Kitan Club no Eshitachi 「奇譚クラブ」の絵師たち
Nureki Chimuo's 2004 book on the illustrators of Kitan Club, centered on Kita Reiko (Suma Toshiyuki), reissued in 2025.
Kitan Club no Eshitachi (“The Illustrators of Kitan Club”) is a book by Nureki Chimuo (Iida Toyoichi), first published as a Kawade Bunko paperback in July 2004 and reissued in a new edition in December 2025.
Kawade Shobō Shinsha describes it as a behind-the-scenes history of the magazine told through its artists, above all Kita Reiko, the pen name under which Suma Toshiyuki (Minomura Kō) drew popular bondage illustrations while also editing the magazine and writing for it. A Nikkan Gendai review of the new edition adds that Kitan Club began in Osaka in 1947 as one of the cheap erotic magazines of the day and lasted about thirty years, and that the book credits Suma with gradually and discreetly working SM material into its pages.
The historian Kawahara Azumi notes that this was the book that, from 2004, made Iida a sought-after witness to Kitan Club’s inner life. Kawahara also argues that the Suma-centered story told here overstates Suma’s role, since he was on the publisher’s staff for under five years (1948–1953), and that the publisher-editor Yoshida Minoru, who kept it going for 28 years, deserves more of the credit.