Confessions of a Mask
by Yukio Mishima
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"There is in this world a kind of desire like stinging pain" -- A Japanese teenager is overcome with longing for his male classmate. He imagines his body punctured with arrows, like the body of St Sebastian in the painting that obsesses him. Over and over again, each night in his private fantasies, the objects of his lust are tortured, killed and maimed. But, in the rigid world of imperial wartime Japan there is no place for such transgressive desires. He must wear a false mask and hide his show more true nature, whatever the cost. show lessTags
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This reminded me of the much more recent novel by Sayaka Murata, Earthlings, a personal favorite and likewise pronouncedly Japanese novel on pining for a sincere expression of being. The agents of desire repression, desire for an authenticity precluded by society, are described in both via mechanistic terms, machines and factories, accompanied by a sense of such profound alienation that the narrators declare themselves inhuman. There's a Deluzian analysis of the two waiting to be exercised that I might some day undertake. There is so much to process here-I’ll be sifting through the memory of many passages for months to come, I'm sure. Exceptional, and an essential read for the queer and the deviant.
Egyszeri esemény ez a könyv az önéletrajzi írások között, azt hiszem. Tele van kibékíthetetlennek tűnő minőségekkel, amelyek itt mégis harmonikus egésszé állnak össze. Egyik oldalon a szenvedély, a vér és a férfitest iránti elfojtott vágy, a másik oldalon pedig az önelemzés mélysége és megrázó őszintesége. Egyik oldalon a hideg tárgyilagosság, a másik oldalon a már-már haiku-számba menő, tökéletességig csiszolt képek. Leginkább egy lenyűgöző borostyán ékkőre emlékeztet, aminek a közepében valami rettentő, rút ősrovart rejt a zárvány.
Once again, I wasn’t sure how well I was going to like this one at first. Unlike other books I have read by Mishima in the past, this is strict first person — as if written by a person looking back over their life and trying to explain it to the reader. While first person can be more intimate, somehow I felt more distant from the narrator, especially earlier in the book when he is looking back over his childhood.
It in his early adulthood, when the narrator is convincing himself that he is his mask — that what he should want and what he does want are one in the same, that I was finally all in. I found it such a compelling portrayal of that compulsive heteronormativity — that everyone else assumes he is straight and he himself show more assumes/convinces himself he is straight and the cracks at the seams are getting wider but his circular self-assessments just get tighter. And even the narrator’s occasional admissions of the difference of his desires are so hemmed in by the rigid models of “inversion” — there are only two types of invert, according the authorities of the time, or at least those available to our narrator.
So yes, in the end, I loved this. I am getting more and more curious about reading more about Mishima as a person. I shall have to see if there are any good biographies available. show less
It in his early adulthood, when the narrator is convincing himself that he is his mask — that what he should want and what he does want are one in the same, that I was finally all in. I found it such a compelling portrayal of that compulsive heteronormativity — that everyone else assumes he is straight and he himself show more assumes/convinces himself he is straight and the cracks at the seams are getting wider but his circular self-assessments just get tighter. And even the narrator’s occasional admissions of the difference of his desires are so hemmed in by the rigid models of “inversion” — there are only two types of invert, according the authorities of the time, or at least those available to our narrator.
So yes, in the end, I loved this. I am getting more and more curious about reading more about Mishima as a person. I shall have to see if there are any good biographies available. show less
Não vou mentir, Confissões de uma máscara de Mishima é de fato um grande livro, mas acabou me decepcionando pelo encerramento abrupto. Eu sei, isso é um dos motivos que fazem dele um grande livro, esse detalhamento do despertar da sexualidade homossexual e a confusão de amar não sexualmente uma mulher (comumente conhecida como amizade) e a aceitação do seu desejo sexual por homens se deu de uma forma sutil e não propriamente da consumação do desejo como esperei pelo livro inteiro. É brilhante, mas de certa forma frustrante também. E impressiona o fato de tê-lo publicado aos 24 anos tão pleno da linguagem e de si mesmo, de grande maturidade, uma obra deveras impressiva em diversos âmbitos.
