Characters who re-live their mistakes, their cruelties, and their sexual indiscretions populate Yasutaka Tsutsui's hell, a netherworld built in ever-decreasing circles of guilt, memory, and desire. If, as Jean-Paul Sartre claims, "Hell is other people," then it is the reflection of one's self in the eyes of other people.

The novel opens during World War II, a memory replayed, in which three ragged and smelly boys — Nobutero, Yuzo and Takeshi — play on a schoolyard platform. As they roughhouse, Takeshi falls and injures himself; the two other boys jump down and pull him along the floor, not noticing his broken leg. From this moment on, Takeshi is disabled, and the friends slowly lose contact with one another. "Hell" begins this way. Or does it? Details of the accident are obscured; memory plays tricks on the mind. All three boys are now in hell — whether it be one of their own making, of the novel, or the hell of senility.

Author of the short-story collection "Salmonella Man on Planet Porno" and the psychological thriller "Paprika," Yasutaka Tsutsui's strange worlds resemble the inner space of the late J.G. Ballard and the satirical science fiction of Kurt Vonnegut. In Tsutsui's hell, people can read each other's minds; see their memories and thoughts stretched out behind them. Like the Tralfamadorians in Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five," they are able to see the past, present, and future as a concrete entity. In hell, a woman's sexual indiscretions with her husband's boss force her to endlessly relive the moment her husband catches her in flagrante delicto. Dead Yakuza members use restaurants as torture chambers, enlisting the help of the female owner who takes out her revenge on men in a most gruesome way. As Christopher Marlowe wrote, "Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed in one self place, for where we are is hell, and where hell is there must we ever be."