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. (This review is based on complimentary copies supplied by the publisher.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. If you can handle that, though, it’s a worthwhile read, wrapping mystery, horror, and ensemble humor into a very attractive package. The corpses are plentiful and right in your face. Kurosagi is definitely not for younger or more sensitive readers. Horn also adds cultural and personal notes, which make this section much more entertaining than most endnotes. The endnotes are mainly translations of the sound effects (such as yurai, the sound of a body floating in water). Yamazaki’s art style is clear and expressive, and Dark Horse does a great job with production: high-quality paper, attractive design, and copious endnotes by editor Carl Gustav Horn. I really enjoyed watching the students try to get to the bottom of each case the characters are well defined and work nicely together, although the kid with the puppet is a bit much.
#Kurosagi corpse delivery service volume 7 online full#
Less would have been more in some of the other sequences a decaying hand with flies buzzing around it is plenty scary, while a full view of a bloody, animated corpse lurching across the room, guts plopping on the floor, is more cartoony and ultimately less effective.ĭespite these flaws, there is a lot to like about Kurosagi. These scenes aren’t gratuitous-they are necessary to the story being told-but that necrophiliac vibe was just a bit too creepy for me. What got to me was the leering father leaning over his dead, naked daughter, or the naked woman suspended on a wall in an obvious S&M position. Yamazaki’s clean-lined style is sterile enough that even the drawings of slashed or decaying corpses didn’t gross me out. Yes, it’s grotesque, but it wraps in a good whodunit and some glimpses of human longing. The second volume is a single long story about a mortuary that offers a new service: re-animating the dead so the relatives of their victims can wreak revenge. The other, about an evil actuary, is quite clever and a fun read. One is about an old woman who sacrifices herself to save her family, and it’s not only poignant but makes a larger point. I thought the other two stories were more satisfying. Fair enough, but that gets old in a hurry. The first and the third are simple gore-fests in which dead victims wreak horrific revenge on their tormentors.
The first volume contains four short stories, each well told and neatly resolved but varying in their gross-out factor. It’s hard to say “These stories are unrealistic” when they start with a man who can talk to the dead, but there is an emotional truth to them that vanishes once the friends and relatives come into focus. The departed, even an executed murderer, are sympathetic creatures, and the students themselves are a fine and likeable group, but the people they deal with are just grotesque. Kurosagi shies away from that emotional territory. The task of helping the souls of the dead find peace crops up often in Japanese and world literature, and usually it involves the living as well-offering comfort, completing unfinished tasks, tying up loose ends. What’s missing from most of these stories is the human element. There’s the ensemble of talented misfits, the puzzle of how they can get the dead to pay for the service, and the many logistical difficulties involved in transporting decaying corpses back to headquarters and then to their final resting places. You can’t beat the concept of Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service: An otherwise unemployable group of Buddhist students set up a business to help the dead find eternal peace.
0 kommentar(er)