This was a heavy and challenging novel that channels the best literary traditions from Dostoevsky. It's basically an autobiography of Mishima's upbringing, and his struggle trying to reject his homosexuality in order to fit into society. This is one of his only two novels that have been translated that deal openly with homosexuality. His widow would deny he was gay, going as far as taking legal action to prevent fellow author Jirō Fukushima from publishing his correspondence with Mishima from the 1950s. The first half of Mask is dizzying, with delirious prose, and grotesque fantasies, replete with literary references to H.C. Andersen, Wilde, and Huysmans. The second half becomes more sombre as Mishima's stand-in tries to force himself show more to fall in love with a woman and hide his true nature. By the end I felt like I'd been punched in the stomach, it's that gut wrenching. A lot has been written about Mishima's open glorification of fascism and his suicide; after reading this it's clear to me his life trajectory was fueled a great deal by his internalized homophobia and repressed homosexuality. It's a beautiful novel, but a difficult one. show less
Mishima is famous for all the wrong reasons - mainly as a fascist who committed seppuku after a failed military coup - but he's also famous for frequenting Nichome, strenuously denied by his widow, of course. A fascinating character, nonetheless, and this is the first of his books that I've gotten around to reading.
As per the above, this particular novel about a boy dealing with dark sadistic sexual fantasies about other boys comes across as semi-autobiographical, although there's strictly no evidence of such. Certainly Mishima was familiar with putting on a mask, or public face.
It's also a good look at war-time Japan, incidentally.
The translation was a bit strained at times - for instance, I could see the translator struggling to come show more up with an idiomatic translation of Japanese set phrases like 'ittekimasu' that have no equivalent in English. At another point, the text mentions "H. prefecture near Osaka" and I just wondered why they didn't write "Hyogo". Perhaps when the book was translated in the 50s they didn't think people would be able to handle all the foreign names, a trend that I think has changed since then. I guess I'd read it in Japanese, but my level - and patience to read all the kanji - is still a bit too low for that.
I was a bit disappointed that the main character didn't end up with a guy, and spent most of the second half of the book half-heartedly pursuing a woman. But I guess he was meant to be tortured, or something. show less
As per the above, this particular novel about a boy dealing with dark sadistic sexual fantasies about other boys comes across as semi-autobiographical, although there's strictly no evidence of such. Certainly Mishima was familiar with putting on a mask, or public face.
It's also a good look at war-time Japan, incidentally.
The translation was a bit strained at times - for instance, I could see the translator struggling to come show more up with an idiomatic translation of Japanese set phrases like 'ittekimasu' that have no equivalent in English. At another point, the text mentions "H. prefecture near Osaka" and I just wondered why they didn't write "Hyogo". Perhaps when the book was translated in the 50s they didn't think people would be able to handle all the foreign names, a trend that I think has changed since then. I guess I'd read it in Japanese, but my level - and patience to read all the kanji - is still a bit too low for that.
This is a book written by a man in his mid-twenties looking back on adolescence. To read it as an adolescent without experience (as I did first) is very different from reading it as an experienced adult nearly two decades older than the age at the author's death (as I have just done).
At the age of 19, it had a powerful effect on me for its apparent sexual honesty - a high art Japanese 'Portnoy's Complaint' perhaps. Today, the claim of honesty looks less secure. Is it a fictionalised memoire or a fiction deluding us into thinking it is a memoire?
Mishima refers in passing to Augustine and the comparison with the author of the fourth century 'Confessions' is deliberate. He is writing as a Japanese but paradoxically so since it is equally show more clear that the Japan of his youth had already been highly Westernised.
His girlfriend is Christian and refers to Jesus. Western clothes, even if militarised, are general. A young German boy rides by on a bicycle without it being anything other than normal. The literary references are essentially Western at every turn, notably to Saint Sebastian.
Although there are references to traditional attitudes, the girlfriend Sonoko and her family may be conservative but they are quite Westernised too. One enlightening aspect of this is that Macarthur's occupation was perhaps not such a break with the recent past as we might believe.
Unlike Germany in the last months of its war, the ordinary Japanese in 1945 were already mentally preparing for defeat while also preparing for sudden death at any time. Even Hiroshima seems less of a shock after the Tokyo fire bombings which are part of the background of the central section.
Whereas Germany in 1945 seems to have been imbued with an atmosphere of terror, Japan in the same period seems to have inclined to fatalism. Whereas the German State brutalised its people, the Japanese State appeared to be giving up the ghost long before it surrendered.
The book starts in the 1930s and moves into the immediate occupation period but the central section is very much that of a teenager not yet old enough to fight and yet too old not to be militarised and be integrated into the war effort albeit in a desultory way.
The book gives us a picture of a country which was suffering shortages and death from the sky but which was also conducting itself (as far as most people were concerned) with an air of normality without the full-on totalitarian systems of the West. The edge had gone off Japanese militarism.
