Customer Reviews

Confessions of a Mask

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Reading other reviews of Confessions of a Mask, I see that many readers are looking at it from a perspective of "gay literature" and seem disappointed that Mishima is not really a supporter of the cause. But from my perspective, as someone interested in Mishima as a giant in Japanese literature, Confessions of a Mask is a great introduction into the literary world of Mishima Yukio.

Without giving away too much, the main forces that propel the protagonist in this semi-autobiographical work, are a secret lust for masculine beauty and an attempt at heterosexual "normalcy" attempted mainly through a painfully flawed try at loving a sister of his friend. Other reviewers have commented that the second half of the story flags a bit, but for me, the frustration and concealed emotion that is tangible in the conversations between the protagonist and Sonoko is both convincing and intriguing.

However, I would agree that the first half of the book is probably more interesting. Mishima's work is less about homosexuality (with the emphasis on sex) and more about an almost reverent approach toward masculine virtue and beauty. These ideas and the struggle within the protagonist start to flag as the war draws to an end and he becomes involved with Sonoko.

I have yet to read many of Mishima's works, but the two main things that appeal to me are his staunch commitment to an ideal or perfection of some sort, and also the amazing penmanship that his stories exhibit. As with most Japanese literature, this sort of subtle detail is lost in translation, so I encourage all who have the ability and time to read the originals!

Although I have a feeling this book will be hard-pressed to please everyone, as it is a bit too extreme for the mainstream reader but perhaps not strong enough for the alternative audience, for me at least it seems like a great insight into the mind and the works of Mishima. No study of modern Japanese literature would be complete without a look at Mishima, and although Confessions of a Mask may not be his greatest work, it is unquestionably an excellent starting point.

This book operates on several levels, as an existential novel, portrait of war-time Japan, and as a coming of age story. I will leave it to others to comment on the other aspects of the book. As a gay story, the author confronts his present and future as a homosexual in a society that hardly recognized the existence of such persons. It is a tragic, but surprisingly not depressing, story written in direct, occasionally dark, prose.

As a gay man, I have given this book to several of my straight friends to help them understand the complex feelings gays, especially those coming out, have about their identity and place in society.

Here in Japan, a lot in life is kept behind closed sliding doors and emotions rarely surface in public. Private and public are clearly delineated. The narrator courageously allows us into his complex private world of tangled emotions. Complicated sexual desire, an artistic sensibility, wit and intelligence create a picture of a precocious teenager that will remind you of Salinger's and Joyce's jaded teens. The narrator is intensely introspective, sympathetic, and has an active imagination fixated on death, sex, and workingclass muscular male bodies. Gay and straight readers alike will find this novel engaging and full of meaning about growing up behind a mask.

--those words only begin to describe this claustrophobic, asphyxiating novel which is really an exercise in language as torture, prose as death sentence. Confessions of a Mask is a remarkable revelation of self and affirmation. It's hard to get a handle on Mishima's influence, but it's harder still to imagine very much of the grim and quite tedious prose coming from "the underground" today without bowing hard in Mishima's direcetion. Highly recommended.

Often people draw a definite line between being homosexual and straight, and once you know who you are you always know. Mishima, in detail, describes the inner conflicts of growing up gay. Dealing with the confusions of being able to find a woman beautiful at charming and yet being able to go no further. It is an excellent book for someone doubting themselves right now or for friends or family to know exactly what their loved one had to struggle with for many years and in some ways may still be struggling with.

If one is looking for a book with a mood for eerie rituals of introspection, this is a good stuff. If one has a knack for being buttonholed with confessions, this is a good stuff too. If one likes finding the so-called absolute answers between the real and unreal, Mishima can articulate this dichotomy with his charming details and weird allegories in this novel. However this book is a great deal of a burden of tedious repetitions of his tales of perversion and guilt, while the dialogues are poorly blended to suit the whole narrative fabric.

Mishima exotically expresses the surrealism of the feelings of a homosexual man, and his confessions of self-deception, and his obssession with blood, death, beauty and tragedy. Even when this novel is originally a Mishima version of one kind of love, his work is also a sort of an amalgam among aesthetes and sensualists like Oscar Wilde and Dostoevski as reflected by this sharp passage:

"I was one of those savage marauders who, not knowing how to express their love, mistakenly kill the persons they love. I would kiss the lips of those who had fallen to the ground and were still moving spasmodically."

