Underrated Manga: Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service

With American anime sales on a downward trend, a lot of attention is being paid to its partner in crime manga, the Japanese comics that are often adapted into anime (if they’re not already adaptations themselves). In North America and Europe manga has exploded, but the sheer volume of manga published in Japan means that not every series makes it over here— and even the ones that do don’t always get the attention that they deserve! So here’s one of our Top Ten Underrated Manga that we recommend that you should get your hands on:

Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service

Five university students with abilities that range from channeling spirits to dowsing (finding dead bodies) to ESP form a company called the Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, an organization that communicates with the dead and transports their bodies to wherever they need to go in order to allow their spirits to move on to the next world.

In the manga, a guy named Kuro “speaks” with the recently dead in order to ascertain their wishes. Makato dowses to find their bodies, and embalmer Keiko handles the corpses they find. To this mix, add business genius and hacker Ao and a strange boy named Yuji who wears a puppet on his left hand that allegedly channels an alien life form.
The resulting series, rated adults-only for violence, gore, and sexual content, offers a series of suspenseful mysteries combined with the goofy humor that often comes from throwing a ragtag group of people like the KCDS employees together.

Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service is currently being released in English by manga publisher Dark Horse, so if you’re into a very dark humor and lots of blood and dead bodies, be sure to pick up the first volume.

Gia Manry is a Portland, OR-based professional writer specializing in pop culture/entertainment writing. Read up on more of her work at giapet.net or hire her at GiaManry.com.