The first U.S. edition of Eikoh Hosoe’s classic collaboration with Yukio Mishima. Photographs of Mishima who supplies the preface. Includes a note by Hosoe along with an afterword by Mark Holborn.
Ba-ra-kei: Ordeal by Roses is a rare glimpse into the life of the great modern Japanese writer, Yukio Mishima, who ended his life in 1970. A lifes work that engages strongly with the morbid and esoteric aesthetic, which pervades his writing. In 1961 Mishima asked Eikoh Hosoe to photograph him, giving him full artistic direction in making these surreal and alluring photographs. The props that surround the writer and the baroque interior of his home are antithetical to the pure Japanese sensibility of understatement and reveal Mishima's dark, theatrical imagination.
