Confessions of a Mask: Yukio Mishima (Penguin Modern Classics)

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On account of the book’s more infamous content, it speaks totally past whatever frame of social confinement that is placed upon it by its gay rights defenders. The extent to which same-sex attraction is explored in Confessions of a Mask remains limited to the indulgences of an onanistic self-abuser, and one just as disposed to occupying his fantasies with the shredded musculature of soldiers carrying out athletic exercises as he is with those same soldiers cast in the roles of samurai slicing open their own abdomens. Kochan’s fascination with flesh and death need not be confined to the ‘novel’ part of this I-novel, either, as one is hard pressed to ignore Mishima’s own fascination with the two. But let not his fascination, even romanticism, imply a sense of cluelessness: anyone who has stomached to read his short story “Patriotism” will recognize the penetrating extent to which he understood exactly what the samurai’s ritual suicide entailed. Even though still young, I did not know what it was to experience the clear-cut feeling of platonic love. Was this a misfortune? But what meaning could ordinary misfortune have for me? The vague uneasiness surrounding my sexual feelings had practically made the carnal world an obsession with me. my curiosity was actually purely intellectual, but I became skillful at convincing myself that it was carnal desire incarnate. What is more, I mastered the art of delusion until I could regard myself as a truly lewd-minded person. As a result I assumed the stylish airs of an adult, of a man of the world. I affected the attitude of being completely tired of women. The plot is very simple – another marker of literary fiction: The protagonist, already as a little boy in pre-WW2 Japan, discovers that his desires and inner thoughts do not… well, again, I could here say something like “coincide with society’s”, but it’s not that simple. Let’s talk a bit about characters, to see why. Review of Confessions of a Mask: Characters In any case, with this in mind, we could say that Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask is a literary-fiction novel. After all, it talks about some very universal human experiences: love, identity, one’s place in society. It’s also symbolic in various ways, and has incredibly realistic characters.

Yet, no matter how much I try to describe what Confessions of a Mask really is, in terms of neatly placing it next to other works, my attempt just seems to fall short. The book is divided into four chapters. In the first, Kochan describes his early life, beginning with the insistence that he remembers the day of his birth despite recognizing that such a thing should be impossible, and it ends with his memory of a manic shrine procession stumbling into his manor’s front yard to ruin their garden. In between, he recounts the distance that was put between himself and his parents on account of an overbearing grandmother, the size of the house he grew up in and its number of maids, as well as episodes of early childhood frivolity. Of the latter, many commentators are drawn to the emphasis with which Kochan proclaimed his fascination with detached, moody feminine figures such as the theater magician Shokyokusai Tenkatsu or Cleopatra. His preoccupations with women’s attire should be remembered alongside his admiration of male beauty—which later he comes to firmly identify specifically with strength—and his utter disgust at seeing that usurped by anything feminine. Upon being told that the knight in one of his favorite storybooks was in fact the great saint Joan of Arc, he reacted with total repulsion and abandoned the book altogether. The Encyclopedia Britannica defines the I-novel as “characterized by self-revealing narration, with the author usually as the central character” 1. Though vague, where this differs from standard autobiography is the intensely psychological and aesthetical characteristics of the genre’s approach. Autobiographies tend to be something of a commentary on the events of a person’s life, if written in the form of a retrospective, or alternatively, a simple narration of those events from memory. By contrast, I-novels are meditative exercises in which very little narrative space is given to the actual events of the narrator’s exterior reality, while the interior elements of it—his thoughts and passions, feelings, fears, considerations, suppositions and fantasies—are prioritized instead.

Mishima’s novel is probably one of the most difficult books I’ve ever thought to review. Not only does it defy categorization, but reading it I wonder whether we could even call it “a novel”. In that regard, it’s very similar to Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino. Confessions of a Mask is a fine example of our struggle to balance between being part of society and understanding it can’t offer us what we crave. If this duality sounds familiar, take a look at my post on the meaning of Jinjer’s “Pisces”– talking about a multi-layered metaphor, huh? Review of Confessions of a Mask: Genre, Plot, Narrative Of Tenkatsu, however, things are a little different. The mask of hers is much more obvious, and therefore, less tragic. More importantly, however, she is herself more enticing. He remarks on her “opulent body veiled in garments like those of the Great Harlot of the Apocalypse,” decorated in stagecrafted jewels that indicated “shoddy merchandise.” However, he makes a deeper insight on account of her character, too: that Confessions of a Mask follows a perfectly clear trajectory, in terms of narrative journeying. There is a logical sequence between events.

