Creative Talent
Writer/Artist: Eiji Otsuka / Housui Yamazaki
Translated by: Toshifumi Yoshida
Adapted by: Carl Gustav Horn
What They Say
There's competition on all sides in the body baggage game when Kurosagi finds its rather loose business model challenged by a corporate rival who guarantees the next world on time! But it's not only the clean-cut trying to dig into their market - the oddball duo calling itself the White Heron Corpse Cleaning Service aren't just out to eat Kurosagi's wormy lunch, they're going to start revealing trade secrets: namely, the hideous history behind the ghost which haunts Karatsu!
The Review
As Carl Horn notes in the appendix, Volume 6 of Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service applies a few new twists to the Kurosagi formula that we haven't seen before in the series. "A Letter for You" takes some obvious jabs (well, obvious for Kurosagi's Japanese audience, anyway) at the recent privatization of Japan's postal system, introducing a local postal service branch that cuts into Kurosagi's business as a last-ditch effort to stay afloat. Numata's own financial problems send him apartment-hunting in "If You're With Me", where he ends up forced to rent the very same apartment where one of his previous clients died. The discovery of a second corpse in the apartment's rafters leads this chapter into "The Two of Us" and "For Whose Good" -- apart from introducing a rare three-part storyline into the series's repertoire, Otsuka also calls in a cameo from his own MPD Psycho series. The most striking twist in the series formula, however, comes in the two-part "Kunio Matsuko Demon Hunting Side Story". Set in the Meiji period, these closing chapters drop real-world authors Kunio Matsuoka and Rokuya Tayama (aka Kunio Yanagita and Katai Tayama) into a fictional Sherlock Holmes-investigation of a prostitute-murdering serial killer.
Unfortunately, these changes aren't enough to stop the downward slide in storytelling quality that started last volume; in some cases, they even make things worse. Otsuka displaces the previous volumes' sharp wit and black humor with silly gags and gimmicks that aren't half as clever as he seems to think they are. Bringing a rival delivery service into the plot smacks of desperate retooling, while the MPD Psycho crossover quickly degenerates into lots of winking at the audience. The worst offender, though, is the two-chapter side story that closes the volume out; Otsuka's dull portrayal of Matsuoka and Tayama are poor substitutes for Kurosagi's colorful main cast and their snappy banter, which have arguably been the best things the series has had going for it.
None of the chapters in Volume 6 of Kurosagi Delivery Service gripped me in the way that past volumes have, making this the first volume in the series that I don't recommend readers to pick up. I sincerely hope that these disappointing last couple of releases turn out to be an anomaly rather than signs of things to come.
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