts to devour the hapless Roji. "Happens a lot to older things," Muhyo says. "It lies dormant for years, waiting for a chance to feed!"
Who knew that antiquing could be so dangerous?
All six of the first volume's "articles" essentially conclude the same way: with Muhyo pronouncing the haunter guilty of some transgression of supernatural law ("unauthorized spectral transmutation and the impediment of magic law," for instance) and sentencing them to an imaginative afterlife punishment. The pleasure in each of these tales primarily lies in writer/artist Yoshijuki Nishi's inventive visual realization of these outlandish devices. Unlike the older-aged Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service or Housai Yamazaki's Mail, which also focus on the living's attempts at righting the afterlife, the tone in BSI is meant to be more comic than frightening. Though, as with all three series, the strongest entries are the ones with a trace of sadness to 'em.
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