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Uramado · Special Issue of Strange Tales of Revenge

Summary

The October 1958 issue of Uramado is an unusually large anthology organized around a special feature of supernatural revenge tales. Its editorial identity combines historical melodrama, contemporary crime fiction, grotesque fantasy, erotic suspense, illustrated serials, photography, and popular occultism. The cover’s telephone-cord bondage image establishes a modern erotic menace, while the formal contents spread presents a densely packed program of stories about curses, ghosts, vengeance, confinement, murder, mysterious women, and bodies placed under threat.

The issue opens with “The Female Water Entertainer,” a lavishly illustrated period tale involving a performer, murder, mutilation, and pursuit. This is followed by Osamu Fujisawa’s “Light and Skin,” a sculptural nude photographic portfolio emphasizing bodily contour, shadow, limbs, and abstract composition. The modern illustrated thriller “The Secret of the Bat Theater” then shifts the setting to Tokyo nightlife, following an actress, a dwarf performer, abduction, torture, narcotics, criminal exploitation, and violent pursuit. “Breast Chamber of Hell” extends the contemporary crime atmosphere through gangsters, stolen narcotics, sexual coercion, imprisonment, and gunplay.

The central revenge feature develops through both historical and modern settings. “The Damask-Skin Curse” concerns a bewitched mansion, secret chambers, written curses, missing women, and inherited violence. Subsequent stories move through samurai households, haunted inns, vendettas, monstrous transformations, supernatural retainers, traveling killers, deceptive beauties, river and waterfront settings, and fatal encounters with women whose beauty conceals danger or grievance. Frequent illustrations turn scenes of capture, exposure, pursuit, murder, supernatural manifestation, and punishment into a parallel visual narrative.

The later half broadens the issue’s tonal range without abandoning its core themes. Stories such as “The Inn of the Poison Butterfly,” “The Beauty Mound’s Karmic Consequence,” “The House That Invites an Eerie Presence,” “Will-o’-the-Wisp Riverbank,” “The Man Who Walks About Selling Death,” “Strange Transformation Sketches,” and “Almost the Anniversary of Your Death” combine mystery structures with ghosts, poisons, doubles, disguises, obsessive desire, and retributive violence. Longer period narratives, including “Hatamoto Bedchamber Chronicle,” “Hell Ship,” “Autumn Wind at Kikyo Field,” and “The Nineteenth Installment of Death-Coffin Komachi,” sustain the magazine’s interest in feudal authority, erotic intrigue, confinement, cruelty, and revenge across extended serial form.

The closing pages contain the final installments of “Death-Coffin Komachi,” additional illustrated fiction, reader and contributor material, a manuscript solicitation, publication information, and editorial back matter. Across its full range, the issue presents revenge as an unstable crossing point between justice and obsession. Women repeatedly appear as performers, victims, avengers, apparitions, seductresses, and bearers of inherited curses, while the magazine’s fusion of text, noir illustration, period drawing, and photography gives the anthology a strongly visual and theatrical character.

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