In a recent manga review for the Daily Yomiuri, Stephen Taylor wrote about Reiko the Zombie Shop. Here is an excerpt from his review:
Death. It comes to everyone, and with it go our secrets, never to be resurrected. Unless your kin employs the services of Reiko the Zombie Shop.
Rei Mikamoto’s gloriously gory tales of necromancy and horror fully deserve to be called graphic novels, as very little is left to the reader’s imagination in the six volumes available in English.
Reiko Himezono is a high school student with the ability to raise the dead and get answers regarding the circumstances surrounding their deaths–straight from the corpse’s mouth.
But in Volume 1, Reiko warns that her services do not come risk-free.
“If someone dies violently…or suffers from any pent-up guilt or rage, there’s a chance they could go berserk,” she warns.
Of course, we’re in zombie territory here, and the more you read, the more disgusting the undead become.
Many of the characters meet their demise in gruesome fashion, with dismemberment and disemboweling commonplace in Reiko’s world. Mikamoto writes of Act 20, in which victims are forced to eat their own entrails, that, “I wanted to create something really scary–I mean terrifying, not just gory…but I only got letters telling me that it was ‘revolting.'” Never has public opinion been more accurate.
Apart from Reiko, other characters include her older twin sister, Riruka, whose aim is to turn the world into a zombie-filled paradise, and Saki Yurikawa, a serial killer. Saki is responsible for the murder of 29 girls in the town of Shiraike and is Reiko’s deadly foe throughout the series.