Yukio Mishima (三島 由紀夫, Mishima Yukio, born Kimitake Hiraoka (平岡 公威, Hiraoka Kimitake, 1925–1970) is one of Japan’s great writers. A good start is the short story Patriotism.

Eikoh Hosoe (細江 英公, Hosoe Eikō, 1933–2024) was a Japanese photographe and filmmaker.

The first edition of Barakei or Ordeal by Roses was published by Shueisha in Tokyo in 1963

“One day without warning Eikoh Hosoe appeared before me and transported me bodily to a strange world even before this I had seen works produced by the camera that were akin to magic but he’s work is sorcery is the use of this civilized precision instrument for purposes utterly opposed to civilization.” Mishima

The book contains photographs and a few selected quotes. Here are two of them:

The mouth of a woman is always pure.
So too is the bird as it plucks the fruit.
The calf is pure when the mother cow’s milk flows,
and the hound that has caught the deer is pure.
CODE OF MANU

Sudanese sheiks, by strict custom, would
watch their semen carefully, preserving it in rosewater
as evidence of fealty and manly power. Allen Edwards, Jewel in the Lotus

According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

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.