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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Female Intelligence Agent is an extended illustrated espionage narrative involving clandestine organizations, surveillance, interrogation, and sexualized danger.
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.
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.
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.
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.