In Jo Kurado's mystery novels strange things happen, someone always ends up dead and there is a universe called Darkland to be found only through a hidden tunnel in the city of Tokyo.

Yuichi Arisu is a typical office slave in the huge, impersonal city of Tokyo. Every night he commutes home to his distant wife and buries himself in the mystery novels of Jo Kuroda, a writer who has conjured up a strange alternative universe called the Darkland. Then, one night, his wife disappears. Does this have something to do with what happened two years ago? Arisu traces his wife to a private detective and then to an underground brothel called Wonderland. But the brothel burns down and the detective is murdered. Arisu becomes the main suspect. Gradually the walls between fantasy and reality break down and Arisu comes under the spell of the Darkland.