Paranoid Trauma, a rare medical fetish erotic photo book

We’ve showcased the incredible work by fintan (pinakotheca) before. He finds often obscure and esoterica Japanese erotica, such as old magazines and photo books, scans them, shares them online, and then sells the original print copies to anyone interested.

Anyone with an interest in Japanese erotica, especially vintage erotica, should follow him on X or Instagram.

We’ve previously showcased the amazing images from a 1990 photo book called Binding Force: Japan’s First Facial Restraint Photo Book, shared by fintan in March.

More recently, he has explored the veritable gold mine that is 1980s outdoor voyeur fetish content.

Today, we want to share scans from an extremely rare 2005 book called Paranoia Trauma.

It features photo shoots exploring medical fetish — especially injury and bandage fetish with dressings, crutches, and patches galore. The settings are both urban and contemporary as well as rural and vintage (possibly wartime or prewar).

The characters range from schoolgirls to office ladies. The characters wear school uniforms, army clothing, kimono, and regular work clothes. All the shoots seem staged.

Most of the shoots focus on the restraint of the injuries and bandages, though some feature most obviously sexual poses, where couples attempt carnal activities in spite of (or perhaps because of) their injuries. In one shoot, the patient is not just restrained by his bandages but also by shibari ropes. The frustration at the physical difficulties this entails, along with the boredom of being confined to home or a hospital ward, only serves to fuel their sexual desire further.

If you’re interested in obtaining the original, fintan (pinakotheca) currently has one copy available, but warns that it’s expensive due to the rare nature of the publication, which was originally released by Eiwa Mook and now seems out of print.

As many have pointed it, Paranoia Trauma seems very similar to, if not directly inspired by, the work of Romain Slocombe, a French illustrator and photographer who made several fetish and subcultural publications about Japan in the 1980s and ’90s, most famously City of the Broken Dolls: A Medical Art Diary, Tokyo 1993-96, featuring women wearing bandages, slings, eye patches, splints, and gauzes.

“For me of course it’s a fetish, I would be immediately attracted if there were a girl with a bandage in the street,” Slocombe once said in an interview.

Slocombe earned the nickname Medical Artist from these publications.

Clearly, there was a thing for this kind of subculture and fetish in the 2000s. Around the same time, this publication also came out: Kegadoru (literally, injured doll or idol).

The “bandage babe” trope was also big in anime, perhaps most especially with Rei in Neon Genesis Evangelion.