“Hell is a city much like London,” remarks Mephistopheles in Marlowe's Faust; in Tsutsui's version it looks more like Tokyo, or perhaps Osaka. Here, a motley collection of adulterous “salarymen”, yakuza gangsters, bestselling novelists, kabuki actors and chat show hosts are congregated to undergo penance for the crimes they have committed in their lifetimes.

As with the characters in Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, they have to relive these catastrophic events many times. For Izumi, a businessman, it is the moment when he finds his wife Sachiko in bed with his colleague, Takeshi, that he must repeatedly confront. For Yuzo, a teenage thug, it is the moment of his murder he must undergo time and again. Gangsters eternally torture their victims; actors eternally suffer terrible stage fright; planes are hijacked again and again; people endlessly die in car crashes.

In this cycle of eternal recurrence, the dead are virtually indistinguishable from the living and, indeed, are fully aware of being dead. Their cartoon-like indestructibility makes it hard to sympathise with Tsutsui's characters - but one's sympathy, in any case, is not required. The slapstick humour adds to the sense of dislocation, as does the constant shifting between past and present. The result certainly gives an impression of what Hell might be like - if only through the mixture of unease, revulsion and boredom that it creates in the reader.

Hell by Yasutaka Tsutsui translated by Evan Emswiler
Alma books, £7.99 Buy the book

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