Another erotic grotesque short novel by Edogawa Rampo, master of this genre. What do we find in this one? Beautiful women, ugly blind man, dismembering, masturbation, gruesome crime scenes... Not necessarily in that order. Not the best Edogawa I've read... but keep in mind these were mass published in some sort of pulp magazines at the time, they're not made to be more than popular adult entertainment.
The introduction to the Shinbaku edition/translation deals with the different movie adaptation of this book and is pretty entertaining. There are a few illustrations from the original magazines in which the novel was published, which makes this read particularly interesting for scholars studying pulp from Japan's 1920s-1930s. ( )