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

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As his relationship with Sonoko progresses, it becomes clear that she thinks both very highly and very fondly of him. Rather than sincerely reciprocate her feelings, he writes at length on the torture he experiences when he is unable to reconcile the contradictions of how he feels he is supposed to act and his own inclinations for violence and grief. 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. My blind adoration of Omi was devoid of any element of conscious criticism, and still less did I have anything like a moral viewpoint where he was concern. Whenever I tried to capture the amorphous mass of my adoration within the confines of analysis, it would already have disappeared. If there be such a thing as love that has neither duration nor progress, this was precisely my emotion. The eyes through which I saw Omi were always those of a 'first glance' or, if I may say so, of the 'primeval glance'. It was purely an unconscious attitude on my part, a ceaselesseffort to protect my fourteen-yesr-old purity from the process of erosion.

What Kochan knows to be real are thus only three things that he ties together into an ugly knot: strength, beauty, and death—each something that was subsumed by his libido. This is why the book seems at times like a parody of homosexual experience, one made more vivid when Mishima’s own distaste for Western preoccupations with homosexuality is considered, as well as his own general disengagement with what similar subcultures arose in Japan at the same time. Kochan’s self-imposed melodrama, the relationship he pursues, in spite of himself, with Sonoko, and the unmistakable allure that he finds in women all cast his self-described homosexual inclinations as the efforts of a try-hard desperately seeking to calibrate a libido that is simply out of control.Confessions of a Mask follows a perfectly clear trajectory, in terms of narrative journeying. There is a logical sequence between events. 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. 3

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.

One might suggest that this is perfectly inline with the sort of pathological confusion that seems to characterize the average homosexual’s interior life. It’s possible, given that their collective behavior could suggest such, though it’s uncharitable to make such sweeping assumptions. However, one might also rebut with the question of how to define an ‘average’ homosexual, and should such a general profile be constructed, it becomes harder to profile Kochan according to it without introducing quite a few suppositions into the narrative that simply aren’t there. 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. 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. 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. 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