Sonoko! Sonoko! I repeated the name to myself with each sway of the train. It sounded unutterably mysterious. Sonoko! Sonoko! With each repetition my heart felt heavier, at each throb of her name a cutting, punishing weariness grew deeper within me. The pain I was feeling was crystal clear, but of such a unique and incomprehensible nature that I could not have explained it even if I had tried. It was so far off the beaten path of ordinary human emotions that I even had difficulty in recognizing it as pain. 15 Flattening this into a mere closet case scenario ignores the more obvious psychological baggage of Konchan’s passions. He finds a natural, if uneasy, camaraderie among men, and he very clearly falls in love with a woman, Sonoko, whom he finds very beautiful. Meanwhile, his libido is engaged by depictions of great strength and great violence. He’s hardly the picture of a normal, healthy young man, but so too is he hardly the portrait of a homosexual. Kochan’s neurosis is a bit less common than something so simple. MaskEBook Plurilingua Publishing This practical and insightful reading guide offers a complete summary and analysis of Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima. It provides a thorough exploration of the novel’s plot, characters and main themes, including memory, beauty and the relationship between death and sexuality. The clear and concise style makes for easy understanding, providing the perfect opportunity to improve your literary knowledge in no time.

On the other hand, as it often is in literature, seeing too strong autobiographical references is risky, in terms of literary criticism. More importantly, it’s pointless. The story is neither about Kochan, the protagonist, nor about Mishima; rather it is about all“Kochans” and “Mishimas”, in Japan and elsewhere, in the 1940s and always. Yukio Mishima (1925–70) was born in Tokyo, the son of a senior government official. He was a delicate and precocious child, and from adolescence was deeply affected by pictures of physical violence and pain, and especially by Guido Reni’s Saint Sebastian — all of which is reflected in Confessions of a Mask. During the Second World War he met the writer Yasunari Kawabata; this was the beginning of a lifelong friendship. He entered Tokyo University to study law in 1944, and in February 1945 was conscripted for war service. He did not see active service although the war experience affected him profoundly, and laid the foundation of the death worship which he later developed. He graduated in law in 1947, spent one year as a civil servant, and then turned to full-time writing. After a depressing visit to New York in 1957, he developed a philosophy which he called ‘active nihilism’, an element of which was the idealising of suicide as the ultimate existentialist gesture — a gesture which he was to perform in 1970, at the headquarters of the Japanese defence forces. He was married and had two children, but it is clear that he was homosexual and not bisexual. Keywords all this somehow achieved a melancholy harmony with her haughty air of self-importance, characteristic of conjurers and exiled noblemen alike, with her sort of somber charm, with her heroine-like bearing. The delicate grain of the shadow cast by these unharmonious elements produced its own surprising and unique illusion of harmony. 3After this visit, Sonoko hints heavily at her interest in marriage. Kochan waves this off as cooly as he can. When she asks if he will come again, he says “Hm, perhaps so, if I’m still alive.” 14 The absurdity of his speech is then underwritten in bold by his description of leaving her at the train station: I’m about to talk about characters, in an attempt to talk about plot. That should give you a hint of how complex a book Confessions of a Mask really is. All of this has been important for sketching a brief psychological portrait of the sort of character Kochan believes himself to be. The action of the plot doesn’t begin until well into his school years, and then, for the most part, a chapter later, with the introduction of Sonoko. At the heart of Confessions of a Mask is, as far as Kochan believes, the tension between how he thinks he is supposed to act as a burgeoning young man entering into the prime of his virility, and the erotic fixation he has with strength and death. I should also mention here that Mishima’s prose is absolutely stunning – props to Meredith Weatherby, the translator, as well. The descriptions are matchless, and the language beautiful in a deeply philosophical way: not always sense-making, but aesthetically it’s incomparable. If this rings a bell, this is what’s at the very core of negative capability.