The death instinct of Mishima (if the book is reliable as to his own mentality) preceded the war and cannot be assigned to it but his young hero has a dialectic in relation to war that reconciles the constant possibility of radical loss with a very human desire to keep death theoretical and romantic.
Mishima in 1948/9 is a highly educated young man conscious that he is writing literature, referential literature, and not history and his 'confessions' must be seen in that light - as an ambiguous account of Mishima's own sexual ambiguity in which history is just the back drop.
The core of the book plays out the young man's 'true nature' as a sado-masochistic homosexual in terms of desire for gratification and his undoubted capability, despite his doubts, for the sort of non-sexual love for a girl that most heterosexual men of any sensitivity would recognise.
His 'true nature' is clearly both aspects but the first is not permitted in society (at least overtly) and the second is defined by cultural expectations. The book is the working out of the balance between the two, the acceptance of the first as fact and the containment of the second as secondary.
Mishima's young hero (alter-Mishima) allows himself to become what he is in terms of his sexuality in stages, another dialectical process, so that the final scene, a rather sad scene in many ways, provides a form of resolution where the two sides of him are permitted a shared reality.
His homosexuality is actually not central to the argument - this is not a 'gay' coming out story - and the fact that it is hidden sexuality rather than a specific sexuality would have been the appeal to this reader in his earlier 19-year old incarnation.
This is a book about any sexuality that is not spoken of or made available in polite society set against conventional sexuality as it appears to the young male of a certain type who wants both to be free without feelings and to feel without being obliged to follow through as society expects.
In that struggle, in this book, the social (while being respected as reality) loses out in the scaling of values. What happens next to Mishima is clearer in his third novel 'Forbidden Colours' which we have reviewed elsewhere on GoodReads - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/252185847
One might think that a later fetishisation of Japanese traditionalism (a little odd in relation to his debt to Western culture) is an attempt to try to contain the local social in order to limit its emotional claims on him where quasi-Western mores might be intrusive on his 'true nature'.
Male Samurai mysticism might also later have given him cover for the expression of that 'true nature'. If so, he is involved in a lifelong appropriation of his own culture (often to the puzzlement of other Japanese) to meet personal goals that owe far more to Western decadence than Japan.
The genius of the book lies in his clever use of apparent honesty to cover up what may lie beneath. The social environment is not romanticised but played straight. It is an ordinary life and he does not even try to be extraordinary either in his behaviour or even in his assessment of himself.
It is his hero's desires that are extraordinary. The 'mask' of the title is a mask of being ordinary because, well, he is actually very ordinary other than his psycho-sexual torment and periodic or incipient unrecognised depression and fully recognised alienation.
As to the book itself, remembering the young age of the writer, it is an odd mix of extremely evocative realist writing based on locale and incident interspersed with quasi-philosophical bouts of self-reflective torment.
The first is remarkable, undoubted descriptive genius. There is no flummery. What happens is described so precisely that the incident is pictured with exquisite clarity - most famously in his first masturbation experience over a Renaissance picture of St. Sebastian.
The second is more problematic. He is struggling to get across feelings and complexities that are not easy to describe. I suspect that translators (we saw this in 'Forbidden Colours') struggle to deal with the connotative aspects of Japanese when dealing with local emotional colour.
As a result there are lines and passages that are close to incomprehensible and sometimes contradictory in a way that does not look as if it was intended. This aspect of the book is less successful - the attempt to make feeling literary and not always succeeding.
All in all, a classic first 'novel' by a genius who is never to be analysed simply. His dishonest authorial voice still shows someone whose most central attribute is a refusal to lie about himself or his motivations and yet to try to push shame aside in order to 'become' what he is.
This 'shame' aspect is also interesting because we see no Western 'guilt' but only an awareness of being driven to inappropriate shameful action or feelings without intending harm. Even his vicious fantasies are 'fantastic', works of imagination, and not the actual intent of the sadistic killer.
It is as if he simply wants another reality where all reality can be concentrated into a moment of death that wipes out the pain of living and where sexual excitation is a fantastic outgrowth of that sentiment.
There is no torturing of animals or deliberate cruelty to persons, just a fear of emotional engagement and a psychology of detachment which becomes more evident in the psychological cruelties of 'Forbidden Colours'. The young hero is depressed far more than he shows anxiety. show less
At the age of 19, it had a powerful effect on me for its apparent sexual honesty - a high art Japanese 'Portnoy's Complaint' perhaps. Today, the claim of honesty looks less secure. Is it a fictionalised memoire or a fiction deluding us into thinking it is a memoire?
