Nureki Chimuo Archive

For the past few years, I have published five books in succession through the publisher Kawade Shobo Shinsa. "The Beauty and Pleasure of Bondage," "The True Story of Bondage and Punishment," "The Secret Book of Sex: Punishment and Pleasure," "The Artists of 'Kitan Club'," "Kitan Club and Its Surroundings", all of which are original paperbacks. Soon, my sixth book will be released. This is a collection of essays found in a certain magazine. This sixth book will be titled, “Bondage, as long as there is life.” The person at Kawade Shobo's editorial department added it. “Bondage: As long as I live” is an amazing title. It gives a sense of sadness. It’s a slightly eerie feeling. When tying a woman’s body, I personally don’t feel the slightest bit sad. I can tie the woman I love however I like, caress her however I want, and my own body is caressed by her. There is no way I could be sad. They say “As long as you live,” but when tying the woman I love how I please, I enjoy it so much my life keeps extending. I am currently serializing my story in a monthly magazine called “SM Sniper,” how I tie the woman I love, and I am caught in a crucible of pleasure. If you are interested, please read that as well. Huh? What is it? Are you saying you don’t want to read about other people having fun? Yes, that’s it. Surely, reading about other people happily indulging in pleasure is nothing short of infuriating. But, you rarely get to read about a man nearing 80, bearing his aged ugliness, engaging in every debauchery with a 27 year old woman’s body.

Now then, what am I trying to write? In this “talking theater” I intend to spill out everything I never wrote in the past. The “play” in “talking play” is not merely a decorative term, but in actuality means “theater.” Honestly, my “SM life” is quite intertwined with my “theatrical life.” While performing in plays, he wrote novels and edited magazines, performed more plays again while writing manuscripts, occasionally mimicking Vaudeville performers, he was simply restless. Of course, during that time, I was constantly involved in SM and kept writing that kind of material. As I wrote in my profile, I’ve been doing all sorts of things like a fool. When I say “theater,” I don’t mean anything lofty, grand or pretentious. Honestly, I believe I’ve always harbored a longing, a sort of “theatrical inclination in me.” In short, I simply loved acting at a basic level. The first “SM Story” I wrote was “The Travelling Actors of Pleasure and Pain,” published in the November 1953 edition of Kitan Club. It’s a collection of 40 short stories, written under the name Mieko Aoyama. They were illustrated by a male artist using the pen name Mineko Tsuzuki. For more information about this artist, please refer to the “Artists of Kitan Club” section in the book. “The Travelling Actors of Pleasure and Pain,” as the title suggests, is the story of a theater troupe performing “light plays” in Akusuka (ahh, the term “light plays” doesn’t exist anymore) that, pushed out by the then widely popular strip shows, formed a troupe of female swordplay performers and set out on a tour. The story unfolds during that very tour. The story is written in the first person, and the “I” in the story is that of the kyougen performer of the troupe, the resident playwright. In other words, the “world of theater” has appeared in my stories since my first work. It wasn’t that I consciously set out to depict the world of theater (not the grand stages of Tokyo), but the more popular kind, that of the small travelling troupes. Even though the theme was SM, I quite naturally realized that such a travelling troupe had become the setting for the story. And this trend has continued until today, fifty years later. When I hear the words “travelling theater troupe,” I immediately sense a decadent romanticism between men and women, thick with the rich, muddy hues of watercolor paint, and a unique eroticism unlike anything found in normal society. Of course, this is

nothing more than my own selfish fantasy, or perhaps delusion, but I have always had this particular feeling, a longing, ever since I was a child. From journey to journey, the lives of men and women in the travelling troupe who perform their dubious plays, as they move from place to place, held a sense of guilty loneliness, like walking stealthily along the alleys of life. Yet, I always felt it also harbored an impossibly sweet, grotesque pleasure. Ever since I was old enough to understand, I had longed for it. I felt a fascination similar to drugs. Even though I am nearing 80, I still find it appealing. Thus, I like it and often watch it. My feelings when I wrote “The Travelling Actors of Pleasure and Torment” fifty-five years ago have not changed a bit. (Truthfully, I secretly think that people who don’t understand the appeal of these troupes can’t possibly grasp the essence of SM.) I hope you now have a little understanding of why I titled this piece “Talking Theater.” Anyway, I just love theater. The first writing was well received, and the manuscript fee arrived quickly, so I followed it with a second writing titled “Harukaze-za Autumn’s Journey2 .” It is also a story about travelling actors. This was published in the next issue, the December issue in 1953. Editor-in-Chief Minoru Yoshida wrote in a letter, “The novels you write have a certain bright and romantic mood to them that I like. Due to the nature of the magazine, our publication always tends to be dark and gloomy. Your work saves me, please keep sending more work like this. If you change your pen name, we will publish as many pieces as you like in the same issue.” The passionate and sincere content of that letter would begin to deepen my relationship with “Kitan Club.” 春風座 is probably the name of a theater, meaning “spring breeze theater, autumn’s journey”