By Eiji Otsuka and Housui Yamazaki
Dark Horse
Rating: Mature (18+)

Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service is a mildly interesting story packaged in a fantastic cover and with footnotes so awesome that they easily overshadow the manga itself.

Here’s the story: Five college students at a Buddhist university have little to no job prospects and are rapidly approaching graduation. They bring together their unique talents to form a team. Kudo is psychic, and can hear the voices of the dead, Numata is a dowser who dowses for corpses, Sasaki is into hacking is the mastermind of the group, Makino majored in embalming – although most Japanese people get cremated, and Yata channels a mysterious voice through a puppet.

Their quirky scooby-doo-esque troop buys a hearse and goes around solving mysteries/crimes at the request of the recently departed. It’s a compelling read. Japan is filled with suicides and old people going off to die alone in fields, and otherwise weird deaths. It’s gory and has adult themes at times, but not so gory or scary or depressing that I wouldn’t like it.

That said the art is kind of mediocre. Sometimes the anatomy is a little off. The paneling is nothing special. The character designs are not spectacular. Having a character who speaks through a puppet was a popular trend around the time this manga was published – there are puppet characters in both Best Student Council (Gokujo Seitokai) and Chibi Vampire (Karin).

The original Japanese editions of Corpse Delivery Service featured a lovely grocery-bag textured brown paper slipcover, which Dark Horse has lovingly reproduced as the color and texture of the cover itself for the American release. Instead of the usual large pictures of the characters, the cover has bad-ass graphic design elements and extremely well-rendered fonts. Unlike other $15 Dark Horse titles, Corpse Delivery Service is only $10.95.

It’s also worth noting that other Dark Horse titles I’ve read featured sound effects that were translated alongside the Japanese sound effects (like in Lady Snowblood and Ohikkoshi). I really like the bilingual sound effects style of translation, because I can pretend to study japanese sound effects in my half-hearted effort to learn Japanese.

I’ve picked up some Broccoli titles with an index of sound effects in the back and found them to be worse than useless in understanding sound effects. Most manga lacks consistent page numbers, plus it’s difficult to count panels depending on the layout. So if the index reads “70.4″ and I’m too lazy to count the un-numbered pages between 65 and 80, and the layout makes it difficult to differentiate panel four, I just end up feeling bad for the person who wrote the sound effects index. They have done a tedious job writing something that no one will read.

Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service goes beyond the pale in it’s index of sound effects, annotated by the manga editor Carl Gustov Horn. Mr. Horn tells us at the start of the index how difficult it is to translate sound effects from Japanese by opening with a mini-essay on linguistics. Here’s an excerpt:

1600 years ago the earliest English speakers, living on the frontier of the Roman Empire, began to use the same letters that the Romans used to write their Latin language, to write out English.

He has gone back over 1600 years in order to bring us the finest explanation of Japanese sound effects that I have ever read.

Later Mr. Horn extolls:

…English is a notoriously difficult language in which to spell properly, and this is in part because it uses an alphabet designed for another language, Latin, whose sounds are different. The challenges the Japanese faced in using the Chinese writing system for their own language were even greater, for whereas English and Latin are at least from a common language family, spoken Japanese is unrelated to the various dialects of spoken Chinese.

This may be hyperbole, but the paragraph above changed my life. No wonder I have such a difficult time spelling in English! Years of laughably bad spelling were suddenly justified. I also spell quite badly in Japanese.

As I continued reading the sound effects translation index, I began to notice more cultural notes, like the one below:

17.1 FX: PAKU PAKU-sound of the puppet’s mouth flapping. Note the game Pac-Man was named for this FX. I asked Japanese Licensing Manager (and translator of DH’s Reiko the Zombie Shop) Michael Gombos why, if that was the case, Pac-Man doesn’t go “paku paku”- I always heard the sound he makes as “waku waku.” Mr. Gombos replied that it is “paku paku.” A case that only demonstrates the point above about different cultures hearing things differently.

This is a most excellent and salient point by Mr. Horn. Anyone reading any amount of manga at all is bound to run into this cultural hearing problem. My personal favorite is Japanese onemonopia for things which make no sound at all in English. Smiling, in Japanese, sometimes has the sound effect “Shiiiiin”. A friend once told me that there is a manga sound effect for laying around the house, feeling bored, which was something like “Goro goro goro”.

Not only does Mr. Horn extoll to us linguistics theory, but he also includes some life advice:

36.1-4 If you want to grow up to be an editor and get good car insurance rates (see 167.3 below) it is especially important to practice good spelling online…

This is comic genius, people. I have included 167.3 below:

167.3…Recently when the editor was getting a new car insurance policy, he got to the point in the interview where they ask you your profession. When he said, “editor,” the agent noted cheerfully that this seemed to drop my premium considerably. It’s a good thing I didn’t mention the “manga” part.

To Mr. Horn’s credit, that does relate to one chapter of Corpse Delivery Service about an actuary.

Besides life advice, some of the footnotes may count as life-saving advice:

170.1 119, rater than 911, is the emergency number for fire and ambulance in Japan, as well as Taiwan and South Korea (although unlike in the U.S., Japan has a separate number for emergency calls to the police-namely 110.).

Of course, I don’t want to spoil all of Mr. Horn’s notes for you here. If you buy this book, be sure to check out 94.2-3 and 51.3. Don’t think you can read them in the store either – Dark Horse titles are usually shrink-wrapped. I have also heard that this particular title is notoriously difficult to find. That may be because one of Dark Horse’s distributers, Publishers Group West, recently went bankrupt. Diamond is picking up the slack.

I only have two complaints about these extensive and glorious footnote. The first is that it’s difficult to follow the layouts. The columns are arranged to read from right to left like the rest of the book, but somehow reading large chunks of English text across columns laid out right to left proved exceedingly difficult.

Second, it’s irksome that Dark Horse abandoned the sort of bilingual sound effects that I loved in Lady Snowblood and Ohikkoshi. The person who I borrowed this comic from had not noticed the unique and amusing cultural footnotes, since there is usually no point in reading long lists of sound effects translations.