Review: 'She Walks at Night' (夜步く) (Kosuke Kindaichi #3) by Seishi Yokomizo (横溝 正史), trans. by Jesse Kirkwood
Pub. Date: 02/06/2026
Publisher: Steerforth & Pushkin; Pushkin Vertigo
In this mind-bending new addition to Seishi Yokomizo’s bestselling Kosuke Kindaichi Mysteries—translated into English for the first time—scruffy sleuth Kindaichi is called to the home of the aristocratic Furugami family, where in the midst of the Musashino countryside and enclosed on all sides by a long earthen wall, a gruesome scandal is brewing.
At the centre of the estate is the family patriarch: the drunken, sword-wielding father Tetsunoshin. His mistress, the icy, alluring Lady Oryu, is also housed in the estate along with their illegitimate daughter Yachiyo —beautiful and unstable—and the drink-ravaged Furugami heir, Naoki Sengoku. With each family member holding onto their own dark secrets, tensions between them ride high.
But this family feud turns bloody when the mutilated, headless body of Yachiyo’s fiancé is discovered in the Furugami estate. To solve the case, Kindaichi will need to pick apart the threads of the family’s carefully-woven story. But can he find the killer before the family is torn apart by its own secrets?
Seishi Yokomizo's Kosuke Kindaichi series are only being translated into English now and I have been having a great time reading them. Yokomizo was excellent at proper locked-room mysteries, at enormous and bloody family drama, and at writing an actually nice detective figure, in Kosuke Kindaichi himself. As an European reader, I've found these books really interesting, both for the mystery of them but also for the insight they give into Japanese society and culture post-WWII. Of course no one book can reflect everything, but Yokomizo subtly addresses how Japanese society was shaken-up, how the class system became fragile, the poverty and destruction that existed, and more. But, since the books were written in the 1970s, they do also contain things we might not find quite as palatable or normal as we did almost sixty years ago. In She Walks at Night, for exmaple, a major plot point revolves around two characters who have Kyphosis, i.e., who have a curved or hunched spine. These characters are consistently referred to as "hunchbacks" in the book and their medical condition is also taken as an indicator for their personalities, which is consistently treated as a negative. This will strike most modern readers, European or otherwise, as wrong or offensive. While there is indeed a discomfort there, She Walks at Night, more than any Yokomizo book I have read so far, is about who gets to tell a story and what their story says about them. That is worth bearing in mind, as you dive into the book.
She Walks at Night begins in media res, with a conversation between Torata Yashiro and Naoki Sengoku. Torata is a writer of bad crime and thriller novels and Naoki is his somewhat-benefactor, except that he doesn't really seem to respect Torata at all. But Naoki is in a pickle, due to his family's complicated relationship with the Furugami family. He unloads the entire drama onto Torata and then demands that he accompanies him to the family estate where, naturally, they are just in time to be present for a murder. What is going on between these two families? What secrets mut be uncovered fort he truth to be found? And will Kosuke Kindaichi arrive on-scene in time to prevent further deaths? I'm keeping the plot as vague as possible, in part because even the set-up would take quite some time to explain but also because discovering the details for yourself is always part of the fun with Seishi Yokomizo's books. She Walks at Night felt a little different than the other Kindaichi books I have read so far. So far, if I recall correctly, these books have started off with a set-up of the family and then about halfway through Kosuke gets involved and we begin to follow him around a bit more. In She Walks at Night, Kosuke is of course present, but he is almost like a background figure while we remain with our protagonist and narrator, Torata. He is really our focus and because he is a writer himself, he knows how to write a story. It makes for a different kind of reading experience, however, so those who really love Kosuke will maybe be a little disappointed.
I had a good time with She Walks at Night, although the issue discussed above did sometimes throw me off a little. As a mystery, it has everything from entangled families, illicit lust, incestual longing, cursed swords, wealth, confused identities, and more. It also has a writer as a protagonist, which means that there are meta aspects to this novel, which is something I always enjoy. While many Japanese thrillers I have read so far have a very present narrator, who uses 'I' pronouns and interjects into the story (The Labyrinth Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji is a great example!), this is heightened a little bit in She Walks at Night. Saying anything more would threaten to spoil the novel and I will say that for this one, the twist is where much of the payoff lies. Because of that, I didn't enjoy this one quite as much as other installments in the series, like for example The Honjin Murders. As the reader, in part because of Kosuke Kindaichi's absence, you're not quite as involved in putting together the clues and are much more reliant on the protagonist's own insights. This is fun, but it removes some of the puzzling that gives so much of the joy in the other books. Because of this, some of the other issues with the series, largely due to the time period from which it comes, like the portrayal of women, comes to grate a little more. However, Jesse Kirkwood does an excellent job as a translator and She Walks at Night feels coherent with the other novels, translated by others like Louise Heal Kawai or Bryan Karetnyk. I remain really happy that Pushkin Vertigo is translating these novels because Kosuke Kindaichi remains my favourite detective and the stories and mysteries are really inventive and challenging.
I give this novel...
3 Universes!
While not my favourite Kosuke Kindaichi book so far, I did have a fun time with She Walks at Night! I gasped at the last few chapters and it really comes across how much Seishi Yokomizo knew about the mystery/detective/thriller genre and how much fun he had writing in it.
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