(hb; 2003, 2007. Translated from the Japanese by Evan Smswiler.)
From the inside flap
“Fifty-seven-year-old Takeshi has just been involved in a traffic accident. When he wakes up, he is in a strange bar, no longer crippled as he has been for most of his life, but able to walk without crutches in his everyday business suit. Looking around, he sees a number of familiar faces—Izumi, a colleague who had died in a plane crash five years before; his childhood friend Yuzo, who had become a yakuza and had been killed by a rival gang member; and Sasaki, who had frozen to death as a homeless vagrant.
“This is Hell—a place where
three days can last as long as ten years on earth, and people are able to read
each other’s minds and revisit the darker details of their former lives. Yuzo
can now look his murderer in the face. The actress Mayumi and the writer
Torigai are chased by the paparazzi into a lift that drops to floor 666 beneath
ground level. . .”
Review
Hell is a good, offbeat speculative fiction read, with its somewhere between spiritual and daily mundanity writing, characters and feel. If Hell lacks the emotional fireworks and wild-stakes drama of Paprika (which I recently read), it’s by masterful design, and therefore should not be compared to Tsutsui’s earlier, 1993 novel, making this 190-page, ultimately hopeful and distinctive book one worth seeking out.
