Murakami Nobuhiko no Kitan Club ni okeru Tokumei Tekusuto o Kaidoku suru 村上信彦の『奇譚クラブ』における匿名テクストを解読する：戦後の民主的平等論者の分身について

This article by Kawahara Azumi, who researches sadism and masochism in postwar Japan, appeared in Ritsumeikan Bungaku, the humanities journal of Ritsumeikan University, number 647 (March 2016, pages 40–62; DOI 10.34382/0002005134). Its subtitle translates roughly as “On the Alter Ego of a Postwar Advocate of Democratic Equality.”

Murakami Nobuhiko worked in the history of fashion and women’s history from the postwar years into the 1980s. According to the journal’s English abstract, Kawahara shows that between about 1953 and 1956 he also published, without his own name, many theoretical essays and novels on sadism in Kitan Club, the magazine of what the abstract calls abnormal sexual culture. In a 2021 article she refers back to this study as having established that Azuma Shin was Murakami’s pen name, and notes that Nureki Chimuo confirmed it in interviews.

Kawahara’s aim is to reassess Murakami as a thinker by taking these texts seriously. Murakami argued throughout his life for the democratic equality of women and men, and in his fashion history he recommended that women wear trousers as a sign of equality. She argues that these ideas served, in sexual form, as the basis of his theory of sadism in Kitan Club and helped recast sadism in modern terms as a mentality of love and peace.

She concludes that his writing on women, fashion and sadism forms a consistent whole. Read together, his texts on how sadism relates to crime and social conditions also answer critics such as Fujime Yuki, who had faulted his treatment of licensed prostitution and class; Kawahara argues he opposed dividing women by class. She calls for a fuller reassessment of his work.