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Kitan Club · Kitan Club, November 1955 Issue

Summary

The November 1955 issue of Kitan Club is a visually and textually dense publication combining bondage illustration, historical fantasy, confessional fiction, sexological commentary, medical and bodily case studies, prison memoir, translated European material, film and literary criticism, reader correspondence, and extensive publishing back matter. Its editorial identity depends on the close association of erotic spectacle with purported documentation. Images of restraint and punishment are placed beside autobiographical testimonies, historical investigations, clinical discussion, cultural criticism, and serialized narratives, creating a magazine that treats unconventional desire as fantasy, personal experience, artistic subject, and field of inquiry.

The issue opens with a formal contents page accompanied by a suspension illustration, followed by a compact portfolio of drawings and photographs. These early features include women tied or suspended in outdoor settings, a woman restrained during a small athletic or disciplinary spectacle, historical scenes of capture and punishment, an image of a woman treated as the spoils of gambling, and several foreign or exoticized captivity scenes. The opening section establishes recurrent motifs of ropes, suspension, forced posture, transport, public display, female vulnerability, and dominant authority. Although brief compared with the longer photographic portfolios in some adjacent issues, it provides a concentrated visual overture to the prose that follows.

Furukawa Hiroko's Farewell begins the principal literary body with a long, psychologically oriented narrative. Its sustained first-person and dialogic passages explore separation, attachment, emotional instability, sexual secrecy, and the difficulty of reconciling private desire with ordinary relationships. The relative lack of illustration gives the story a serious, inward tone and establishes confession and emotional estrangement as important concerns. Satō Masuo's Theory of the Abnormal Novel then turns from narrative to criticism, considering the literary treatment of unconventional sexuality, the relationship between fiction and lived experience, and the difficulty of defining a distinct literature of sexual difference.

Haruta Ichirō's Ten Months in Captivity continues the recurring prison memoir. This installment describes institutional routines, discipline, bodily hardship, surveillance, authority, and the social relationships formed under confinement. It is followed by Takarazuka Fumio's How I Punish Him, illustrated by Shima Takashi, which shifts from involuntary imprisonment to deliberately staged female dominance. The article develops punishment through commands, humiliation, bodily positioning, emotional control, and scenes in which male submission becomes the central erotic structure.

A short article linking lesbianism and enemas combines same-sex desire with medicalized bodily treatment. Kameyama Hideo's historical discussion of female belly-cutting in training clothes follows, using an older written source to examine ritualized cutting, spectacle, and gendered violence. Futamata Shizuko's Playing with Life is one of the issue's longest fictional works. It unfolds through coercive encounters, physical danger, medical intervention, confinement, attempted control, and recurrent threats to bodily autonomy. Its illustrations heighten the melodramatic atmosphere, moving from private interiors to scenes of restraint, forced treatment, and helplessness.

Numa Shōzō's From the Notebook of a Certain Masochist continues his long-running hybrid of confession, cultural history, foreign reference, psychological interpretation, and commentary on punishment. This installment discusses masochistic identity through literature, medicine, social convention, and personal reflection. It is followed by Tsujiura Takashi's The Woman Who Laughs Under Torture, presented as the record of an acrobatic dancer. The article combines performance culture, bodily endurance, public spectacle, and punishment, treating the woman's theatrical or professional identity as inseparable from the fascination generated by her suffering.

Mikine Kōji's Landing Before the Enemy is a juvenile-detention or wartime-inflected memoir centered on discipline, risk, institutional authority, and the vulnerability of young men. Okyū and the Loincloth then adopts a more comic and anecdotal mode, using moxibustion, clothing, exposure, and domestic embarrassment as its organizing devices. Confusion returns to serious fiction through a narrative of emotional disturbance, desire, and unstable perception. Yoshino Mayumi's Let Me Wear Your Underwear addresses a woman directly and treats intimate clothing as a vehicle for identification, fetishistic longing, cross-gender imagination, and personal confession.

A brief hymn to bodily beauty and Izuta Osamu's Fireside Talk provide a pause before the long prize-selected narrative Jealousy and Woman. The latter examines romantic rivalry, possessiveness, humiliation, sexual betrayal, and the aggressive emotions produced by unstable relationships. Its length allows jealousy to become both a motive for cruelty and an organizing psychological condition. An illustrated wartime captivity feature interrupts the prose near its conclusion, connecting private erotic conflict with broader images of violence and forced exposure.

