She Walks at Night (1948) by Seishi Yokomizo

Back in May, Pushkin Vertigo released their eighth Kosuke Kindaichi novel, Yoru aruku (She Walks at Night, 1948), written by the patriarch of the Japanese honkaku mystery novel, Seishi Yokomizo – translated into English by Jesse Kirkwood. No doubt, the book title will make Western readers immediately think of John Dickson Carr's It Walks by Night (1930) and not wholly without reason. But, as Ho-Ling Wong noted in his review, it also smacks of Edogawa Rampo's grotesque tales with its sleepwalkers, hunchbacks and headless corpses.This bizarre, twisted case begins when Naoki Sengoku consulting Torata Yashiro, a childhood friend and struggling mystery writer, concerning the Furugami Family. Naoki's family has been shepherding the Furugamis, "notorious for their naivety and indecisiveness," through Japan's most turbulent times from the Meiji Restoration to the depression of the 1920s. A much needed stewardship of the Furugami estate and fortune as generations of inbreeding produced a long…