xploring dungeons is deadly work. Adventurers risk everything for treasure and glory—but many never make it back alive. Traps, monsters, starvation… the deeper you go, the more bodies are left behind.

That's where corpse bearers come in.

Nemu descends into the depths to recover the fallen, navigating deadly terrain, grieving families, and the realities no hero wants to think about. It's dangerous, exhausting work, but someone's got to do it.

She prefers to work alone. Until Garensis insists on tagging along, convinced that Nemu can help him find his missing sister. But he's about to learn that bringing the dead home is never as simple as it sounds.

Nemu the Corpse Bearer has story by and art by Tsukamu Yoriwake. English translation is done by Jan Cash and lettering by Christa Miesner. Published by Seven Seas Entertainment (November 10, 2026). Rated T.

Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

It's easy to lose sight of death in fantasy manga. While there are notable exceptions, like Frieren: Beyond Journey's End and Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash, for most characters in modern iterations of the genre, death is hardly permanent. That's what makes Nemu the Corpse Bearer so striking: it's about the reality of death for characters who venture into dungeons and other fantasy quest staples, and the only type of magic that affects it is Nemu's body bag, which prevents further decomposition. It's more than a little bleak.

But it's also about the importance of mourning and ritual, as well as the idea of what people like Nemu and her self-appointed partner Garensis owe to those left behind. (The dead, it is made clear, owe nothing. They're gone.) Each of Nemu's quests involves trying to find the corpse of someone presumed dead; in this volume, three are in the dungeon, and one is in an above-ground setting. She has to navigate the dangers that killed them and then perform that clearly taboo (or at least reviled) job of touching the dead and returning them to the guild office. The requesters, who must then identify the bodies, are rarely grateful to Nemu – the third story, where a grieving mother screams at Nemu and Garensis, saying that her son's death is “their fault” (because without his body, she could have believed him alive), only happens the one time in this volume, but Nemu's reaction indicates that it's typical. It's part of the mourning process: the left-behind need someone to blame for their loss, and she's a very easy target.

One of the strongest elements of the book is the fact that there's no judgement towards the dead. Was it smart for the woman in chapter one and the couple in chapter two to have gone into the dungeon? Absolutely not. But neither Nemu nor Garensis blames them for their own deaths. It's understood that they were just trying to do their best, to live in a way that they could accept. Their deaths are tragedies, and that's the main point. This is really driven home in the fourth chapter, when they encounter the corpse of an elf unnaturally animated by her last-ditch effort to heal herself. She fully accepts blame for her own death, prolonged as it is, and while she has regrets, she still thinks her mission was worth it. Her words really highlight what Nemu has been demonstrating (and saying) about her job being about closure rather than judging. It's awful, and it's sad, but it's something that people need done.

For a book about death, this manages not to be too gruesome in the art. Of course, the art also isn't fantastic, particularly with expression, but it still more than gets the job done. Like Sunday Without God, it's a story meant to make you think about death and mourning. It may not be perfect, but I think it'll get there.

Erica Friedman
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We all know the format. A hapless, good-natured sidekick is thrust into a dangerous situation where they are saved by a powerful, specifically skilled person. That person is an outcast, whether by choice or circumstance. As the sidekick learns about the main character's life, they come to respect and admire them, and we are drawn along with them. In the process, we learn how human society fails to accept the things it needs rather more often than we'd like to think.

Nemu the Corpse Bearer is exactly this kind of story.

Nemu accidentally saves Garen and ends up following her through her grim quest to recover a corpse that was once a beloved person, and Nemu has to face and defeat creatures that are too powerful even for other adventurers. Garen sees how the other people in town, clients, and even other adventurers treat Nemu with contempt and anger…and it pisses him off. Garen's questions will be clear to any adult or smart young reader. The scenarios are episodic on this early side of the narrative. Like other stories of its kind, this may develop a longer or more complex plot as it goes on. Undoubtedly, Garen (i.e., we) will learn more about Nemu's circumstances.

The art is solid, full of fantasy monsters with complicated magical solutions, gormless villagers, and a few standout designs. Nemu's “corpse-bearing” gear is interesting and well-designed.

I found this volume to be entertaining and would not mind reading more, with the hope that neither backstories nor more complex plotting took away the basic tone of the series. I've always preferred the episodes over the season-long arcs. Other readers may feel the opposite.

If you like your dungeon adventures with a helping of life and death musings, flavored with melancholic human hypocrisy and hints of more danger to come, you'll enjoy Nemu the Corpse Bearer, as I did.

Caitlin Moore
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I can see what the series Nemu the Corpse Bearer wants to be. It strives for a quiet melancholy, a look at the people who do essential jobs but are shunned by society shuns. It hopes to examine grief and longing. It's the kind of work that I'm drawn to; done well, it's a beautiful opportunity to explore one of the most complex, universal, and individual human emotions. And yet, the first volume left me cold. Why is that?

In this world, corpse bearers journey into dungeons to retrieve corpses of missing explorers in exchange for a hefty commission from the bereaved. It's an unpleasant job that few are willing to do, so it pays well. Garensis gets sucked into the world when he meets Nemu, a corpse-bearer who stumbles on him when he's trapped in the dungeon with a broken leg. After she returns him to the surface, he decides to go along with her in hopes of finding his missing sister. Beyond this framing device, the story is largely episodic, with each chapter focusing on a different job the two end up doing. The individual episodes, all nicely drawn, cover topics such as Romeo and Juliet romance, the way grief makes people irrational, and carrying on a person's final wishes.

Plenty of series find an under-considered aspect of a popular setting and push on the thread. Nemu the Corpse Bearer thinks through one possibility of what happens after adventurers die, drawing on the fact that historically, people who work with the dead have been reviled and shunned despite doing an essential service. Unfortunately, I found the image of the world a bit… basic. It's a basic JRPG setting, with guilds and inns and armorers. There was nothing special about the setup, and for a series about death, there's very little consideration for rites and rituals. It may be a bit unfair to compare it to Delicious in Dungeon, the absolute best series in the dungeon-crawling genre, but the world-building feels so limited, especially when death is one of the biggest sites for culture to form.

Nor does the character writing bring much to the table. Nemu and Garensis are a standard pair of foils: the quiet, experienced one, and the brash, happy-go-lucky newbie, respectively. They're likable enough, but they have little in the way of chemistry. The secondary characters are non-entities; none of them really feel like people with their own lives the way you need to build up in stories that cover emotional topics like this.

With a deft touch, Nemu the Corpse Bearer could have been a memorable series. However, with mediocre writing that fails to reach the emotional highs and lows that should come with the subject matter, it's nothing greater than fine.