MANGA MANIA: THE KUROSAGI CORPSE DELIVERY SERVICE (VOL 1) BY Eiji Otsuka

What do you do if you are about to graduate from a small Buddhist college but do not come from a priestly family and therefore have no job opportunities open to you. If you have the proper skills, and a strong stomach, you might join The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service. This group sees to it that corpses abandoned in garbage dumps or found in the woods or the trunks of cars make it home to where their remains truly belong. But special skills do come in handy. One is a computer hacker; one is a dowser able to find corpses not water; one channels a foul-mouthed alien through a hand puppet; another, who for some reason appears to be a little girl, is an embalmer; and, most helpful of all is Kuro Kuratsu who is able to speak to the recently deceased.

Eiji Otsuka's manga series promises to be ghoulish fun. One story involves a necrophiliac father, another a hair dresser determined to assemble the perfect woman. Most surprising is Eiji's ability to write funny dialogue, something you don't get a lot of in manga. There may be visual gags and outrageous situations in most series, but The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service at times has the verbal spark of good comic film writing. In one scene the group argues over whether they need to buy a train ticket for a corpse. Numata, the dowser, has the group constantly eating the same brand of instant noodles so he can collect the labels and enter a contest for a Prada windbreaker. Throughout, they banter and give one another a hard time like any group of twenty-year-olds, they just happen to be carrying around dead bodies.

THE PHILIP K DICKATHON (16): THE SIMULACRA

The Simulacra is PKD's grand, panoramic novel. He sweeps the reader from the highest corridors of power in Washington, D.C., to the lush rain forests of the Pacific North West and the colony of mutants who inhabit them. We meet Nicole Thibodeaux, the First Lady of the United States and the most powerful woman in the world; Richard Kongrosian, a psycho-kinetic musician who performs without touching the keyboard; and Looney Luke, semi-legal dealer in jalopies, outdated spacecraft good enough for a one-way trip to Mars. There is intrigue, betrayal, deception, and the threat of war.

Wait a minute. PKD didn't write grand, panoramic novels. Not that all the above isn't true. In fact it suggests no more than a fraction of the goings-on inThe Simulacra. But it all goes on in the usual two hundred or so pages common to PKD's novels. This is his most chaotic book. Every chapter for the first third of the novel introduces two or more new characters. What connections there will ever be among them is difficult to imagine. But much of what happens focuses on pleasing Nicole, who spends much of her time auditioning new acts to perform at her functions, or planning yet another televised tour of the White House. (Only readers of a certain age will get this joke.)

PKD tossed a lot of stray ideas into this one. Most of the ideas or good, the situations very funny, but he does not manage to do much more than let them fizzle out towards the end. Readers may be either irritated or exhausted, but the wiser choice is to just go along for the ride.

As in most of the novels from this period, there is moment when a female character lets loose with either a kind of praise or criticism that PKD must have wished for or dreaded hearing from whoever was his wife at the time. Here is Nicole talking about Richard Kongrosian.

"Oh the hell with it," Nicole said. "I'm tired of his ailments. I'm tired of having him pamper himself with his hypochondriacal obsessions. I'm going to toss the entire power and majesty and authority of the state at him, tell him point blank that he has got to give up his imaginary diseases.

Ouch. But even though Kongrosian is a hypochondriac he still has the power to psycho-kinetically transport one of Nicole's gun-wielding agents to the White House laundry room when necessary. The author remains in control.

GLOSSARY (5)

BAO BAKO BAKO -- sound of a distant helicopter          

ZU ZURU -- sound of body dragging itself on the ground

PAN PAN -- brushing dirt off pants

PITA -- sound of fly landing on eye

BUBUN -- sound of flies

BUUUUN -- buzzing flies

GA -- footstep

PURAN -- sound of an arm falling off a stretcher

JI -- zipper starting to open

JIIIII -- zipper unzipping

BIKUN BIKUN -- body starting to twitch

GEBOBOBO -- vomiting blood

DO -- an organ hitting the floor

GAKO GAKO -- old car sounds

GIKU -- gulp sound effect

PORI PORI -- scratching head

SHIN -- sound of silence

GATA GATA KATA GATA -- headless body starting to shake

GOGOGOGOGO -- rushing water

Selected from the sound fx glossary of  The Kurosogi Corpse Delivery Service (vol 1) by Eiji Otsuka

(English translations of Japanese manga usually leave the sound effects that are crucial to the image in the original  kanji lettering.  The above are transliterations of kanji words into Roman lettering)

MONDAY MORNING

MONDAY MORNING

MANGA MANIA: GENKAKU PICASSO by Usamaru Furuya

The set up for the story involves a pun that only works in Japanese. When Hikari wrote his name on his shoes -- is this something Japanese teenagers do? -- he accidently wrote Hikaso. And since he draws all the time, all this schoolmates call him Picasso.

