Ba-ra-kei

"It’s a beautiful book, originally published in the mid sixties. It arose out of this very unusual collaboration between the photographer, Eikoh Hosoe, and the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima. Hosoe had been commissioned to do a portrait of Mishima for a collection of essays. Well the portrait was one thing, but Hosoe took a lot of other photographs. They became a document of Mishima’s fascination with his own body. These two men produced an extraordinary book together, but on the eve of its publication, Mishima – who was obsessed with purity and the way of the Samurai – committed ritual suicide. Eikoh Hosoe realised subsequently that this book had been part of a testament, a will, a preparation for the suicide. I think Mishima was 38 when he did it. It’s difficult to say. He had an odd childhood – he was raised by his grandmother. He was very isolated as a child. Later he was a very prolific writer. He wrote over 40 novels, he was an actor, he wrote drama, he wrote essays. But he was also obsessed with his own physicality. He was a weight trainer, he did sword fighting – he even established a private army. Yeah. He tried to bring off a coup in Japan. He tried to depose the military government in order to re-establish the old imperial government and emperor. But of course he completely failed and this is more or less at the time of his suicide. He did the suicide by having one of his young protégées behead him with a sword. So this book is deeply erotic – fascinating. The photography’s extraordinary. There are a couple of other remarkable characters related to this book that I don’t have time to go into now. I’m interested in a number of Japanese photographers, but I first encountered Mishima when I read one of his short stories in a collection and it was a story about ritual suicide: an army officer who had dishonoured himself and who impaled himself on his sword. And his wife has to commit suicide with him. A very conservative man."