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Uramado · September 1959 Special Issue: Secret History of the Ōoku and Inner Palace

Summary

The September 1959 issue of Uramado is a large special number centered on sensationalized histories and fantasies of the Ōoku, the shogunal women's quarters, and the wider world of the early-modern inner palace. Its editorial mixture is characteristic of Uramado: illustrated fiction, historical melodrama, erotic and grotesque anecdote, supernatural tales, nude photography, essays, and contemporary crime stories are interwoven rather than separated into rigid departments. The opening establishes this range immediately with the illustrated story The Pink Phantom Thief, Fujisawa Osamu's Nude Masterpieces photographic portfolio, and the editorial miscellany From the Unsorted Shelf.

The principal special feature begins with Yagiri Jūhachi's Secret Chiyoda Picture Scroll: Lady Kasuga, an extended historical narrative built around the politics, rivalries, sexuality, and punishments associated with the Tokugawa inner chambers. Other major contributions repeatedly return to court intrigue and female rivalry: Demon Palanquin, The Flying Squirrel's Long-Cherished Wish, Two Komachi of Vengeance, Illustrated Flowers in Combat in the Ōoku, Sinister Clouds over Nerima Palace, and The Mad Consort's Trap. The stories are heavily illustrated and use confinement, jealousy, coercion, secret meetings, bodily punishment, and political manipulation as recurring narrative engines.

Alongside the palace material, the issue broadens into other forms of abnormal and erotic culture. Historical Fact and Fiction of Female Seppuku examines women and ritual suicide through a mixture of historical commentary and literary examples. Beautiful-Skinned Page explores male beauty and eroticized youth in an illustrated narrative. The Devil from the Graveyard, Tsugomori Pond, and The Strange Kappa Boy bring supernatural and grotesque motifs into the issue, while Pencil Hell and Hair Benten move into modern urban or psychologically charged settings. Oryū's Secret Notebook and Records of Wicked Women and Villains continue the fascination with dangerous women, deception, sexuality, and criminality.

The final portion shifts increasingly toward modern settings. In Tokyo's Blind Spot presents a translated or adapted urban crime narrative, while Chronicle of the Ōjō Group closes the major fiction with a contemporary underworld story. The last pages contain the conclusion of that narrative followed by publication information, manuscript solicitation, notices, and the colophon. Across the issue, the Ōoku functions less as a narrowly historical subject than as an organizing fantasy space for secrecy, erotic rivalry, punishment, disguise, transgression, and dangerous desire, while the surrounding fiction and visual material extend those concerns from the Edo period into supernatural folklore and modern metropolitan life.

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Analysis Notes

The cover identifies the issue as the September number and as a special issue devoted to secret histories of the Ōoku and inner palace. The internal special-feature title page identifies it as Volume 4, Number 9. A formal illustrated table of contents occupies PDF page 4. Printed pagination does not maintain one constant offset from PDF viewer pagination because the front matter, photographic plates, advertisements, and other inserted leaves are not handled uniformly in the printed numbering; article ranges above therefore follow the actual article openings and continuations rather than a single calculated offset. PDF page 28 is a separate title page for the Ōoku special feature. PDF page 261 contains manuscript solicitation, publication notices, and the issue colophon rather than continuation of the final fiction. Several pen names and personal names are printed without furigana; their Latin-script readings are conventional romanizations and should be authority-checked where exact author-specific pronunciation is important.

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