The Erotics of Power: Yukio Mishima and the Performance of Desire

Yukio Mishima didn’t just write about power—he lived it, performed it, turned it into something almost tangible. His obsession with beauty, control, and destruction ran through everything he touched, from his novels to his carefully sculpted physique to the way he ultimately chose to leave the world. Nowhere is this fixation more vividly captured than in Ordeal by Roses, his 1961 collaboration with photographer Eikoh Hosoe. In these images, Mishima isn’t just an author—he’s an icon, a man willingly trapped inside his own mythology.

The Push and Pull of Power

Mishima’s characters are always caught in a tension between dominance and submission, fascinated by the kind of power that wounds even as it seduces. In Confessions of a Mask, his barely disguised autobiography, the narrator’s first sexual stirrings aren’t soft or romantic—they’re violent, tied to images of suffering, of beautiful men in agony. Love, in Mishima’s world, isn’t about comfort. It’s about losing yourself to something bigger, more terrifying.

This plays out across his novels, whether in the sadomasochistic undertones of Forbidden Colors, the militaristic fervor of Runaway Horses, or the brutal coming-of-age rituals in The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea. Power, for Mishima, was never just political or physical—it was erotic, an intoxicating mix of fear, desire, and destruction.

Ordeal by Roses: Mishima as His Own Fantasy

Mishima understood the allure of the image. He sculpted his body with the same precision he used to craft his prose, and in Ordeal by Roses, he lets himself become an object of fetish. The series is hypnotic—Mishima bound in ropes, drenched in flowers, his body positioned somewhere between a Renaissance martyr and a Japanese warrior. Hosoe’s lens doesn’t just capture Mishima; it transforms him. The writer who spent his life imagining power dynamics suddenly becomes the subject of one.

But what’s striking is the way Mishima leans into it. He’s not just participating—he’s reveling in it, surrendering himself to the gaze, to the idea of himself as something sculptural, theatrical. It’s the same dynamic that pulses through his books: the thrill of submission, the ecstasy of control.

The Ultimate Act of Power

For Mishima, power wasn’t just an abstract concept—it was something to be acted out, pushed to its limits. And in the end, he took it to its most extreme conclusion. His death in 1970—a failed coup followed by seppuku—was less a political statement and more the final act in a performance he’d been rehearsing his entire life. He believed in the beauty of the grand gesture, in the idea that the only way to truly possess something was to destroy it. It’s the same impulse that drives the protagonist in The Temple of the Golden Pavilion to burn down the thing he loves most.

Mishima lived inside his own stories, shaping his life as meticulously as his fiction. And Ordeal by Roses remains one of the most striking artifacts of that lifelong project—a moment where he was both the artist and the art, the object of desire and the one holding the power.