Defying the commonly held perceptions of time and space, and escaping any easy classifications, Yasutaka Tsutsui’s stories centre on the folly of human desire. Most of his characters suffer awful fates as a result of their own foolishness, which usually takes the form of greed, lust or vanity. With influences as diverse as Darwin, Freud and the Marx Brothers, his writing displays a mixture of pathos, slapstick and psychological insight, shot through with bolts of Kafkaesque inventiveness.