Sun & Moon

The opening portfolio, “Images of Discipline,” presents women tied in Japanese rooms, restrained against sliding doors and alcoves, suspended or inverted, and positioned through architecture. Rope is used to connect the body to walls, beams, furniture, and the frame of the room. The series treats domestic space as a flexible stage upon which restraint can be composed.

The first major text is a “humiliation roundtable” titled “Three Families of Parasitic Insects,” a darkly comic discussion among three participants or couples. The roundtable combines confession, jokes, stories of practice, and observations about different SM temperaments. It reflects the magazine’s ongoing interest in conversational authority: participants establish credibility through experience rather than medical qualification.

The issue then introduces a serialized “Beloved Wife Bondage Record.” The husband-author describes photographing and tying his wife, explaining how their practice developed and how domestic intimacy is altered by the camera. Photographs show behind-the-back ties, standing restraint, outdoor or semi-outdoor posing, and the movement between clothing and nudity.

A long essay, “One Abnormal Sex Life,” explores desire through autobiography and reflection. Rather than offering a simple catalogue of practices, it considers how an erotic identity develops across memory, marriage, fantasy, and repeated experimentation. Such writing shows the magazine trying to preserve life histories, not merely provide stimulation.

The central historical feature is “The Collector of Humiliation: A Record of Solitary Pleasure.” It examines earlier SM books, mimeographed albums, photographic sets, and rare publications. Reproductions include covers and images from old Kitan Club-related materials, allowing readers to see how bondage photography changed from the 1950s into the 1970s.

This archival section is particularly important for kinbaku history. It treats earlier magazines and photographs as collectible evidence of a tradition. The author compares models, rope patterns, print quality, poses, and publishing contexts. By 1977, the postwar SM press was beginning to build its own historiography.

A related feature, “The Pleasure of Drifting: My Specialty Is Stockings,” turns to fetish collecting and private performance. Stockings, garters, corsets, and Western-style lingerie are treated as technologies that frame the body and transform ordinary nudity into fetishized presentation.

The photographic essay “My Den Is Toxic Shocking” or “My Room Is Toxic Shocking” documents a private play environment influenced by imported fetish aesthetics. Leather, restraints, straps, furniture, and theatrical posing shift the visual register away from traditional Japanese rope toward a hybrid international SM style.

The October issue also includes several large amateur portfolios: pregnant-wife bondage, mature women, bedroom restraint, chair ties, chains, body harnesses, reader-submitted photographs, and staged “training” sequences. This variety reinforces the magazine’s claim that SM belongs to ordinary couples and readers rather than only professional models.

The issue’s historical consciousness extends to its discussion of earlier kinbaku models and photographers. Several pages reproduce mid-century bondage photographs, identifying how the older images were posed and how contemporary readers might interpret them. The article does not simply praise the past. It compares changes in bodies, rope tension, costume, studio conventions, and erotic atmosphere.

The concluding sections return to contemporary practice through confessions, photograph submissions, fictional pieces, and rope portfolios. The overall effect is an issue suspended between archive and workshop. It looks backward to construct a lineage while continuing to solicit new amateur evidence.

For readers of Kinbaku Today, the October issue is especially valuable because it shows historical memory becoming part of SM culture itself. The magazine’s readers no longer experience Kitan Club and older bondage albums merely as obsolete pornography. They treat them as ancestral documents whose images can be studied, collected, compared, and republished.