Baccano! depicts a New York drawn from the movies. The air is honeyed with jazz; the streets flood with girls donning pearls and peacock feathers and skinny, black-strapped dresses, and men who carry Glocks and pocketknives. This is a world filled with innocence and decadence, with farce and tragedy. An alchemist tempts Fate by calling the devil. A homunculus spars—or dances—with a mobster. A boy with a tattooed cheek and a girl with scarred arms rob some cargo and find a family. A solipsistic cutthroat falls in love with an assassin. A young girl trawls the waters of the Hudson River in search of an undead brother. Three mafioso families prepare for war as the local tabloid savours a potential story.

Keeping company with the characters of Baccano! is like sitting in a restaurant with a hundred tables and trying to listen to every single conversation at once. Making conversation would mean having to shout over the din of everyone else’s voices. Every character has a story to tell, and they couldn’t care less about whether their voices overlap.

In the animated adaptation of Baccano!, director Takahiro Omori plays with storytelling with this same vivid fluidity. In the spirit of Nolan’s Memento or Singer’s The Usual Suspects, the non-linear timeline leaves us dizzy until we relent beneath its momentum. Previously separate narratives converge as satisfyingly as they do in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction—and a similar aesthetic exploitation of graphic violence gives the anime a gruesome, volatile beauty that twists your stomach as it turns your head. Omori concocts a heady cocktail of spilled blood and severed fingers that would make Martin Scorsese or Brian de Palma proud, transforming the savage atmospheric setting from page to screen without losing its marvelous intricacy.

Indeed, in Narita’s novels, the setting is almost a character in itself. Durarara!! creates a similar effect. Ikebukuro, a district neighbourhood in Tokyo, becomes the epicentre of terror and rapture as the characters’ lives collide. The colours of the characters’ headspaces are mapped onto the cityscape that surrounds them. The faces of strangers are blurred, vending machines and streetlamps are uprooted, a yellowish sunset bleeds across blue skies like egg-yolk seeping from a broken bowl. Durarara!! captures the claustrophobic familiarity of a metropolitan neighborhood where you cannot move without elbowing those around you, where a thousand voices scream into the void of an internet chatroom, and where a single action drastically changes the lives of those who stumble into your vicinity. As the characters learn to navigate the urban panorama around them, they are bound to one another by the obscenity of their mutual terrain, drawn into a tangled knot of love and resentment by an inescapable sense of place.