Murakami Nobuhiko 村上信彦
Japanese writer and historian of clothing and women's history (1909–1983) who, according to Japanese Wikipedia, contributed fiction and criticism to Kitan Club from 1953 to 1961 under the pen name Azuma Shin.
Murakami Nobuhiko (村上信彦) was a Japanese novelist, women’s historian and medical commentator. Japanese Wikipedia and the Kotobank reference entries give his birth as March 30, 1909, and his death as October 31, 1983. The Japanese Wikipedia article on Kitan Club lists him among the magazine’s notable contributors, who wrote there under a pen name.
Career
Japanese Wikipedia says that he worked at the publisher Kōfūkan and that from 1943 he devoted himself to research and writing on literature, the history of dress and women’s history. The Kotobank entry from the 20th-century biographical dictionary lists his multi-volume novel Oto takaku nagarenu and his books on the history of clothing, and records that his study Takamure Itsue to Yanagita Kunio won a Mainichi Publishing Culture Award. He left the history of Taishō-era women unfinished at his death, according to Wikipedia.
Kitan Club as Azuma Shin
Japanese Wikipedia states that between 1953 and 1961 he contributed fiction and criticism to the SM magazine Kitan Club under the pen name Azuma Shin (吾妻新). It lists two serialized novels in the magazine: Kanjō kyōiku, from the November 1953 issue to the September 1954 issue, and Yakōjima, from October 1954 to April 1955. The article on Kitan Club itself says that the historian Kawahara Azumi has shown that Murakami contributed many pieces under this name.
Kawahara’s 2021 article on the editor Nureki Chimuo (Iida Toyoichi) adds the account of how the identification was made. In the interview Kawahara presents there, Iida says that Suma Toshiyuki, the Kitan Club staff member also known as Minomura Kō, told him in November 1958 that Azuma Shin was a pen name of the clothing historian Murakami Nobuhiko. Kawahara notes having already demonstrated the link in a 2016 study and regards Iida’s own statement as significant. In the same interview, the interviewer counts pieces found in available issues from 1953 to 1955: one long novel, two translations and eight other reading pieces, a number Iida considered smaller than remembered.
Kawahara’s study of these texts is described in the library entry Murakami Nobuhiko no Kitan Club ni okeru tokumei tekusuto o kaidoku suru.