Kitan Club

May 1963

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Cover of Kitan Club, May 1963

Issue Details

Volume
17
Issue
5
PDF pages
188

Summary

The May 1963 issue of Kitan Club is organized as a broad anthology of bondage photography, fetish illustration, supernatural adventure, historical fiction, personal testimony, cultural commentary, and reader correspondence. Its opening pages establish the issue’s visual character through staged scenes of blindfolding, gagging, trampling, tightly compressed rope positions, kimono bondage, and women alternately occupying dominant and submissive roles. A substantial illustration portfolio follows, with contributions by Shima Takashi, Claude Koga, Kurokawa Fujio, and Taki Reiko depicting warehouse restraint, tongue suspension, breast-weight bondage, group punishment, imagined disembowelment, female same-sex intimacy, and headlock wrestling.

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The prose section opens with Nonaka Aizō’s “Valley of the Dead,” an extended pulp-fantasy narrative involving an isolated valley, a criminal entertainment trade, coercive performance, escape attempts, and grotesque transformation. Yoshino Mayumi’s conversational “Notes of a Gun-Making Maniac” shifts the tone toward modern urban leisure, collecting, transport work, and the economics of specialized hobbies. Maki Shinji’s “The Women of Sunpu Castle” then turns to historical melodrama, presenting conflict between women, assassination plots, ritualized combat, and female seppuku within a castle setting. Iseki Yasuaki’s “A Beautiful Cry” develops a modern sadomasochistic story, while Yoshino Mayumi’s “The Ordeal of the Diapered Child” examines infantilism and humiliation through a confessional narrative.

The middle of the issue combines recurring serial fiction with psychological and social themes. Tsujimura Takashi contributes the twenty-fourth installment of “Tales of the Thirty-Ninth Night,” followed by Hanada Ichirō’s “Longing for a Long Sentence,” which treats imprisonment as fantasy and fixation. “Marriage: The Withered Chapter” and Horikawa Shichirō’s “Secret Tales of Female Seppuku” continue the issue’s interest in troubled relationships, bodily sacrifice, and women subjected to or embracing ritual death. Taketani Jūzō’s continuing novel “The Wife of the Cross” extends this atmosphere into domestic and religiously inflected suffering.

The later section becomes more explicitly documentary and participatory. Reader testimony describes intoxication with enemas; a short essay considers women in male dress; another reflects on bondage photography as an amateur practice. Manda Fuji’s confession “Love’s Bewilderment,” Maruyama Keizō’s report on women’s sumo, Sanjō Takushi’s fiction “The Woman of the Ginkgo Mansion,” and Ōtsuka Keiko’s eight-millimeter memoir “Happiness” broaden the issue from fantasy and punishment to private memory, performance, cross-gender spectacle, and domestic unease. The final pages are filled with reader exchanges, classified notices, requests for photographs and publications, club announcements, editorial replies, and advertisements for fetish materials. These closing pages reveal Kitan Club not only as a magazine of visual and literary fantasy but also as a social network through which readers shared experiences, sought correspondents, and circulated specialized media.

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Table of Contents 21 items
  1. Opening Gravure Portfolio
    Summary

    An opening visual portfolio presents staged erotic scenes of women and men subjected to rope bondage, gagging, masking, and restrained poses in domestic and outdoor settings.

  2. Illustration Portfolio by Shima Takashi, Claude Koga, Kurokawa Fujio, Taki Reiko, and others
    Summary

    An illustration portfolio depicts stylized erotic scenes involving bound, gagged, captured, and otherwise physically controlled women, with recurring motifs of restraint, coercion, and submission.

  3. Second Gravure Portfolio
    Summary

    A second photographic portfolio shows women immobilized with rope in seated, kneeling, floor-based, and other staged bondage positions, often with covered or blindfolded faces.

  4. Valley of the Dead by Nonaka Aizō
    Summary

    A grotesque supernatural tale set in a haunted valley, where a mountain man, a witch-like woman, and a traveling performer become entangled in violent torture, poison, death, and occult revenge.

  5. Notes of a Gun-Making Maniac by Yoshino Mayumi
    Summary

    A conversational notebook-style column presents comic exchanges about apartment moves, deliveries, money, and erotic merchandise, alongside a mail-order advertisement for a women’s bondage photo collection and fetish garments.

  6. The Women of Sunpu Castle by Maki Shinji
    Summary

    This historical erotic adventure portrays rival women of Sunpu Castle whose beauty, martial prowess, jealousy, and violent struggle culminate in swordplay, decapitation, and fatal revenge.

  7. A Beautiful Cry by Iseki Yasuaki
    Summary

    A serialized erotic story follows Akiko as she enters an increasingly coercive relationship in which she is disciplined, restrained, humiliated, and compelled to endure painful punishment, while her emotional distress and cries are eroticized by the surrounding characters.

  8. The Ordeal of the Diapered Child by Yoshino Mayumi
    Summary

    The concluding ordeal centers on a young woman subjected to diapering, physical discipline, restraint, and degrading treatment, while the later pages discuss Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s Diary of a Mad Old Man, its film adaptations, and the elderly protagonist’s fetishistic fixation on women’s feet. The unit thus links fictional punishment with literary and cinematic representations of fetishism, aging, and sexual obsession.

