"Your body is their business! Five young students at a Buddhist university, three guys and two girls, find little call for their job skills in today's Tokyo . . . among the living, that is! But all that stuff in college they were told would never pay off-you know, channeling, dowsing, ESP-gives them a direct line to the dead . . . the dead who are still trapped in their corpses and can't move on to the next reincarnation." (Dark Horse)
It's very, very, very rare that I buy translated manga *the last time I bought some was almost 2 1/2 years ago for Battle Royale*, however, this time was a little different. I'll be frank, I hate most translated manga. *VIZ is at the very top* However, I hadn't heard of Dark Horse translating manga. That was the first thing that caught my attention. The second was the fact that finding a scanlation of this manga was near impossible. Mainly, b/c you have to get on the IRC to download it. *Yeah, I would rather buy it, than spend time on the IRC. Says something, huh?* XD
Anyways, this is a good story. The premise is simple enough: The 4 main students find dead bodies and they fulfill their last wishes. I have to admit, I was a little leery at the idea that there were so many dead bodies hidden all over the place in Japan, but it makes it no less interesting. The story is solid chapter to chapter; focusing on each character and giving them a little bit of depth. The art is ok, since it breaks away from the tradition cute manga genre and the action and violence keeps that generic junk away.
Since I had both the Japanese and American version, I decided to do a little comparing. What I found was a mixed bag of things. Certain things were translated *i.e. bulletin boards and some signs* while others *sound FX and more signs* were left untranslated. It was a fair balance. Text wise was a little different. I compared the first chapters and found a few things that were a bit off. Some text had been changed, but not modified enough to change the storyline and, in one case, a sentence was dropped and replaced with [...]. However, the sentence had little significance, since it basically translates out to "Are you serious?...." Another case was towards the end of the chapter when the father was talking. His entire dialogue was changed from the original version. I'll admit this, though: Even though the speech was changed, it gave it more feeling and made it just a little bit creepier as well. I don't completely approve however.
All in all, this is an awesome manga, whether you buy the original Japanese or the translated American version. Beware, there are slight dialogue changes, but they don't impact the storyline in any way. Just a little heads up, just in case
Rating: ★★★★½
