May 1963 Issue

The May 1963 issue of Kitan Club is organized as a broad anthology of bondage photography, fetish illustration, supernatural adventure, historical fiction, personal testimony, cultural commentary, and reader correspondence. Its opening pages establish the issue’s visual character through staged scenes of blindfolding, gagging, trampling, tightly compressed rope positions, kimono bondage, and women alternately occupying dominant and submissive roles. A substantial illustration portfolio follows, with contributions by Shima Takashi, Claude Koga, Kurokawa Fujio, and Taki Reiko depicting warehouse restraint, tongue suspension, breast-weight bondage, group punishment, imagined disembowelment, female same-sex intimacy, and headlock wrestling. The prose section opens with Nonaka Aizō’s “Valley of the Dead,” an extended pulp-fantasy narrative involving an isolated valley, a criminal entertainment trade, coercive performance, escape attempts, and grotesque transformation. Yoshino Mayumi’s conversational “Notes of a Gun-Making Maniac” shifts the tone toward modern urban leisure, collecting, transport work, and the economics of specialized hobbies. Maki Shinji’s “The Women of Sunpu Castle” then turns to historical melodrama, presenting conflict between women, assassination plots, ritualized combat, and female seppuku within a castle setting. Iseki Yasuaki’s “A Beautiful Cry” develops a modern sadomasochistic story, while Yoshino Mayumi’s “The Ordeal of the Diapered Child” examines infantilism and humiliation through a confessional narrative. The middle of the issue combines recurring serial fiction with psychological and social themes. Tsujimura Takashi contributes the twenty-fourth installment of “Tales of the Thirty-Ninth Night,” followed by Hanada Ichirō’s “Longing for a Long Sentence,” which treats imprisonment as fantasy and fixation. “Marriage: The Withered Chapter” and Horikawa Shichirō’s “Secret Tales of Female Seppuku” continue the issue’s interest in troubled relationships, bodily sacrifice, and women subjected to or embracing ritual death. Taketani Jūzō’s continuing novel “The Wife of the Cross” extends this atmosphere into domestic and religiously inflected suffering. The later section becomes more explicitly documentary and participatory. Reader testimony describes intoxication with enemas; a short essay considers women in male dress; another reflects on bondage photography as an amateur practice. Manda Fuji’s confession “Love’s Bewilderment,” Maruyama Keizō’s report on women’s sumo, Sanjō Takushi’s fiction “The Woman of the Ginkgo Mansion,” and Ōtsuka Keiko’s eight-millimeter memoir “Happiness” broaden the issue from fantasy and punishment to private memory, performance, cross-gender spectacle, and domestic unease. The final pages are filled with reader exchanges, classified notices, requests for photographs and publications, club announcements, editorial replies, and advertisements for fetish materials. These closing pages reveal Kitan Club not only as a magazine of visual and literary fantasy but also as a social network through which readers shared experiences, sought correspondents, and circulated specialized media.

Title	Author	Printed Pages	PDF Pages
Opening Gravure Portfolio	Uncredited	—	6 –13
Illustration Portfolio	Shima Takashi, Claude Koga, Kurokawa Fujio, Taki Reiko, and others	—	14 –21
Second Gravure Portfolio	Uncredited	—	22 –28
Valley of the Dead	Nonaka Aizō	34–42	30 –38
Notes of a Gun-Making Maniac	Yoshino Mayumi	43–45	39 –41
The Women of Sunpu Castle	Maki Shinji	46–55	42 –51
A Beautiful Cry	Iseki Yasuaki	56–67	52 –63
The Ordeal of the Diapered Child	Yoshino Mayumi	68–75	64 –71
Tales of the Thirty-Ninth Night: Twenty-Fourth Night	Tsujimura Takashi	76–81	72 –77
Longing for a Long Sentence	Hanada Ichirō	82–99	78 –95
Marriage: The Withered Chapter	Kururugi Sakae	100–102	96 –98
Secret Tales of Female Seppuku	Horikawa Shichirō	103–117	99 –113
The Wife of the Cross, Continued	Taketani Jūzō	118–125	114 –121
Intoxicated by the Words of an Enema	Takeno Keizō	126–127	122 –123
Observations on Women in Male Dress	Tajima Naoshi	128–135	124 –131
Reflections on Bondage Photography	Yasuda Takao	136–137	132 –133
Love’s Bewilderment	Manda Fuji	138–147	134 –143
The Women’s Sumo of the Wives	Maruyama Keizō	148–149	144 –145
The Woman of the Ginkgo Mansion	Sanjō Takushi	150–167	146 –163
Happiness: An Eight-Millimeter Memoir	Ōtsuka Keiko	168–177	164 –173
Reader Communications	Uncredited	178–191	174 –187

The formal contents page appears on PDF page 4. The issue identification page gives Volume 17, Number 5, cumulative number 176. Printed page 34 corresponds to PDF page 30, producing a consistent four-page offset through the principal numbered section. Several contributor names and one reader-confession title contain uncommon or faint characters and should receive human confirmation, particularly the author of “Marriage: The Withered Chapter,” the given name attached to “The Woman of the Ginkgo Mansion,” and the exact wording of “Intoxicated by the Words of an Enema.” PDF page 188 contains the colophon, publication notices, and final advertisements.