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Uramado

July 1959

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Cover of Uramado, July 1959

Issue Details

Volume
4
Issue
7
PDF pages
291

Summary

The July 1959 issue of Uramado is organized around a prominent Special Feature on Terrifying Unusual Sensations, combining erotic horror, punishment imagery, supernatural fiction, crime, fetishism, historical inquiry, illustrated narratives, and photography. The opening pages establish this hybrid character immediately. The illustrated Hell Screen presents a sequence of scenes involving nudity, restraint, violence, and grotesque fantasy, followed by Fujisawa Osamu’s Selected Nude Masterpieces, a studio portfolio emphasizing the isolated nude body against a dark background. An editorial miscellany, From the Unsorted Files, then reflects on reader submissions and the magazine’s taste for unusual and psychologically charged material.

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The principal special-feature stories develop fear through situations in which sexuality, captivity, death, and the supernatural overlap. The Hanging House is an extended illustrated tale of a suspicious household marked by hanging deaths, confinement, hidden spaces, and threatening women. Other contributions turn to fetish and historical subjects: Madam, Your Hand Please constructs an urban encounter around female hands and coercion, while Female Hara-Kiri in History and Fiction examines representations of women’s ritual suicide across historical sources and imaginative literature. Servant of the Feet foregrounds foot fetishism, and The Samurai with Two Faces returns to period fiction and bodily duplicity.

The middle of the issue broadens into espionage, prison writing, uncanny folklore, and exotic curiosity. Female Intelligence Agent uses an illustrated serial format to depict clandestine operations, interrogation, and sexual peril. Inside the Gray Walls is framed as recollection from imprisonment, while Aikuchi, The Gallows Bed, Strange Museum, and Hair Wheel move between crime, horror, imported suspense, abnormal psychology, and erotic obsession. Mystery of the Heike Village and The Cursed Old Man draw more heavily on Japanese supernatural and regional traditions.

The closing third sustains the issue’s fascination with monstrous bodies, death, and dangerous desire. Tales of Supernatural Strangeness, The Lady and the Dog, the film feature The Two-Headed Killer, Phantom Samurai: Hama Calendar – Hell of Congealed Fat, Gift from the Dead, The Murderous Doll, and Tattoo create a dense succession of ghost stories, grotesque imagery, sadistic fantasy, cinema commentary, and illustrated suspense. Promotional notices and editorial back matter follow the main features. Across the issue, Uramado presents eroticism not as a separate category but as something entangled with fear, bodily vulnerability, voyeurism, fetishism, punishment, folklore, crime, and the visual culture of the grotesque.

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Table of Contents 23 items
  1. Illustrated Tale: Hell Screen by Nakajima Yoshimi
    11–18
  2. Selected Nude Masterpieces by Fujisawa Osamu
    19–26
  3. From the Unsorted Files by Henjūshi
    27–35
  4. The Hanging House by Yakiri Jūhachi
    36–53
  5. Madam, Your Hand Please by Narutaki Saburō
    54–65
  6. Female Hara-Kiri in History and Fiction by Naka Yasuhirō
    66–75
  7. Servant of the Feet by Makido Nobuo
    76–87
  8. The Samurai with Two Faces by Shimamoto Haruo
    88–103
  9. Female Intelligence Agent by Yoda Seiichi
    104–119
  10. Inside the Gray Walls by Shintani Yoshimi
    120–133
  11. Aikuchi (Dagger) by Nakabayashi Setsuzō
    134–149
  12. The Gallows Bed by Kuroba Shin
    150–162
  13. Strange Museum by Tōge Kōsuke
    163–170
  14. Hair Wheel by Shima Fuji
    171–181
  15. Mystery of the Heike Village by Fujimi Iku
    182–195
  16. The Cursed Old Man by Hasegawa Isamu
    196–205
  17. Tales of Supernatural Strangeness by Suzuki Kazuo
    206–219
  18. The Lady and the Dog by Toyama Kazuhiko
    220–230
  19. The Two-Headed Killer
    231–233
  20. Phantom Samurai: Hama Calendar - Hell of Congealed Fat by Kuroki Shinobu
    234–249
  21. Gift from the Dead by Misaki Yōnosuke
    250–269
  22. The Murderous Doll by Sakata Osamu
    270–281
  23. Tattoo by Enjōji Tatsu
    282–293

Highlights

  • Hell Screen opens the editorial body with a heavily illustrated sequence in which nudity, restraint, punishment, and grotesque fantasy are presented in a deliberately archaic pictorial mode. (PDF pp. 6–13).
  • Fujisawa Osamu's Selected Nude Masterpieces uses an almost entirely black studio background to isolate the model's body through a succession of curled, reclining, kneeling, and extended poses. (PDF pp. 14–19).
  • The Hanging House is one of the issue's longest special-feature narratives, developing a claustrophobic mystery around hanging deaths, hidden architectural spaces, suspicious household members, and repeated threats of strangulation. (PDF pp. 29–46).
  • Female Hara-Kiri in History and Fiction examines the representation of women's self-disembowelment in historical materials, theatrical traditions, and fiction, linking scholarship with the issue's larger fascination with bodily extremity. (PDF pp. 59–68).
  • Servant of the Feet turns explicitly to foot fetishism, using illustrations and narrative commentary to explore submission, desire, and erotic fixation on women's feet. (PDF pp. 69–80).
  • Female Intelligence Agent is an extended illustrated espionage narrative involving clandestine organizations, surveillance, interrogation, and sexualized danger. (PDF pp. 97–112).
  • Inside the Gray Walls adopts the voice of prison recollection and shifts the special issue from supernatural terror toward confinement, punishment, criminality, and institutional life. (PDF pp. 113–126).
  • Hair Wheel by Shima Fuji combines black-hair fetishism with an uncanny narrative of three brothers, presenting hair simultaneously as erotic object, visual motif, and source of menace. (PDF pp. 164–174).
  • The late sequence from Gift from the Dead through The Murderous Doll returns forcefully to the issue's central mixture of death, supernatural revenge, erotic danger, and illustrated grotesquerie. (PDF pp. 243–274).
  • Tattoo occupies the final major narrative position, bringing together criminal milieu, bodily inscription, erotic attraction, and violence before the magazine's closing notices and editorial material. (PDF pp. 275–286).

Contributors

Named contributors represented in this issue:

Kinbaku Today is an independent online journal dedicated to the study, practice, and cultural history of Japanese rope bondage. Blending essays, translations, interviews, and archival research, it explores kinbaku not simply as technique, but as a living dialogue between history, performance, and human connection.
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