This is the first Mishima tale I have experienced, yet I feel that this work reveals a lot of his personality hook line and sinker.

It tells the discovering of Mishima's gay identity, during the second world war and after. Very easy to read, very deep. It should be on everyone's shelf. Loic Barriere

What an intense, impassioned narration of this particular man's sexual awakening. The sadomasochist fantasies/feelings that accompany the narrator's sexuality are disturbing, yes - but at the same time, the narrator is so honest, so totally frank with the reader about everything he's experiencing, from his young boyhood to manhood, that I developed a respect for him I would never have thought, on first reading, that I'd have. At the same time, I was filled with compassion for the narrator because he's suffering so acutely -concealing his true self within himself; setting up mental walls... The narrator never asks for pity, but my heart is moved by what he's doing to himself.

This is a riveting novel. The juxtaposition of the narrator's outward "normal" life and the ferocity of his "inner", emotional/sexual feelings, is just brilliant - unnerving, but brilliant.

From what I can tell, Yukio Mishima was not a very happy man.

Granted, the only works that I have read of this very prolific author are this and Kinkakuji, but I'm seeing a pattern already, and it doesn't point towards Mishima being a cheerful, laid-back guy. Of course, his suicide by seppuku is also a good indicator that he took things way too seriously.

Published in 1948, Confessions of a Mask addresses a subject that would have been taboo anywhere, not just Japan. The main character, whose name is only given as Kochan, is a young man dealing with the fact that he is homosexual. He begins with one of his earliest memories, seeing a night-soil man and finding him beautiful, which he believes is what set his preferences for life. As he gets older, he doesn't yet realize that he's different from other boys, except in that he's small and thin and gets sick a lot more often. He finds himself entranced by men, especially laborers, and not knowing if this is what he's supposed to be feeling.

His sexual maturity is a sad and stunted thing. The pleasure and rapture that he sees in paintings of St. Sebastian hide dark urges of violence and despair. His boyhood love of a classmate is a secret that gnaws at him until he finally convinces himself that he was never actually in love at all. And his attempts to become "normal" end with nothing by emptiness and sorrow. Kochan has no friends to talk to, no family to lean on, and no way to know if what he's feeling is good or bad. All he knows is that the other boys are fascinated by women, and he's fascinated by other boys. In darkness and isolation, Kochan grows. What he grows into, however, is a pale, lonely and barren man.

Like many gay kids, especially in the pre-internet era, Kochan believes that he is unique. An aberration, a deviation from the norm. As far as he knows, no other boy has felt the way he did, and the only other one he hears of - Oscar Wilde - is long dead. His desire to fit in with the rest of the world leads him to play an elaborate game, to wear a mask so convincing that it nearly convinces himself. Being able to hide who he really is and what he really wants becomes a matter of hiding from himself. And as anyone who's tried that will know, hiding from yourself only works for so long....

Such is the life of a young gay man in wartime Japan. While I'm sure what Mishima has presented here is not the average, it is a depressing picture of what it's like to live in a society where such a deviation from the norm is punishable by societal exile. While I can't claim to know what would have happened to a young man in that era who came out of the closet, the narrator doesn't even seem to consider that as an option, good or bad. Thus I can only assume that the consequences would be dire.

There's no doubt that this book is at least semi-autobiographical. A look at <a href="[...] shows a number of parallels, especially in the early days. Both he and Kochan were raised by grandparents and separated from their families. Mishima stared writing as a boy, an activity that his father deplored and which earned him beatings by other students in school. He knew what it was like to be different, and that probably fed into this novel.

Whether or not Mishima was actually gay is, it seems, debatable. He did marry, and had two children, which would seem to indicate against it, but if, like the character in this book, he fought against his own nature, such an arrangement could be understandable.

