Stuff I Read – Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service Vol 7
Well ask and you shall receive, I guess. After the last volume failed to follow through with developing any of the ongoing story threads in the series, volume seven delves back into things with another appearance from the Shirosagi Corpse Cleaning Service. It’s a nice play off of the main group, especially seeing as how the Cleaning Service actually gets work. But we do get some development, and get to see perhaps the main villain of the series, the apparent mother of the spirit that has been helping the group. The volume also does a nice job of offering some good laughs in the first story and changing things up in the second, longer story, as in that one the main character is out of commission for most of the action. The last story goes back to the rather light hearted and gives a very short take on a movie being shot. Really the first and last stories are quite short, while the middle is the biggest chunk and is taken up with the most important material, so the form of this book seems to be the best since the second volume, really, or maybe out of the entire series. The form does nice to get us in, to give a light story, then a fairly dense one with a lot of things happening, then back to a rather simple story. Each have memorable parts, though the last one is the least memorable in my opinion, but it all works.
The first story panders a bit to nerds, as it revolves around the idea of robots and deals with a set of nerd characters trying to make a robot suit useful. These nerds eventually end up using a human brain to help the robot move, but it ends up going a bit berserk and trying to kill people, to fairly hilarious results. It is nice to see the whole otaku culture come out for this, and it is rather clever on the level that this manga comments on other manga and things like that, characters casting judgments on the losers who devote themselves to things like this series. So it gets points with me for that. The down side is that, as only one part out of five or six, there isn’t a whole lot here. There really is no mystery, and the real story is this robot trying to kill people, which is pretty funny as this nerd now given a robot body fails to succeed in doing anything. Meaning that even undead and given a mech suit, basically, this nerd is still a nerd, still unable to be potent. So the laughs are there, and it also shows the main character use his power to exorcise the spirit, a new skill.
The second story deserve the most time and discussion, though, as it is the longest of the stories in this volume, either three or four long, and deals with the overarching story. In it the group starts coming across these weird faces that are showing up on other people. More precisely, these faces show up on ears that have been transplanted onto people in a plastic surgery promotion where they have licensed the body parts of an old celebrity. It turns out that they killed the celebrity and are working with her daughter to try and lay a trap for the Kurosagi gang and, more importantly it seems, for the main character and his spirit guardian. Which works, at first, and as he goes to talk with the face the two are pulled into a trap by a very vengeful spirit that turns out to be the mother of the spirit that protects the group. The mother is apparently engaged in some campaign to punish every blood relative of a group that killed her, no matter how slight the connection. The Shirosagi pair seem to be working with this spirit, and might be that spirit’s way of punishing the living.
In any event, this switches things up, as it means the rest of the group has to cope without the main character, and the female manager of the group takes a more central role in this story, going as far as to be able to summon the trapped spirit at some point. This opens the possibility that she also possesses some power that has not been explored yet, and means that it might be no accident that she got everyone together. On the whole the story is given enough time to breath and develop, and the various people are given fair time to shine. They delve into the mystery and it is nice to see something a bit different, as much of this series can feel very similar at times. But here we have to development and changes, and the story itself moves at a good pace and turns out to be interesting, full of weird shit, which is always good in this series. And it progresses the larger story, or at least reveals more of it, which is appreciated.
The last story is a short one involving a movie that the group is called into help with, which quickly turns out to involve murder and such. I don’t have a whole lot to say about this story, because while it was fairly entertaining, it really didn’t do anything new. This is sort of the “everything back to normal” story following the one where things actually happen, and it is nice to see that Kurosagi isn’t going to go changing anytime soon, but it doesn’t really do much more than that. It is funny at times, and good throughout. And all told this was a solid addition to the series. It was very nice to see the development, and the humor and weirdness is all still there and nice and does what it needs to do. And so, for the seventh volume of this series, I consider this a step up and give it an 8.5/10.