Dan Oniroku 団鬼六
Japanese novelist and producer (1931–2011) whose serial Flower and Snake, begun in Kitan Club in 1962, became a classic of Japanese SM fiction and a long film franchise.
Dan Oniroku was the pen name of Kuroiwa Yukihiko, a Japanese novelist, screenwriter, film producer, publisher and essayist. He was born in Hikone, Shiga Prefecture, on April 16, 1931, and studied law at Kwansei Gakuin University. English Wikipedia, citing the writer Nicholas Bornoff, calls him the most celebrated author of popular SM fiction in Japan.
Early career
His first published fiction appeared in the late 1950s, and the Shochiku studio filmed his 1958 novel Ōana in 1960. Japanese Wikipedia records that he taught English at a middle school in Miura, Kanagawa, from 1962 to 1965, while continuing to write; English Wikipedia adds that he wrote pink-film scripts under another pen name in the same period. He adopted the name Dan Oniroku in 1963.
Flower and Snake
His best-known work, Hana to Hebi (Flower and Snake), began as a serial in Kitan Club in 1962 under the name Hanamaki Kyōtarō and ran on and off for about thirteen years. Japanese Wikipedia’s article on Kitan Club calls it a classic of SM literature. The historian Kawahara Azumi counts the novel’s success among the causes of the late-1960s “SM boom,” and notes that Kitan Club issued a special number collecting the serial in 1969. Kawahara also names Dan as one of the professional SM novelists the magazine produced.
In 1974 the Nikkatsu studio released a film version directed by Konuma Masaru and starring Tani Naomi. English Wikipedia reports that the film is credited with starting Nikkatsu’s SM line of Roman Porno films, and that Dan had a long working relationship with Tani. Japanese Wikipedia counts nine film versions of the story as of 2022.
Publisher and producer
In 1969 Dan founded Oni Production, which made pink films and, from 1972, published the SM magazine SM King. Nawapedia records that the 1971 Haga Shoten book Kinbaku Taizen appeared under his name, with a bondage section by the rope tier Urado Hiroshi. Later in life he took over the shogi magazine Shogi Journal in 1989 and returned to wide readership with a 1995 book about the shogi gambler Koike Shigeaki, which Japanese Wikipedia reports sold about 100,000 copies.
Dan died of esophageal cancer in Tokyo on May 6, 2011. A literary prize, the Dan Oniroku Award, carries his name.