Mishima refers in passing to Augustine and the comparison with the author of the fourth century 'Confessions' is deliberate. He is writing as a Japanese but paradoxically so since it is equally show more clear that the Japan of his youth had already been highly Westernised.
His girlfriend is Christian and refers to Jesus. Western clothes, even if militarised, are general. A young German boy rides by on a bicycle without it being anything other than normal. The literary references are essentially Western at every turn, notably to Saint Sebastian.
Although there are references to traditional attitudes, the girlfriend Sonoko and her family may be conservative but they are quite Westernised too. One enlightening aspect of this is that Macarthur's occupation was perhaps not such a break with the recent past as we might believe.
Unlike Germany in the last months of its war, the ordinary Japanese in 1945 were already mentally preparing for defeat while also preparing for sudden death at any time. Even Hiroshima seems less of a shock after the Tokyo fire bombings which are part of the background of the central section.
Whereas Germany in 1945 seems to have been imbued with an atmosphere of terror, Japan in the same period seems to have inclined to fatalism. Whereas the German State brutalised its people, the Japanese State appeared to be giving up the ghost long before it surrendered.
The book starts in the 1930s and moves into the immediate occupation period but the central section is very much that of a teenager not yet old enough to fight and yet too old not to be militarised and be integrated into the war effort albeit in a desultory way.
The book gives us a picture of a country which was suffering shortages and death from the sky but which was also conducting itself (as far as most people were concerned) with an air of normality without the full-on totalitarian systems of the West. The edge had gone off Japanese militarism.
The death instinct of Mishima (if the book is reliable as to his own mentality) preceded the war and cannot be assigned to it but his young hero has a dialectic in relation to war that reconciles the constant possibility of radical loss with a very human desire to keep death theoretical and romantic.
Mishima in 1948/9 is a highly educated young man conscious that he is writing literature, referential literature, and not history and his 'confessions' must be seen in that light - as an ambiguous account of Mishima's own sexual ambiguity in which history is just the back drop.
The core of the book plays out the young man's 'true nature' as a sado-masochistic homosexual in terms of desire for gratification and his undoubted capability, despite his doubts, for the sort of non-sexual love for a girl that most heterosexual men of any sensitivity would recognise.
His 'true nature' is clearly both aspects but the first is not permitted in society (at least overtly) and the second is defined by cultural expectations. The book is the working out of the balance between the two, the acceptance of the first as fact and the containment of the second as secondary.
Mishima's young hero (alter-Mishima) allows himself to become what he is in terms of his sexuality in stages, another dialectical process, so that the final scene, a rather sad scene in many ways, provides a form of resolution where the two sides of him are permitted a shared reality.
His homosexuality is actually not central to the argument - this is not a 'gay' coming out story - and the fact that it is hidden sexuality rather than a specific sexuality would have been the appeal to this reader in his earlier 19-year old incarnation.
This is a book about any sexuality that is not spoken of or made available in polite society set against conventional sexuality as it appears to the young male of a certain type who wants both to be free without feelings and to feel without being obliged to follow through as society expects.
In that struggle, in this book, the social (while being respected as reality) loses out in the scaling of values. What happens next to Mishima is clearer in his third novel 'Forbidden Colours' which we have reviewed elsewhere on GoodReads - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/252185847
One might think that a later fetishisation of Japanese traditionalism (a little odd in relation to his debt to Western culture) is an attempt to try to contain the local social in order to limit its emotional claims on him where quasi-Western mores might be intrusive on his 'true nature'.
Male Samurai mysticism might also later have given him cover for the expression of that 'true nature'. If so, he is involved in a lifelong appropriation of his own culture (often to the puzzlement of other Japanese) to meet personal goals that owe far more to Western decadence than Japan.
The genius of the book lies in his clever use of apparent honesty to cover up what may lie beneath. The social environment is not romanticised but played straight. It is an ordinary life and he does not even try to be extraordinary either in his behaviour or even in his assessment of himself.
It is his hero's desires that are extraordinary. The 'mask' of the title is a mask of being ordinary because, well, he is actually very ordinary other than his psycho-sexual torment and periodic or incipient unrecognised depression and fully recognised alienation.
As to the book itself, remembering the young age of the writer, it is an odd mix of extremely evocative realist writing based on locale and incident interspersed with quasi-philosophical bouts of self-reflective torment.
