Barakei: Ordeal by Roses #34, Hosoe Eikō

Recent Acquisition Label:
Website, 2009, Kris Ercums
In this photograph, the celebrated twentieth-century Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima poses as St. Sebastian. The image of a young, svelte St. Sebastian, tied to a tree by order of the Roman Emperor Diocletian and pierced by multiple arrows, was powerfully erotic for Mishima. He cites his virgin encounter with the image in the autobiographical novel Confessions of a Mask (1948, Kamen no Kokuhaku Kamen no Kokuhaku) as a foundational sexual experience. Eroticism and sadomasochism-a blurred pair of suspended legs can be seen in the foreground-permeates the entire photographic series known as Bara-kei or Ordeal by Roses, a collaboration between Mishima and the experimental photographer Hosoe. Fantastical, dramatic, rococo, and self-indulgent, as Mark Holbern observes, this series “begins where Mishima’s writing ends.” An outspoken nationalist, in 1970 after failing to incite a coup to re-establish the emperor, Mishima committed ritual suicide.

"The world to which I was abducted under the spell of [Hosoe’s] lens was abnormal, warped, sarcastic, grotesque, savage, and promiscuous…It was, in a sense, the reverse of the world we live in, where our worship of social appearances and our concern for public morality and hygiene create foul filthy sewers winding beneath the surface. Unlike ours, the world to which I was escorted was a weird, repellent city-naked, comic, wretched, cruel, and overdecorative-yet in its underground channels there flowed, inexhaustibly, a pellucid stream of unsullied feeling."
Mishima Yukio (1925-1970), preface to Ordeal by Roses, 1982