One of the things that I found difficult about this book - and Kinkakuji - was how very introspective it was. The narrator tells the story of his life from his older point of view, and dissects every thought and every memory in exacting detail. It creates a picture of a person who lives entirely in his own head, and attributes modes of thinking that one wouldn't normally associate with, say, a twelve-year old. He appears to be very analytical, even from his earliest days. Though he tells us that he is not letting his adult mind get in the way of his memories of childhood, this great attention to detail proves him wrong.

The depiction of Kochan's attempts to hide himself is yet another mask - the mask of purposefulness. The narrator would like us to believe that he made every decision with purpose, as part of a plan. That he really did choose this life of self-deception. Perhaps because the idea that all of this was beyond his control is just too terrible to contemplate. Perhaps because it is better to own a bad decision than to admit that it was an accident. The narrator shows us quite clearly how adept he is at hiding from himself, and so he cannot be trusted to tell us truthfully about how he thought when he was a young man.

This makes reading the book a challenge - the reader must evaluate every statement and judge every event for its possible veracity. Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing how much is true and how much is falsehood. In the end, we just have to take Kochan at his word, all the while accepting that he's probably lying - and doing it without being aware of what he's doing.

Reading Confessions of a Mask today, sixty years after it was first published, is illuminating. In the US, we're involved in a great societal discussion over whether or not gays should get married, and while being homosexual certainly isn't something that is universally accepted, the prospects for young gays and lesbians in the modern age are much better than they would have been for someone coming of age in the 1940s. Even in Japan, where coming out to one's family is still as hard as it ever was, there are gays and lesbians on television and the matter is open to discussion. A homosexual in Japan may not be as willing to kick down the closet door as his or her American counterparts, but the abject horror of being utterly rejected by society is probably much less than it was.

When you consider what happens in this book, the horrible mental contortions that the main character must make in order to hide his true nature from the world - and himself - you can appreciate how far we've come.

Yukio Mishima is one of Japan's most famous modern writers, having written over twenty books, forty plays, ninety short stories, and numerous poems, and having earned three nominations for the Nobel Prize before he committed seppuku (ritualistic suicide) in 1970 at the age of forty-five. Confessions of a Mask was his very first novel (arguably semi-autobiographical), but it is still considered one of his classics. The story is about a nameless homosexual narrator and his attempts throughout his life, from a young child to a grown man, to try to understand himself, his desires, and why exactly he feels so different from everyone else. He comes to the conclusion that he can fit easily into society if he just hides his true self behind a "mask", but he soon finds out it isn't that simple, and before long he begins to lose his firm grip on who exactly his "true self" really is.

The book begins with the narrator describing certain instances from his childhood, memories that he feels have had a significant effect on who he is now. I thought this was just the story's introduction, Mishima's way of introducing the character and letting us get to know him better, but after many pages of these memories, I began to realize that this was the story. It doesn't have a clear beginning, middle, and end as much as it is just a series of events. After all, isn't that closer to the way real life is? Some of the events might seem random at first, but they are all strung together by the highly precise and articulate narrative.

However, even though I thoroughly enjoyed Confessions of Mask, it is definitely not for everyone. There is not very much action in the narrator's life compared to what is going on in his head. And every time something exciting or dramatic does happen, the intensity is constantly being cut down by the narrator's analysis of exactly what psychological or philosophical importance the event has, and occasionally he goes off on tangents that lead to another event entirely before making his way back to where he started. This type of narrative style could easily have been botched by a less skilled writer, making the story sound messy and awkward, but Mishima knows from the beginning where he is going, and he arrives there successfully, detours and all. His psychoanalysis of himself comprises a lot of the book, but he keeps himself from sounding too self-centered by also offering his philosophical insight into human nature in general, not just his own.

There are still a few times when his psychology begins to get tiresome or repetitive, but the beauty of Mishima's writing and the yearning to know what happens next still kept me reading without many complaints. Confessions of a Mask is depressing in how negatively the narrator views himself, but unfortunately the feeling of not fitting in is something that most everyone can relate to. The ending might not seem completely satisfying or conclusive at first, but it fits fairly well with the style of the rest of the novel. I recommend this fascinating and psychologically complex story to anyone who prefers reading books where there's more happening internally than externally, or to anyone else who is interested in trying something different.