A hapless private investigator who loses his hearing after having one ear bitten off, a maverick weights-and-measures man who gets pulled into a sinister blackmailing scheme by a seductive Japanese woman, a college kid so desperate to avoid an office job that he tries to break into boxing and organized crime: the characters in Gates of Eden grapple with their place in the world, trying to comprehend what fate has placed before them. With these stories -- sometimes heart-felt, sometimes brutal, always wildly entertaining -- Ethan Coen delivers everything you would expect from such an original imagination.