The first is remarkable, undoubted descriptive genius. There is no flummery. What happens is described so precisely that the incident is pictured with exquisite clarity - most famously in his first masturbation experience over a Renaissance picture of St. Sebastian.
The second is more problematic. He is struggling to get across feelings and complexities that are not easy to describe. I suspect that translators (we saw this in 'Forbidden Colours') struggle to deal with the connotative aspects of Japanese when dealing with local emotional colour.
As a result there are lines and passages that are close to incomprehensible and sometimes contradictory in a way that does not look as if it was intended. This aspect of the book is less successful - the attempt to make feeling literary and not always succeeding.
All in all, a classic first 'novel' by a genius who is never to be analysed simply. His dishonest authorial voice still shows someone whose most central attribute is a refusal to lie about himself or his motivations and yet to try to push shame aside in order to 'become' what he is.
This 'shame' aspect is also interesting because we see no Western 'guilt' but only an awareness of being driven to inappropriate shameful action or feelings without intending harm. Even his vicious fantasies are 'fantastic', works of imagination, and not the actual intent of the sadistic killer.
It is as if he simply wants another reality where all reality can be concentrated into a moment of death that wipes out the pain of living and where sexual excitation is a fantastic outgrowth of that sentiment.
There is no torturing of animals or deliberate cruelty to persons, just a fear of emotional engagement and a psychology of detachment which becomes more evident in the psychological cruelties of 'Forbidden Colours'. The young hero is depressed far more than he shows anxiety. show less
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Author Information
268+ Works 27,047 Members
Yukio Mishima, the pseudonym for Hiraoka Kimitake, was born in Tokyo in 1925. His work covers many styles: poetry, essays, modern Kabuki ja Noh drama, and novels. Among his masterpieces are The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, and the four-volume novel Sea of Fertility, which outlines the Japanese experience in the 20th century. Each of the four show more volumes in this series has a distinct title--Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn, and Five Signs of a God's Decay--and they were published over a six-year period, from 1965-1970. Mishima's plays include Tenth Day Chrysanthemum, and the Kabuki piece The Moon Like a Drawn Bow. Although Mishima was been nominated three times for the Nobel Prize for Literature, he never received it. Nevertheless, he is considered by many critics as one of the most important Japanese novelists of the 20th century. Yukio Mishima died by his own hand in 1970, committing seppuku (ritual disembowelment). (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Awards
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Series
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Confessions of a Mask
- Original title
- 仮面の告白; 假面の告白 Kamen no Kokuhaku
- Alternate titles
- Kamen no Kokuhaku
- Original publication date
- 1949-07-05 (original Japanese) (original Japanese); 1958 (English: Weatherby) (English: Weatherby)
- People/Characters
- Kochan; Omi; Sonoko
- Important places
- Tokyo, Japan
- Important events
- World War II
- Related movies
- Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985 | IMDb)
- Epigraph
- ...Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it never has and never can be fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Within beauty both shores meet and all contradictions exist side by side. I'm not a ... (show all)cultivated man, brother, but I've thought a lot about this. Truly there are mysteries without end! Too many riddles weigh man down on earth. We guess them as we can, and come out of the water dry. Beauty! I cannot bear the thought that a man of noble heart and lofty mind sets out with the ideal of the Madonna and ends with the ideal of Sodom. What's still more awful is that the man with the ideal of Sodom in his soul does not renounce the ideal of the Madonna, and in the bottom of his heart he may still be on fire, sincerely on fire, with longing for the beautiful ideal, just as in the days of his youthful innocence. Yes, man's heart is wide, too wide indeed. I'd have it narrower. The devil only knows what to make of it! but what the intellect regards as shameful often appears splendidly beautiful to the heart. Is there beauty in Sodom? Believe me, most men find their beauty in Sodom. Did you know this secret? The dreadful thing is that beauty is not only terrifying but also mysterious. God and the Devil are fighting there, and their battlefield is the heart of man. But a man's heart wants to speak only of its own ache. Listen, now I'll tell you what it says....
Dostoevski, THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV - First words
- For many years I claimed I could remember things seen at the time of my own birth.
- Quotations
- My hands, completely unconsciously, began a motion they had never been taught.
From that time on I was in love with Omi. - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Some sort of beverage had been spilled on the table top and was throwing back glittering, threatening reflections.
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- 895.635 — Literature & rhetoric Asian Literature Literatures of East and Southeast Asia Japanese Japanese fiction 1945–2000
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- PZ3 .M6878 .C — Language and Literature Fiction and juvenile belles lettres Fiction and juvenile belles lettres Fiction in English
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