The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service Vol 10. Eiji Otsuka (Writer), Housui Yamazaki (Art) Toshifumi Yoshida (Translator) Dark Horse Magna (2010)

A superb mix of gore and black humour with a brilliant story premise and a engaging and very well defined cast. The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service are a group of people who locate corpses and deliver them according to the corpse's last wishes. The first story in the collection presents a problem to the Kurosagi team, corpses appear to be disappearing and when they do find one they do not want to assist it. They find that they are not the only ones looking for corpses and when they encounter a policeman with a very particular interest in them a deeply sad and gripping story unfolds. The second story takes a Japanese legend about the murder of a guest and gives it a very modern and grimly funny makeover. The final story ties up a television programme featuring a "psychic" and look at the background of one of the team. The mix of satire, comedy, gore and character is astonishing.
The most striking aspect to the collection is the variety of the stories, they use the same premise and team and manage to follow very different directions in each case. Eiji Otsuka has a talent for mixing up genre requirements with the unexpected and entirely appropriate, the comedy and gore sit very comfortably with the strongly emotional currents within the stories. The cast are given room to shine over the effects. The clean lines and detail of the art by Housui Yamazaki are a pleasure to read. The corpses have a satisfying grimness to them, their injuries are explicit, their rage is clear.
An outstanding aspect to the book is the final section, "Disjecta Membra" by the editor Greg Horn. Not only does it include a very informative essay about Japanese written characters, it is a glossary of the sound effects and other items within the comic. They are funny, surprising and hugely enjoyable, very much like the stories themselves. A great read.

The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Servive. Volume 1. Eiji Otsuka (Writer), Housui Yamazaki (Art). Dark Horse Manga (2006)

A collection of superb and gruesome ghost stories. Five students from a Buddhist university in Japan who are facing unemployment combine to provide a service to corpses that they locate whose spirits have unfinished business tying them to their bodies. Their skills include dowsing for corpses, embalming, channeling an alien intelligence via a glove puppet, advanced Internet skills and speaking with the dead. Speaking rather than reanimating the dead, the book is not a zombie story, the intent is to establish what the trapped spirit requires. The cast are engaging and individual, the stories are sharply, blackly humorous, suitably gruesome and the art is a delight.
The stories are excellent, compact, contemporary ghost stories with a effective gruesome aspect. Lurking beneath the surface of these stories is a sly commentary about Japan, it is not an awkward addition to the entertainment, it flows naturally from the context of the stories. The stories are concerned with the abandoned dead and how they arrived in that state. This context for the stories naturally follows some of the less obvious nooks and crannies of Japanese society and casting a light cannot avoid raising a question.
The wonderful line art captures both aspects of the stories, the mundane and the supernatural, and merges them seamlessly. The supernatural is placed so neatly in the settings that it does not atrach undue attention nor overbalance the art. The cast are very individual, the body language is clear and action fluid and strong. Excellent comics

Mail. Volume 3. Housui Yamazaki (Writer & Artist). Dark Horse Magna. (2007)

The third volume of contemporary ghost stories maintains the very high standard of the previous volumes. There is no overarching continuity between the volumes so that they can be read independently without any loss. The opening story does strike a very different note, it opens with the series narrator, the ghost detective, Akiba, recounting an episode from his childhood when he was blind. The artwork for this episode is very nicely done and distinctively different to the art anywhere else in the series. The resolution to the story is equally very different. Housui Yamazaki does not do a great deal more with the set up created in the first story, it is followed up in the second story and then it fades away as a dramatic issue.
The remaining stories are concerned with how people come into contact with ghosts and how Akiba resolves the situation. As ever the set ups are cleverly done, anchored in contemporary life, one haunting is done via a mobile phone. The stories are all short, they all are very carefully paced so that that the person who is involved in the haunting is introduced and the haunting is given room to develop. This draws the reader into the story in a nice way and adds weight to the single page and double page spreads where the ghost reveals themselves. Keeping Akiba to the minimum means that he is not used up, his interventions remain effective.
For me the stand out story in this volume is one about a failed suicide/murder and the sad and finally menacing repercussions. These are too low key to be horror stories, they very effective examples of cunningly compressed storytelling, they bear re-reading as they are not dependant on a surprise to drawn in the reader. Excellent stories, a pleasure.

Mail. Volume 2. Houdui Yamazaki. Dark Horse Manga (2006)

A second volume of contemporary ghost stories that are as vivid and compelling as the stories in the first volume. The creator Housui Yamazaki has taken on a very difficult task, he has to create a story featuring a ghost posing a substantial threat to someone and have that threat resolved by the detective Reiji Akiba using his spirit gun both with a limited number of pages, he also has to have enough variety to prevent the formula becoming stale or repetitive. The stories in this volume show that he is easily up to the challenge, there is a nice variety of circumstance and resolution to ensure that the reader will not guess the possibilities too easily. The ghosts are more menacing this time round, their appearances are more violent and their appearances are more gruesome. This is still not a splatter book, it is just that some of the art is nicely explicit. The emphasis remains in all the stories on the living and how or why they have become entangled with the ghosts. Sometimes they have had a direct involvement with the ghosts and there is unfinished business that is keeping the ghost involved in their lives other times it is just bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The art is great, it is nicely understated except when the ghosts appear, the context is normal and unremarkable, homes, cars and very strikingly in a lift. The ghosts themselves are needy, existing in a everlasting now unable to change their circumstances without the assistance of the living. None of the stories are very chilling or frightening, they are carefully wrought to be nicely suspenseful and have satisfying resolutions that do not betray the set up. Their quality makes them a pleasure to reread.