#barakei

I don't usually post about book hauls here, but this one is a piece of art and has been my most dreamed about book for years. Earlier this month I was able to find this impressively well preserved copy for almost half the price it usually runs for. It became my first acquisition of 2026. It feels strange to finally own the item you've been longing for all this time. As a collector, it's both an exhilarating and surreal feeling.

“With its complex, quasi-baroque design by Kōhei Sugiura, this lauded work by Eikoh Hosoe explores themes of birth, death, sex, entrapment, and isolation. It features the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima as an aging hipster antihero who acts out his erotic life before Hosoe’s camera. With its references to the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian and its high-contrast printing style, the collaborative publication caused an international stir in Japan and the United States during the early years of protests against the Vietnam War.”

Eikoh Hosoe. Barakei, Killed by Roses #3. 1961-62

In 1963, controversial author Yukio Mishima and photographer Eikoh Hosoe put the finishing touches on their masterful collaboration Barakei (Killed by Roses), part photographic performance, part surreal portrait of Mishima as both iconoclast and self-mythologist. The original edition, designed by Kohei Sugiura, famously established the touchstone for two subsequent editions in 1971 and 1985. Aperture is delighted to reissue this faithfully reproduced facsimile of the 1963 classic, making available once again one of the most infamous and intriguing photo books of the twentieth century. 

Yukio Mishima by Eikoh Hosoe

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