跡を消す: 特殊清掃専門会社デッドモーニング

by 前川ほまれ

気ままなフリーター生活を送る浅井航は、ひょんなことから飲み屋で知り合った笹川啓介の会社「デッドモーニング」で働くことになる。そこは、孤立死や自殺など、わけありの死に方をした人たちの部屋を片付ける、特殊清掃専門の会社だった。死の痕跡がありありと残された現場に衝撃を受け、失敗つづきの浅井だが、飄々としている笹川も何かを抱えているようで――。　生きることの意味を真摯なまなざしで描き出す感動作！

Paperback Bunko

Reviews

[Katie G · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Erase all the Traces - Special Cleaning Service Company Dead Morning"
DNF @ 41%.

A freeter (person who does various part-time jobs), 21 year-old Wataru Asai, happens to meet a man named Sasagawa at a bar after his grandma's funeral. After drinking too much Asai vomits a bit on the man's jacket and takes it to the cleaner's for him. When Asai returns the jacket a few days later to the man's office he finds an old building, and on the door to the company's office on the 2nd floor, the door simply has some tape with the company name "Dead Morning" and a cat named Castella who follows him in when the door opens.

Asai then learns that Sasagawa's little business is "Dead Morning" (Sasagawa does the cleaning and he has a secretary) and it does "special cleaning" services. That is, Sasagawa cleans the rooms/apartments where people have died either by suicide or they died alone and their bodies were discovered several days, or weeks later.


He ends up tagging along with Sasagawa that day for a job to an apartment where someone had died alone and was discovered a few weeks after. The apartment is disgusting. It's smelly and full of dead flies that Sasagawa had sprayed with chemicals the day before. The "melted" shadow of the human on the tatami mat also repulses him. Asai is so revolted he ends up puking and then falling asleep in Sasagawa's truck. He vows never to do this job again.

In chapter 2, he ends up tagging along again on a job because he had left something in the Dead Morning office and went back for it and got talked into going again. This time at least, it wasn't so bad. It was a suicide and the man was careful to keep the place neat. It's actually a rather touching chapter where we see a mom deal with grief in a peculiar way, and our protag Asai is also learning how others deal with grief and Asai himself tries to handle them and does a bad job, learning a few lessons himself about other people.

Chapter 3 was where it got really gross and why I stopped reading. 2 months have passed and Asai has continued to do this job. On this day, they show up to a job they think will be easy but turns to be extremely disgusting. The house is full of garbage. The man who comes out to greet them is a weirdo who has absolutely no interest in hygiene or his dead brother. His brother was dead several weeks before he realized it even though the live together. They go into the room where the brother had died and there are flies, maggots and fly pupae among anime figurines and computers. On top of how gross the description was, our main protag Asai is a bit of a pervert and we occasionally get to hear his gross thoughts about women.

The disgusting scenes of death coupled with the perverted male thoughts about women compounded to be a bit too repulsive to me so I decided to leave it unfinished. I would have liked to know some more of the characters - a woman who came to pick up all the trash to dispose of it who was extremely strong, and the female Dead Morning secretary who likes sweets but not enough to continue the book.


(read in Japanese)