Uramado

The issue opens with The House in the Swamp Where People Disappear, an illustrated suspense story by Tsukumo Juro with art by Hiyama Kitaro. The narrative returns later in the issue after intervening features. The first major photographic portfolio, Tree and Woman by Yoshida Hisashi, uses a rough tree trunk as both visual structure and restraint apparatus, producing stark black-and-white studies of a nude bound to or posed around the wood. The Painter of Enmado follows as a dark illustrated tale centered on an artist, erotic grotesquerie, captivity, and the production of disturbing images. Story of a Man Who Wants to Become a Maid shifts toward first-person reflections on gendered behavior, femininity, domestic service, and the narrator’s desire to inhabit a woman’s social role.

The middle of the issue broadens the magazine’s cultural range. Uninvited Peril is an international adventure and abduction story involving a woman traveler, border crossings, pursuit, interrogation, restraint, and escape. A reader essay on the film adaptations of The Great Bodhisattva Pass examines scenes of female suffering in Japanese cinema, while Black-Hair Night Tales considers erotic fascination with women’s hair. Actresses in Scenes of Suffering and Temptation to Masochism further connect popular entertainment and everyday experience to the magazine’s continuing interest in submission, distress, and masochistic imagination. Tragic Death of a Defeated Warrior adds a historical-fiction register, and Disregard for Women’s Rights in the Meiji Era explicitly turns toward historical gender relations.

The latter half is especially rich visually. White Wall and Selected Pleasure-in-Cruelty Photographs present photographic studies of bondage and bodily pose, while Record of Rope-Love Sin and Karma uses an illustrated period setting. Tokyo Hedon Yaro, Uramado Town, Black-Hair Confession, and Readers’ Short Reviews provide shorter prose and community-oriented material. The period picture-story The Man Who Failed to Become a Man is followed by the grotesque tale The Devil’s Fish Is Black Even to Its Mouth, a film-review section, Shake Your Ass and Run, and Female Prisoners and Prenatal Education.

The closing material returns decisively to erotic visual culture. Garden of Pleasure-Cruelty 1: The Captive Cage combines prose and bondage imagery; a retrospective selection reproduces notable illustrations from earlier Uramado issues; and the final Ōoku Scroll of Naked Women uses two-color pages and historical imagery to close the volume. Across these shifts, the issue presents Uramado as both an erotic magazine and a broader archive of fantasies about restraint, gender, danger, performance, historical cruelty, and visualized suffering.