No bed of roses
This image from the major Japanese photographer Eikoh Hosoe’s breakout 1962 photobook Ordeal By Roses superimposes times and cultures. The backdrop is a painting of art history’s ultimate gay pin-up, Saint Sebastian, his head and body surreally ornamented by a baroque clock. The actual subject however can be found between the saint’s legs: the dark prince of Japanese literature, Yukio Mishima.
End credits
History remembers Mishima as much for his death as his prolific writing. His ritual suicide was a horrific, stage-managed end to a life obsessed with death, beauty and Japanese identity.
Fatal attraction
These fixations are writ large here with the morbid sexuality of Saint Sebastian (Guido Reni’s version was supposedly the first image Mishima masturbated to). Defying the clock, the muscle-bound author is frozen forever in the photo.
West side story
Hosoe’s mash-up also evokes Mishima’s conflicted relationship with the west. He raged against westernised Japan, but while he longed for a return to Samurai values, he wore western fashions and decked out his Italian-style Tokyo villa with baroque and rococo artefacts.
Part of Masters Of Japanese Photography, Sainsbury Centre For Visual Arts, Norwich, to 19 Mar
