The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service - Plot, Setting and Structure

Plot, Setting and Structure

The series deals with the exploits of five young graduates of a Buddhist college, all of which have a special skill, some of them supernatural and/or involving dead bodies. Most notable is Kuro Karatsu who has the ability to "speak" to the recently deceased and hear their last wishes. On this basis the group forms a business venture to fulfill said wishes in hopes for compensation. However, because corpses do not always die of natural causes or accidents, the group often encounters criminal activity or such compensation is unattainable.

The series is ostensibly set in modern day Japan with the main characters hanging around the Buddhist college near Tokyo the main characters attended, though the characters often travel elsewhere for summer jobs or to fulfill their "clients" wishes. Tokyo, usually Shinjuku, is often visited though it is not known exactly where the college is located in relation to the greater Tokyo metropolitan area. The manga also seems to be set in the same universe as MPD Psycho and Mail, other series that the authors Otsuka and Yamazaki respectively have worked on, as characters of these series appear in it.

The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service is usually structured into self-contained chapters though some successive stories, most notably the entire second volume, are one continuous story. This changes in later volumes due to a change in serialization. The stories stay self-contained, but span two or three chapters which have fewer pages than chapters at the start of the series. Most chapters are named after a Japanese pop song with each chapter in a single volume usually named for songs by the same artist. The English release by Dark Horse Comics is notable for extensive translation notes and explanations in the back of the manga. An example would be information about the artists of the songs the chapters are named for.

Each volume of the manga features a structural drawing of a body on the cover that is relevant to one of the stories within starting with Volume 3. The cover and backcover also features a depiction of all the company members. However, only Karatsu gets a Mugshot on each cover while the other characters may appear in some other manner or are hinted at. Above this depiction they are only identified as "Staff A" through "Staff E" (with the felt puppet Kere Ellis being "Staff E'") and a description of their skill underneath. In the japanese edition, the volumes come with a dust jacket using a paper stock similar to brown wrapping paper. Dark Horse attempted to emulate this cover style by using a similar stock for the cover of the English edition. However, starting with volume 12 Dark Horse switched to a more glossy paper stock for cost cutting reasons.