So that's not very interesting. But things pick up when Picasso and his almost girlfriend Chiaki have a helicopter fall on them. Chiaki dies. Picasso suffers only minor injuries. Several days later, Chiaki appears Tinkerbelle-like from the pocket of Picasso's school jacket. Surprise! Picasso is also dead, and his body will rot unless he uses his drawings to help others. First he spots a schoolmate with a dark aura, then he draws a mysterious picture, then he is physically sucked into the picture, then he figures out what is wrong, then he makes things right. In Vol. One he does this four times.

Finally, some one has created a manga that uses an absurd premise you might expect from a prime time, network series. It has good production values but it's boring.

THE HORROR! THE HORROR! -- RAMSEY CAMPBELL

Ramsey Campbell's home page opens with a quote from the Oxford Companion to English Literature. It informs us that Campbell is "Britain's most respected living horror writer."

My copy of the OCEL is a fifth edition and has no entry for Campbell at all. If it did, that first statement might be followed by this bit of information: Charles Dee Mitchell has attempted to read five of Mr. Campbell's works and only succeeded in finishing three. And trust me, in the case of those I abandoned it was not because I was too terrified to turn another page.

Ramsey Campbell, Family Man

Ramsey Campbell may neither travel well nor date well. He has an American following but is a much bigger deal, obviously, in Great Britain. He is, after all, their most respected living horror writer. He has been publishing since the late 1950's, and his most recent novel came out just this year from one of the presses that do high-priced, short runs of fantasy, horror, and science fiction titles. The books I tried were early to mid career novels. The Doll That Ate His Mother (1976), The Face that Must Die (1979), The Nameless (1981), The Hungry Moon (1986), and The Influence (1988). Perhaps the past two decades have seen a remarkable transformation of his style and storytelling, but it is not as though the ones I read came un-recommended. The Face That Must Die was a somewhat fancy reprint with an introduction by Poppy C. Brite and a few really bad illustrations. The Influence won the British Fantasy Award and is on the Guardian's list of best sf and fantasy. The Hungry Moon, absolutely the worst of the lot, is the novel chosen by the Horror Writers' Association to represent Campbell's work.

So is it just me? Of course, if that turned out to be the case, I would be the last person to admit it. I found the books mildly entertaining to unreadable. The thought that they might be genuinely frightening or even unnerving never crossed my mind.

To start with the ones I didn't finish. The Hungry Moon is an overlong tale of Druid magic resurrected in the modern day by a religious nut. Campbell introduces us to too many of the residents of Moonwell, a village in Northern England. We learn what supposedly makes each one interesting and that takes a while. Then the event happens and we see how each of them react. Since I started skimming and finally quit the book, I don't know the full panoply of horrible things that go on. But in the first chapter you learn that the village of Moonwell not only no longer exists but has been removed from maps, memories, and the telephone directory. The Influence concerns an evil great aunt out to possess the soul of her grandniece. If it had been a movie on TV and I could fast forward the commercials I would have watched it. But I couldn't read it.

Random Spooky Image

The other three novels are about psychopaths, two of them with some black magic references. The best of them is The Face that Must Die. The anti-hero, a Mr.Horridge, is a deranged young man obsessed with the evils of homosexuality. Great Britain decriminalized homosexuality in 1967, and decade later, Horridge sees the twisted results of the legislation everywhere he turns. He and his hammer will do what they can to remedy this situation. When the book first came out, portions were excised supposedly because they were too shocking. The complete text did not come out until 1982. Now the book just seems like fun. Horridge is crazy, and the block of flats on which he focuses his rage is peopled by characters only one of whom is gay and none whom have any idea what's coming. Like some of those old British stage thrillers, this is a shocker that now plays as black comedy.

Campbell lives in Liverpool, and what he does best it create the down-in-the heel atmosphere and characters of that dismal, at least in his rendering, Northern England city. Everything is rundown, the weather is miserable, the people often not very bright. I especially liked the paranoid, pot-smoking hippie and the scatterbrained artist who lets a psychopath into her flat thinking he is the plumber.

So big deal, Mr. Campbell is not my cup of tea. If anyone, however, finishes The Influence, I am curious to know if anything even vaguely unpredictable happens by the time it is over.

Read my reviews of individual Ramsey Campbell novels on Worlds Without End