Nureki Chimuo: The Showa Nawashi Who Taught a Generation

Chimuo Nureki — written 濡木痴夢男 in Japanese, also spelled Nureki Chimuo in English sources — was born Iida Toyokazu in Asakusa, Tokyo, in 1930. He died on 9 September 2013 at eighty-three. In the later Showa years of Japanese kinbaku culture he was both a prolific writer and a rope artist who worked in still photography, video, and live demonstration. His career ran more than half a century and tracked Japanese adult magazines from print into moving image.

His fixation on the look of being tied started in childhood Asakusa. Around 1938, watching women’s sumo there left a mark; around 1940, Takabatake Kasho’s pictures of boys with their arms bound behind them dug the obsession deeper. After the war he studied briefly under the kabuki onnagata Ichikawa Fukunosuke and took bit parts at Toho. Between 1945 and 1946 he met the painter Ito Seiu more than once in Asakusa and Ichikawa. That put him among the few later rope artists who could say they had met Seiu in person, and it gave his eye a clear traditional ground.

In print, early work shows up in the November 1953 issue of Kitan Club, which ran his “Etsugyaku no Tabiyakusha.” Around 1957 he met Suma Toshiyuki (pen name Minomura Kou), a major writer, illustrator, and rope hand for early SM magazines such as Kitan Club and Uramado. That friendship shaped what Nureki wrote later. Under his real name Iida Toyokazu he then edited Uramado until the magazine folded around 1965. The pen name Chimuo Nureki first appears in the February 1973 issue of SM Select; he was about forty-three.

From then on the name shows up constantly in 1970s SM magazines. He wrote short pieces, fiction, and scripts for SM Select, S&M Collector, and others — magazine serials, television, and pink-film scripts. People in the scene often put his output around two thousand pieces. There is no exact count, but “a great many” covers it.

Alongside the writing he worked as a rope artist from the 1970s on: stills, video, and live shows. Early video house Art Video carried his work, and he appears as one of the rope artists in Masaki Kusakabe’s documentary Bakushi. On the visual side he had a long partnership with photographer Norio Sugiura; together they fixed a look that became common and easy to spot in late-Showa kinbaku photography.

He also pushed exchange and teaching. On 27 October 1985 the forerunner group “Sugishita Naomi Kai” held its first meeting; on 2 February 1986 it took the name Kinbiken and settled into regular practice, photography, and instruction. In his teaching Nureki kept coming back to “what the rope itself feels like”: the rigger should not get lost in complicated patterns and should stay with the texture and touch of rope on skin.

When he died, the disciple usually named as formal was Akira Naka. The scene generally holds that Nureki’s line passed through Naka. Chinese overviews of rope artists and Japanese pieces on Naka keep citing him. Later researchers warn that his own accounts are subjective and need room around them, but those accounts remain major source material for Japanese kinbaku history. Across a lifetime of writing and practice, Chimuo Nureki left a hard mark on that history.