Oki Shōji 沖渉二

Oki Shōji was an illustrator whose career spanned more than six decades. Nawapedia describes Oki as a twentieth-century SM illustrator whose work appeared in many SM magazines, and records the birth on April 16, 1922 and the death in 2018. The Ginza gallery Vanilla Gallery, which showed Oki’s original art twice, summed up the career as one that began with the brush soon after demobilization at the end of the war.

Early career

The biography printed by Vanilla Gallery for its 2012 and 2017 shows traces the early work. After the war Oki illustrated serialized fiction for the Osaka evening paper Kokusai Shinbun and, to make ends meet, drew a great deal for the kasutori magazines. Nawapedia lists Oki’s illustrations in the November 1951 issue of Kitan Club and, from the spring of 1953, in the magazine 1,001 Nights (Sen’ichiya). In 1955, the gallery writes, Oki moved back to Tokyo, was introduced to the magazine Uramado of the publisher Amatoria-sha (Kubo Shoten) and came to know Suma Toshiyuki.

SM magazines

Uramado and Fūzoku Kitan came first. Through Suma, according to the gallery, Oki met Dan Oniroku; Nawapedia dates that introduction to around 1972. Vanilla Gallery lists the houses whose magazines carried Oki’s work afterwards: Oni Pro, Sun Shuppan, Futabasha, Futami Shobō, Sanwa Shuppan, Tsukasa Shobō and MyWay Shuppan. The Ginza Shinbun News report of 2017 adds that Oki published in many magazines during the SM boom of the 1970s and illustrated Dan Oniroku’s story Anagura Reijō.

Oki worked under several names. The gallery gives Sakurai Gorō for the Osaka years, Oki Shōji (also written 沖渉司) in the SM magazines from the Uramado period on, Tatewaki Jun (帯刀惇) for gekiga comics and Mikage Sakae (美影栄) for a serial in the sports paper Tokyo Sports; Ginza Shinbun News dates that serial to the mid-1980s.

Books and exhibitions

From the 1990s, the gallery notes, many anthologies and art books of Oki’s work were published. Nawapedia’s list of selected works includes a 1970 Rope and Woman picture collection compiled by the Tankikai group, the 2004 volume Oniroku Dan’s Original Comics Collection 1, a 2008 picture book from MyWay Publishing and the 2022 anthology Kinbaku: The Golden Age of Japanese Restrained & Tortured Artworks.

In 2012 Vanilla Gallery marked the sixty-eighth year of Oki’s career with the exhibition Gensō no Sōen (Orgia), presented as a look back at the history of postwar SM illustration. In April 2017 the gallery held a second retrospective, Sasameyuki, which Ginza Shinbun News covered in a report on April 4 that year.