The Japanese translation of Johannes R. Birlinger's Das Grausame Weib, rendered by Morimoto Aizō as Cruel Women, again supplies the magazine with a European comparative framework. It surveys historical and literary examples of female cruelty, punishment, domination, and sexual violence. Okinoya Sumiko's From Cruelty to Sadism follows by considering the distinction between cruelty as behavior and sadism as an erotic or psychological orientation. The accompanying illustrations and case-oriented discussion connect theoretical terminology with concrete scenes of bodily punishment.

The fourth installment of Azuma Shin's Notes on Meiji-Period Newspapers uses newspaper reports to document crime, domestic violence, gender transgression, sexual practices, punishment, and unusual customs. The article treats the popular press as an archive of marginal behavior, preserving incidents that formal histories often omit. A confession titled The Dawn of the City of Sodom then presents male same-sex experience through personal memory, secrecy, social stigma, and the search for a community or vocabulary capable of explaining desire.

Sakata Shinji's Complete Submission returns as a substantial prize-selected narrative of domination, dependency, humiliation, and the progressive loss of autonomy. A second confession, A Certain Sodomite's Confession, develops male same-sex desire through autobiographical recollection, social concealment, erotic discovery, and the tension between public respectability and private experience. Kyōmachi Shin'ichirō's Longing for Sadism examines the appeal of dominance and cruelty from the perspective of someone drawn toward a sadistic identity rather than securely possessing one.

The later part of the issue contains a varied sequence of criticism, model studies, confession, and reader-oriented material. A compiled collection centered on corn cobs and erotic or medical anecdotes uses a catalog-like format. Takahara Masao's The Actress's Bare Feet explores foot fetishism through theatrical performance, spectatorship, bodily detail, and personal fascination. Watanabe Yō's Record of Yuriko is a long narrative of intimacy, observation, and sexual development. A letter addressed to a model follows, making explicit the relationship between viewers, performers, and the magazine's visual culture.

A review of film magazines and theatrical scenes examines how cinema and popular imagery represent eroticism, bodily danger, and unusual desire. Kondō Kikuya's experiential narrative Blowing Pool develops through personal recollection, bodily sensation, and social unease. An article on an acrobatic troupe and a continuation of Haruki Toshio's A Faint Masochism Seen in Film extend the magazine's interest in performance, spectacle, and mediated suffering. The film essay considers how submission and punishment are transformed by acting, framing, and narrative convention.

The final group of substantive articles includes an appeal for ideas for a third album, a discussion of women's professional wrestling, a confession titled Secret Obscenity, a short literary piece called Blooming in the Soil of Shared Bedding, and several correspondence departments. Women's professional wrestling is treated as a spectacle of bodily strength, staged aggression, costume, and gendered performance. The correspondence pages collect readers' personal experiences, questions, comments on previous articles, requests for information, and editorial responses. They show the magazine functioning as a meeting place where isolated interests could be named, compared, and converted into publishable testimony.

The back matter is extensive. It contains new-book listings, advertisements for erotic and sexological publications, catalog pages, subscription instructions, contributor notices, publication data, and a final short piece concerning ancestral female belly-cutting. These pages locate Kitan Club within a wider commercial and intellectual network of magazines, books, correspondence circles, and specialist publications. The issue therefore closes not with the final fictional narrative but with an invitation to continue reading, ordering, submitting, and participating.

Across the issue, restraint appears as physical bondage, imprisonment, emotional dependency, medical intervention, institutional discipline, and narrative structure. Clothing and bodily accessories function as fetish objects and instruments of control through underwear, loincloths, training garments, theatrical costumes, and wrestling attire. Female dominance is explored through fiction, historical examples, translated scholarship, punishment scenes, and athletic spectacle. Male vulnerability appears through prison memoir, same-sex confession, submission narratives, fetishistic identification, and spectatorship. The magazine's central editorial achievement is its fusion of visual fantasy, historical documentation, confession, criticism, and reader exchange into a single participatory discourse about desires that conventional society treated as private, shameful, or abnormal.

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