In general, the tone of Kurosagi is much less campy than Rei Makamoto's action horror series, which suits writer Eiji Otsuka's frequently somber material. Our heroes' mission is to be at the beck and call of the unsettled dead: whether it's to bring the client's killer to justice or simply find them a suitable spot to rest in peace. After being passed on a winning lottery ticket by their first "client," Ao christens the business the Kurosagi (the word means "black crane") Corpse Delivery Service, though the job isn't always necessarily a profitable one. In the second episode our quintet (six, counting the nasty puppet) helps an elderly suicide find a "Dendera Field," a temple housing the dead, which turns out to be more difficult than we Western readers would immediately guess. There are marked differences between the way the deceased are handled in the U.S. and Japan (for one, they don't have the same obsession with body preservation that we do), and the poverty-stricken elderly, in particular, appear to truly be out of luck.
Volume one shifts from vengeance-driven ghost story to mournful consideration of death to full-tilt corpse-strewn horror story, and artist Yamazaki is beautifully suited for the material. It's almost sterilely smooth; he has a strong knack for rendering expressive faces and he doesn't shy away from in-yer-face grisly imagery. In places, the artist recalls Naoki Urasawa of Monster (not a bad place to be), especially in the way he evokes a sense of brightly lit dread. More than the weakly illustrated adaptations of The Ring which Dark Horse released a couple of years back, KCDS does a bang-up job serving up a visual manga counterpart to the contemporary urban Japanese horror flick.
Definitely recommended – at least until Otsuka brings in the aliens to "explain" puppet boy Yata.
Article comments
1 - Natalie Bennett
This article has been selected for syndication to Advance.net, which is affiliated with newspapers around the United States. Nice work!