The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service Omnibus vol. 5
It’s. Finally. Here.
“Kurosagi’s” return was originally announced back at Anime Expo in July 2019 with this fifth omnibus including the never-before-published vol. 15 set for March 2020, and a sixth omnibus of three new volumes to arrive later that year. I don’t think I need to tell you how those plans were interrupted. Given that this series has always been particularly sales-challenged, I was afraid that we’d seen the last of this series in English.
That is, until I found out at the Dark Horse panel at this year’s Fanime that vol. 5 would FINALLY be arriving in August. It was the best comics news I’d heard all year and I made sure to get my hands on this collection as soon as I could. Now that I’ve read through it, I can say that even though vol. 15 doesn’t offer anything truly surprising for the series, it’s still more of a good thing.
The review below will be all about my thoughts on vol. 15. If anyone’s curious about what I thought about volumes 13 and 14, you can check out my thoughts here and here.
The first story in vol. 15 involves a familiar setup: Karatsu, Numata, and Yata (and Kerellis) being recruited social welfare worker Sasayama to investigate the homes of centenarians to find out if they’re still alive or not. Most of the people they find are, until they get to a junk-filled apartment with a hand sticking out of the trash. Surprisingly, the person it’s attached to isn’t a corpse even though she believes herself to be one. Cotard’s Syndrome notwithstanding, Numata takes her back to his place so he can see if the people who follow his dowsing blog can help them figure out who she is. Which they do because, after he returns having stepped out for a bit, Numata finds that someone has broken into his apartment and kidnapped the elderly woman.
If “Kurosagi” was a series that had a strong ongoing plotline I’d be hoping that its return delivered some meaningful advancements of it to convince me that it was still firing on all cylinders. As the series has made it clear that it’s not about that kind at all, I’m just hoping to get some oddball plot elements, find out about some esoteric knowledge, and enjoy some of the best translated/localized dialogue in manga. This opening story had all of these things, and even a proper hint of tragedy as we find out about the old lady’s history. It all wraps up in a tidy fashion, but I was still entertained.
The next story is a bit more distinctive in that it involves rival biker gangs, the return of Tezuka, Tomino, and Nagai from the School of Robotics, and has some ties to the story that closed out vol. 14. It starts off with the Kurosagi crew trying to get some footage of bikers for a TV special on the urban legend of a headless biker. What they find is the Robotics Trio’s latest scheme involving corpses – this time to make a delivery service of their own. The problem is that one of the corpses they used for their motorcycle fleet used to lead a biker gang and when he senses that his old comrades are in trouble… well, you can probably guess what happens next.
It’s a goofy little lark, enlivened by some minor revelations about Numata’s past, an entertainingly ridiculous fight between their two leaders, the Robotics Trio’s presence and some choice bits of localization regarding them. By that last part I’m talking about scenes like the one where Tomino is possessed by the gang leader and exclaims, “FOUR WHEELS MOVE THE BODY! TWO WHEELS MOVE THE SOUL!” while Nagai and Tezuka try to figure out if the line is from “Gundam Seed” or “Victory Gundam.” Other highlights include how the reveal that the biker fleet is driving Honda Super Cubs is characterized by, “These guys are, at best, distant cousins of anarchy!” or the ice burn against one of Yoshiyuki Tomino’s worst series, “Brain Power(d).” There’s more quality lines here, but this is the story in vol. 15 that benefits most from Carl Horn’s localization.
Then we come to the last story in the volume that manages to tie together two of Japan’s national tragedies. Those would be the sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway by the Aum Shinrikyo cult and the Fukushima power plant disaster. The story starts off ominously enough with a family being murdered, with only their youngest son escaping death after he cracks his head after falling down some stairs. What follows is the boy’s story over a decade later as he lives in an orphanage drawing detailed pictures of what he sees on TV. One such picture of the Fukushima cleanup captures the crew’s eye and may actually prove key to catching the man who killed this boy’s family all those years ago.
This was the best story in vol. 15 mainly due to a surprising twist halfway through regarding the cult’s involvement. It’s also the story that has the least amount of supernatural elements in the entire volume. Writer Eiji Otsuka likely figured that the story would be able to support itself through the involvement of cults and Fukushima and he was right, while also being able to tie the two together in an interesting, if potentially horrifying, way. There’s also the expected amount of quality dialogue, with Kerellis’ paranoid rantings about radiation being good for a chuckle, though Numata gets the most memorable line with, “Seems we got sweated by some cultist with at Tec-9 trying to take mine!”
For those of you thinking that Horn may have taken some excessive liberties with localizing the dialogue in this volume, all I have to say is, “Welcome to ‘The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery’ service. I hope you stay a while.” I would hope that everyone else who picked up this volume is like me and actively enjoys his localization efforts, which he explains in depth along with other cultural, and personal, notes in the extensive translation notes at the end of this volume. They’re certainly wordier and more prone to digressions in vol. 15. They’re still worth it to read through to the end as you’ll encounter bits as random as his love of the Dead Milkmen, a friend of his old landlady exclaiming “I love the catbus at Burning Man!” and to touch upon the final story’s connection to “The Invisibles.”
Horn also lets us know at the end of these notes that plans are still in place for a sixth omnibus of “Kurosagi” collecting the next three volumes of the series. He also notes that it will likely be more expensive than this one, which retails for $25, given that it would be providing all-new material. I hope he’s only talking about a $5 increase to a $30 price point, but paying a premium for new volumes of this series is something I’m totally fine with. After all, I did effectively re-buy volumes 13 and 14 when I picked up this omnibus. Even if the stories in here feel a little familiar compared to what has come before, there’s still nothing quite like this oddball mix of the supernatural and the esoteric. Nothing better translated for that matter either.