A hard boiled/thriller where the explosion of a bomb in Tokyo sends a wave of rippling effects through the lives of its many characters, "百舌の叫ぶ夜" is a very entertaining read, with only one or two issues (one, regarding one the main characters, a product of its era, maybe, but still reinforcing some negative stereotypes) that stop it from being something special.
The story has two main storylines: the police investigation around the explosion, where the wife of a policeman died (one of those cool as a cucumber types cops) and the wow-I-lost-my-memory-how-original man who regents a club with ties to the yakuza, a yakuza that is trying to kill him because of some photos. Both of them are really entertaining, and dialogues, action, cool situations happen all the time, with the storylines crisscrossing each other to develop a quite good (not original, though) plot.
However there are two little points that can be annoying to the reader. First, the time jumps. The story goes back and forward with little warning and sometimes it takes a page or two to know where you are in the overall timeline. The second regards the man-without-memory's sister, who is... well, one of those characters whose depiction can be seen as a problematic one of a collective (also, some vocabulary could be seen as derogatory for nowadays standards).
The best: it is a thrilling thriller (cough cough)
The worst: some decisions around one of the main characters
Alternatives: maybe Nishimura, Tetsuya Honda or Hideo Yokoyama
Inspector Kukaki is a good-looking young detective driven to drink and demotivated after the death of his wife and daughter. As luck would have it, he’s in the vicinity when a drugged terrorist punk and his lethal gang kidnap Elena, a 16-year-old autistic girl, as she is on her way to her embassy with her mother. This occurs shortly after the scary punk has terrorized an entire office building, shooting workers and blowing things up, before the gang makes its escape on jet belts.
Ex-cop Ohsugi who has resigned from the force to become a bumbling private eye, tries to hide Elena from her pursuers, but his own daughter gets kidnapped in the process. So does the smart, beautiful young police chief Higashi who was worried about Inspector Kukaki. Now he is worried about her, so he and Ohsugi fly to a teeming Asian fleshpot where small children are being held hostage by brutes. Organizing the evil operation is the man behind every political conspiracy and economic scandal since WWII, a faceless nemesis alternately known as Mozu or Daruma.