  9. Tales of the Thirty-Ninth Night: Twenty-Fourth Night by Tsujimura Takashi
    Summary

    This installment of the serialized fantasy follows encounters at a bathhouse and temple that develop into voyeuristic discovery, supernatural menace, and elaborate scenes of erotic punishment and restraint.

  10. Longing for a Long Sentence by Hanada Ichirō
    Summary

    A dark erotic narrative centers on obsessive planning and enactment of prolonged punishment, with characters subjected to beatings, burning, binding, suspension, and psychological domination.

  11. Marriage: The Withered Chapter by Kururugi Sakae
    Summary

    A serialized erotic narrative portrays a marriage deteriorating into coercive domestic sadism, with jealousy, humiliation, physical restraint, and psychological submission shaping the relationship.

  12. Secret Tales of Female Seppuku by Horikawa Shichirō
    Summary

    This historical erotic tale follows a woman in a samurai-era setting who is compelled toward ritual female seppuku, presenting execution, obedience, spectatorship, and bodily suffering as a highly stylized dramatic spectacle.

  13. The Wife of the Cross, Continued by Taketani Jūzō
    Summary

    A serialized erotic fiction installment portrays a wife subjected to rigid household rules, forced domestic service, physical punishment, sexualized humiliation, and repeated attempts at escape within an abusive marital and family regime.

  14. Intoxicated by the Words of an Enema by Takeno Keizō
    Summary

    This reader confession by a young woman traces the development of her fascination with enemas from childhood experiences into a private erotic fixation involving medical imagery, self-experimentation, and fantasy.

  15. Observations on Women in Male Dress by Tajima Naoshi
    Summary

    The essay examines the erotic and imaginative appeal of women in male dress, drawing on literary, cinematic, illustrated, military, and historical examples to discuss gendered appearance, role reversal, and masculine presentation.

  16. Reflections on Bondage Photography by Yasuda Takao
    Summary

    An essay reflecting on bondage photography discusses the visual appeal of bound bodies, the role of costume and restraint, and the tension between documentary realism and erotic staging.

  17. Love’s Bewilderment by Manda Fuji
    Summary

    An extended erotic narrative follows the narrator’s obsessive relationship with Keiko, whose illness, authority, and sexual demands draw him into coercion, humiliation, bondage, rivalry, and fantasies of suffering and death.

  18. The Women’s Sumo of the Wives by Maruyama Keizō
    Summary

    A reportage-style feature describes a village wives’ sumo contest, emphasizing the women’s physical competition, spectatorship, local festival atmosphere, and eroticized wrestling imagery.

  19. The Woman of the Ginkgo Mansion by Sanjō Takushi
    Summary

    A serialized erotic narrative follows Tokunoichi and Yoshiji through encounters involving abduction, coercion, physical restraint, and sadistic sexual violence, culminating in an assault at the Ginkgo Mansion.

  20. Happiness: An Eight-Millimeter Memoir by Ōtsuka Keiko
    Summary

    Ōtsuka Keiko’s memoir reflects on her experiences with women’s nude modeling, erotic photography, and 8-millimeter filming, considering the emotional and psychological dimensions of being viewed and recorded.

  21. Reader Communications
    Summary

    A wide-ranging reader correspondence section presents readers’ reports, requests, opinions, and personal experiences concerning bondage, nude photography, fetish practices, and participation in the magazine’s erotic community, alongside editorial responses and notices.

Highlights

  • The opening photographic sequence presents blindfolding, trampling, exposed rope restraint, kneeling positions, and tightly compressed floor ties. (PDF pp. 6–13).
  • A full-page illustration portfolio by Shima Takashi, Claude Koga, Kurokawa Fujio, Taki Reiko, and others depicts warehouse bondage, tongue suspension, breast-weight restraint, group punishment, disembowelment fantasy, and headlock wrestling. (PDF pp. 14–21).
  • A second photographic portfolio places gagged and bound women in domestic and outdoor settings and includes female-on-male domination and compact rope positions. (PDF pp. 22–28).
  • Nonaka Aizō’s “Valley of the Dead” is a long supernatural adventure combining an isolated criminal enclave, coerced performance, escape, and bodily transformation. (PDF pp. 30–38).
  • Maki Shinji’s “The Women of Sunpu Castle” dramatizes rivalry, assassination, female sword combat, and ritual suicide in a historical setting. (PDF pp. 42–51).
  • Yoshino Mayumi’s “The Ordeal of the Diapered Child” provides a substantial treatment of infantilism and humiliation as an erotic and psychological fixation. (PDF pp. 64–71).
  • The central run of serial and case-oriented writing explores imprisonment fantasies, troubled marriage, female seppuku, and the continuing story “The Wife of the Cross.” (PDF pp. 72–121).
  • Later documentary pieces address enema practices, women in male dress, and the culture of amateur bondage photography. (PDF pp. 122–133).
  • The final literary section includes a confession of erotic bewilderment, a report on women’s sumo, the long story “The Woman of the Ginkgo Mansion,” and an eight-millimeter film memoir. (PDF pp. 134–173).
  • The extensive closing correspondence and classified pages document reader networks, exchanges of photographs and publications, club activity, personal advertisements, and editorial communication. (PDF pp. 174–188).

Contributors

Named contributors represented in this issue: