Hell by Yasutaka Tsutsui Search Amazon for other books by or about Yasutaka Tsutsui. Rating: Reviewed by: John Walsh

In the Buddhist tradition, Hell is a place in which souls go to be prepared for their re-entry to the Samsara--the great wheel of suffering which provides for birth, death and rebirth on the ultimate journey towards Nirvana or Enlightenment, which is the point at which the soul is able finally to free itself of attachment to or desire for any worldly or physical trapping. Freed of ego in this way, the soul is then liberated from the Samsara and enters instead a new state of higher being in a different universe, as occurred to the historical Buddha at the end of his labours. In the popular imagination, Hell is a place of inordinate physical and psychic suffering, in which horrific acts recur almost endlessly in forms which are related to the sins or the cause of attachment that the individual exhibited during the earthly existence. However, as Sartre observed, Hell is also other people. Thus it is that in Yasutaka Tsutsui's short but resonant novel follows a cast of characters as they go through their own personal hells. While one or two are obliged to face perpetual acts of violence, others are able to use violence to exorcise the horrors they themselves found but, much more commonly, it is through constant interaction with important people that the issues crucial to the attachment of the soul are resolved, if resolved they can be.

So, we find here the man who finds release in recognizing the part he played in ruining his wife's life, the woman whose inability to deal with an adulterous affair locks her into a never-ending series of meetings between herself, lover and husband, as well as the boy working up to confronting his murderer face-to-face. This sounds startling and even gruesome and, in truth, some sections read that way but, more commonly, the horror is expressed in a different and seemingly wholly mundane way. One of the most frightening short stories that has been written is Fyodor Dostoyevsky's "Bobok," which recounts the interactions of a group of deceased people who have been buried in proximity to each other--the horror lies in the extent to which the normal rules of bourgeois society, in all their hypocrisy, persist into the heart of the grave. Hence, while the dead souls face up to the grim reality that there is neither heaven nor hell but a slow disintegration into silence, they must also do so while maintaining etiquette and deference to their supposed social superiors. A similar situation occurs in Tsutsui's imagination. The mundane is used to mask the horror while at the same time intensifying it for those forced to go through the process.

The suffering of souls in Hell appears to them to be eternal but there is the possibility of redemption (which is the return to the universe for rebirth) for those souls able in one way or another to release the fetters. This is available to at least some of the characters in this novel and they are able to escape. However, escape does not necessarily indicate virtue: enlightenment in Buddhist cosmology is after all just as available to demons as angels and bad people as good (there are many schools of thought within Buddhism and not every Buddhist would agree with my interpretation). Enlightenment is process of the soul and not refinement in terms of good and bad. Western readers will have the opportunity to try to come to terms with these different approaches.