ten no kami-sama no iu toori

"...even a city like Osaka feels different when you're trapped, stuck in a place you don't belong. The people in Umeda or Namba aren't people anymore, just frenzied masses always heading in the wrong direction, and the narrow streets don't feel quaint but choked off, constricted, suffocating. The musical soundscape lapses into a shrill atonal cacophony pierced only by laughter at once empty and menacing, and the gaudy soft-core porn beckoning from every surface of the pink districts seems no longer harmlessly lurid but downright hellish. And the lights, the ceaseless blinking blazing searing lights everwhere, only make you think how sad and desperate this need for attention, how childlike and primitive our collective fear of the dark."

...whatever Isaac Adamson's weaknesses as a writer of noir, he certainly knows Osaka.