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 last as long as ten years on earth, and people are able to see events in both the future and the past. Yuzo can now see the yakuza that killed him as he harasses a friend of his. The actress Mayumi and the writer Torigai are chased by the paparazzi into an elevator that drops to floor 666 beneath ground level. The vivid depiction of afterlife portrayed in "Hell" admits the traditional horrors, but subjects them to Tsutsui's unique...

Paprika - exotic, piquant, to be used sparingly. The eponymous heroine of Tsutsui's novel is the alter ego of brilliant and beautiful psychotherapist Atsuko Chiba, one of the leading brains in the Institute for Psychiatric Research. An expert in the use of 'psychotherapy devices' that trap a patient's dreams and display them on a monitor, Atsuko is able to manipulate those dreams, even enter them, as an aid to psychoanalysis. When treating private patients, Atsuko transforms herself into the guise of Paprika - a captivating girl of unknown age - to mask her true identity.As Paprika delves ever deeper into her realm of fantasy, the borderline between dream and reality becomes increasingly blurred. All the more so when a colleague at the Institute develops a new device that allows the dreams of several individuals to be combined simultaneously. With this, they enter dangerous territory - far from curing their patients, they could drive them insane. Rich in humorous dialogue and ridiculous situations, replete with the folly of human desires, yet with an underlying sense of menace that 'all is not what it seems', Paprika could be described as the very pinnacle of Tsutsui's art.

Nanase cannot remember when she first realized she could read people's minds, but not once during her eighteen years has she ever questioned her particularly unusual ability. Yet, working as a live-in maid, she is inevitably drawn into the lives, thoughts and desires of her employers, with dangerous and at times hilarious consequences. From the sexual rapaciousness of her first boss to the grime and stench of the house where she works next and her third employer's inability to accept she's no longer young, Nanase's adventures are a picaresque journey into the inner sanctum of the lives and psyches of ordinary Japanese people.

SUMMARY: This collection of marvelously off-kilter short stories – the American debut of acclaimed Japanese writer Yasutaka Tsutsui – portrays the consequences of a world where the fantastic and the mundane collide and throw the lives of ordinary men and women into disarray.In “The Dabba Dabba Tree” Tsutsui describes the hilarious side effects of a small conical tree that, when placed at the foot of one’s bed, creates erotic dreams that metamorphose into communal farce. In “Commuter Army”–a sly commentary on the ludicrousness of war–a weapons supplier whose rifles cease functioning after just one shot becomes an unwilling conscript in a war zone. “The World is Tilting” imagines a floating city that slowly begins to sink on one side, causing its citizens to reorient their daily lives to preserve a semblance of normality. In “Rumors About Me”, an ordinary office worker finds himself the subject of intense media scrutiny, his every action documented in the tabloids. And in the title story, we learn just how obscenely absurd the environment on Planet Porno can seem to a group of hapless research scientists.With a sharp eye towards the insanities of contemporary life, Yasutaka Tsutsui crafts in Salmonella Men on Planet Porno an irresistible mix of imagination, satiric fantasy, and truly madcap hilarity.

This collection of marvelously off-kilter short stories – the American debut of acclaimed Japanese writer Yasutaka Tsutsui – portrays the consequences of a world where the fantastic and the mundane collide and throw the lives of ordinary men and women into disarray. In 'The Dabba Dabba Tree' Tsutsui describes the hilarious side effects of a small conical tree that, when placed at the foot of one's bed, creates erotic dreams that metamorphose into communal farce. In 'Commuter Army' -a sly commentary on the ludicrousness of war-a weapons supplier whose rifles cease functioning after just one shot becomes an unwilling conscript in a war zone. 'The World is Tilting' imagines a floating city that slowly begins to sink on one side, causing its citizens to reorient their daily lives to preserve a semblance of normality. In 'Rumors About Me', an ordinary office worker finds himself the subject of intense media scrutiny, his every action documented in the tabloids. And in the title story, we learn just how obscenely absurd the environment on Planet Porno can seem to a group of hapless research scientists. With a sharp eye towards the insanities of contemporary life, Yasutaka Tsutsui crafts in Salmonella Men on Planet Porno an irresistible mix of imagination, satiric fantasy, and truly madcap hilarity.