Yasutaka Tsutsui is called the Japanese Philip K. Dick and the spiritual father of Haruki Murakami. He is best known to Russian readers for his novel “Paprika,” on which a popular anime was based. The novel “Underworld,” first published in Russian, amazes both with the author’s idea and the form of its implementation. The hero, fifty-year-old Takeshi, gets into a car accident and finds himself in the underworld, where he meets his acquaintances who died under a variety of circumstances. Here time passes completely differently than on earth, and people know not only the past, but also the future. Tsutsui’s afterlife is not at all the way it is traditionally imagined: in some ways it’s scarier, and in some ways, oddly enough, funnier.

Press about the novel: Tsutsui’s work challenges the generally accepted classification of genres . Following in the footsteps of François Rabelais, Swift and Mark Twain, he creates a mix of satire, fantasy, detective and myth. The Japan Times The hell in Tsutsui's surreal story is not as it is usually imagined. It is not very different from our world, which has simply been abandoned by those who inhabit it. Financial Times In The Underworld, Tsutsui mixes history and modernity, reality and fantasy. The Daily Telegraph