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Kitan Club

September 1964

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Cover of Kitan Club, September 1964

Issue Details

Volume
18
Issue
10
PDF pages
221

Summary

The September 1964 issue of Kitan Club presents a particularly dense combination of bondage photography, illustrated punishment fantasies, confessional writing, erotic fiction, reader testimony, and serialized sadomasochistic literature. The issue opens with an unusually long visual sequence: staged rope photographs occupy much of the early section, alternating clothed and nude models, close studies of knots and limb restraint, gagging, floor bondage, and tightly compressed poses. These are followed by a suite of punishment and bondage illustrations by Yotsuma Takashi, including scenes of chair restraint, outdoor binding, shaving, blade imagery, suspension, and other theatricalized forms of coercion. The visual emphasis establishes the issue’s central concern with bodily posture, restraint, humiliation, and the transformation of the bound body into an aesthetic object.

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The prose section begins with confessional and documentary-style pieces, including Wife’s Confession by Mizuno Kayo and Shingū Akio’s Autopsy of the Fully Nude Body. Short essays and columns then move between sadomasochistic fantasy, photographic commentary, female submission, bodily technique, film, fetishistic imagery, and readers’ observations. Several features treat SM as a personal identity or social world rather than merely a literary theme. These include My Image: The Woman Prisoner Being Kept, a first-person fantasy of captivity; Shameful Record, presented as a prize-winning confession or personal experience; Pathos Banquet; the serial Sadism novel A Painful History of the Heart; Confession; SM Hostess; and My Rubber Play. The issue’s editorial voice repeatedly blends documentary language with fantasy, encouraging readers to understand SM through testimony, staged experiment, fiction, and visual demonstration.

The later half is dominated by longer fiction and recurring series. Eseh Pari Nikki continues its satirical or erotic travel-diary mode, while Lakeside Moon-Shadow Notes begins a longer literary narrative. Sweet Submission explicitly foregrounds willing obedience and erotic surrender. The feature on a seven-month-pregnant stripper adds a sensational documentary register, followed by the continuation of Thirteen Women Sentenced to Death, which combines criminological fascination with punishment and female criminality. Yoshino Mayumi’s Wet Through and Through continues a recurring erotic series, and Melon Venus develops another sustained fetish narrative. An experimental record concerning Donan returns to the magazine’s quasi-documentary mode.

The issue culminates in the final installment of Dan Oniroku’s Flower and Snake, one of Kitan Club’s most important serialized works. Its extended closing section carries the issue through repeated scenes of captivity, erotic domination, and psychological submission before yielding to reader correspondence, indexes, recent-issue contents, notices, and the colophon. As a whole, the issue exemplifies Kitan Club’s mid-1960s editorial identity: a hybrid publication in which rope photography, illustrated fantasy, confession, serial fiction, reader culture, SM terminology, and quasi-investigative writing are tightly interwoven.

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Table of Contents 26 items
  1. First Gravure: Bondage and Restrained Women
    6–21
  2. Frontispiece Illustrations by Yotsuma Takashi
    22–29
  3. Second Gravure: Bondage Studies
    30–45
  4. Wife's Confession by Mizuno Kayo
    50
  5. Autopsy of the Fully Nude Body by Shingū Akio
    51
  6. My Image: The Woman Prisoner Being Kept by Kondō Hajime
    65–71
  7. Shameful Record by Yoshimura Yoshiko
    72–75
  8. Pathos Banquet by Utsuki Yōichi
    76–81
  9. Counterfeit: Tormenting Sadism by Yoshino Mayumi
    82–89
  10. A Painful History of the Heart by Saijō Misao
    90–105
  11. Confession by Inaba Nobuo
    106–110
  12. SM Hostess by Murasaki Shima Reiko
    111–116
  13. My Rubber Play by Umekawa Sachiko
    117–119
  14. The Master's Doll
    120–131
  15. Eseh Pari Nikki by Manda Fujin
    132–139
  16. Lakeside Moon-Shadow Notes, Part One by Segawa Yasuko
    140–153
  17. Sweet Submission by Iho Yasushi
    154–163
  18. A Seven-Month-Pregnant Stripper by Segawa Shirō
    164–165
  19. Thirteen Women Sentenced to Death, Continued by Sade Sudō
    166–177
  20. Wet Through and Through, Continued by Yoshino Mayumi
    178–185
  21. Melon Venus by Senuma Shirō
    186–189
  22. On Donan by Kurise Chō
    190–193
  23. Flower and Snake, Final Installment by Dan Oniroku
    194–212
  24. Recent-Issue General Index
    213–214
  25. Reader Correspondence
    215–223
  26. Editorial Notices and Colophon
    224

Highlights

  • The opening photographic sequence is an extensive study of female rope restraint, moving from clothed and gagged poses to nude bondage, close studies of limb ties, and tightly compressed floor positions. (PDF pp. 6–21,30–45).
  • A substantial illustrated portfolio by Yotsuma Takashi presents theatrical scenes of restraint, punishment, shaving, blade imagery, suspension, and historical-style torment. (PDF pp. 22–29).
  • Wife's Confession uses the first-person confession format that became central to Kitan Club's presentation of SM as lived experience as well as fantasy. (PDF p. 47).
  • My Image: The Woman Prisoner Being Kept develops captivity as a personal erotic fantasy and exemplifies the magazine's recurrent first-person imaginative essays. (PDF pp. 62–68).
  • Shameful Record is presented within Kitan Club's prize confession, memoir, and experience framework, emphasizing reader testimony and embarrassment as erotic material. (PDF pp. 69–72).
  • A Painful History of the Heart inaugurates a serialized sadism novel and occupies a long central block of the issue. (PDF pp. 87–102).
  • SM Hostess treats sadomasochism as a social and occupational milieu, reflecting the magazine's interest in SM identities and communities beyond purely fictional scenarios. (PDF pp. 108–113).
  • Thirteen Women Sentenced to Death continues a recurring series centered on women, crime, punishment, and execution, combining sensationalism with documentary framing. (PDF pp. 163–174).
  • The final installment of Dan Oniroku's Flower and Snake forms the issue's major concluding literary sequence and reinforces themes of captivity, domination, and psychological submission. (PDF pp. 191–209).
  • The closing pages contain reader correspondence, recent-issue indexes, editorial notices, prize information, and publication data, emphasizing Kitan Club's active reader community and serialized publishing structure. (PDF pp. 210–221).

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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