Mitsukazu Mihara is best known for her Goth Loli fashion and exploring the uneasy and increasingly intimate relationships between people and technology. With THE EMBALMER, she takes on a different kind of relationship: the dead and the living they leave behind. Shinjyurou Mamiya, a magnetic and brilliant medical student, has returned to Japan to practice the art of embalming, which is generally considered unclean and barbaric. Mamiya, however, feels that embalming, if done artfully, gives mourners one last goodbye with the deceased, starting the living on the road to recovery rather than clinging to grief.

With Azuki, his cute landlady and conscience, Mamiya manages to discover who needs his services most. The connections between life and death are potent, especially as Mamiya (ahem) releases tension with rotating lady friends after each embalming, satisfying the lust brought on by each close brush with death. The art is everything Mihara is known for: elegant, gothic and a little bit unsettling.

This first volume forces U.S. readers to take another look at our own mourning practices and consider how people can best come through loss and loneliness. The sensual shenanigans are offset by the tender compassion Mamiya shows toward both his clients and the people they've left behind, though thus far there is not enough sense of where the story is going to be sure how the meditations on death will become part of a greater story arc. The few scenes of seduction, given Mamiya's urges, lend the title a definite older edge.

Neither truly shojo or shonen, THE EMBALMER occupies middle ground in terms of appeal, though the emotional focus and dashing lead pull the title toward shojo.