The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, Vol. 1

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... 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... the dead who are still trapped in their corpses and can't move on to the next reincarnation. The five form the Kurosagi ("Black Heron" - their ominous bird logo) Corpse Delivery Service: whether suicide, murder, accident, or illness, they'll carry your body wherever it needs to go to free your soul! The kids from Kurosagi can smell a customer a mile away - it's a good thing one of the girls majored in embalming!

From Booklist

Sometimes when people die, their souls can't move on without help. In Tokyo, five Buddhist university students find how to use their unique skills to provide the help the city's dead need. Kuro Karatsu can hear the voices of the dead, who mostly just want to tell him where they want to go before they can move on, and Ao Sasaki leads a group of student volunteers to find and chant prayers over the dead. When a suicide requests burial with his secret love, a faded pop idol, the helpers afterward find the dead man's winning lottery ticket. Entrepreneurial Ao sees this as a sign that the dead will pay for the unique services they provide. The ensuing dark comedy fearlessly embraces adult humor, including nudity and plenty of gore, yet Otsuka preserves the reverent spirit of the original premise so well that one chuckles but feels a little wrong. The art, too, is more sophisticated than in traditional manga. Fans of Shaun of the Dead and other zombie flicks ought to love this. Tina ColemanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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