Oran, a lonely young woman, lives with servant couple Sasuke and Osoyo in a derelict house surrounded by a garden wall.
When Naojirō finds out that Oran's unfaithful fiancé and the passenger of the rickshaw which hit him are the same man, diet member Namizaki, he vows to kill him.
[4] Higuchi biographer and translator Robert Lyons Danly called it an ambitious, "involuted and extremely literary work" with "a gothic flavor to it".
[2] Both Tanaka and Danly pointed out the parallels to Higuchi's biography, who after her father's death had been left by her fiancé, Saburō Shibuya [ja], who later became a prosecutor, a judge, and the governor of Akita Prefecture.
[4] Danly even saw Encounters on a Dark Night as Higuchi's exploration of her desire for revenge against her father's former business partners.