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

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This is not a book that can be recommended without a fair number of qualifications or caveats. On this writer’s part, Confessions of a Mask served as a useful interpretive key to the rest of Yukio Mishima’s works, though it was far from the first of novels that I’d read. It is, however, probably the most personal save only for his Sea of Fertility tetralogy taken as a whole. Placed within his greater corpus, Confessions of a Mask both illuminates and explicates, in the plainest possible fashion, his entire literary philosophy, even if in rudimentary and underdeveloped form, as well as with no small dose of irony. If the Sea of Fertility is the ultimate culmination of this process, something of a great chrysanthemum in full bloom, then what is found in Confessions of a Mask is the barest germ of a seed of that flower. 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.

The first two chapters, comprising roughly half of the book, serve as prelude to the action of chapters three and four: the introduction of Kochan’s love interest and his courtship with Sonoko. Just before her introduction, Kochan describes his limited interactions with the fairer sex during his late adolescence. The second was a haphazard attempt at seducing him by his childhood friend while he had a fever, and that went about as one can imagine. 7 The first, more notable instance, was an exchange he’d had with a cousin of his when he was about fourteen: a girl whose beauty he describes with notes such as the “subtle attractiveness to her smile,” and “the harmonious grace and beauty of her face and figure.” 8 This was a girl who captivated him to such degree that he “would sit beside her for hours as she embroidered, doing nothing but stare at her vacantly.” One might question what more even needs to be said.

Yukio Mishima is generally considered the most significant Japanese author of the 20th century. In addition to his prolific literary output, he was also an outspoken right-wing political activist, and even formed his own private militia in 1968. Two years later, he led a small group of militia members into an army base, and gave a speech to the assembled troops with the aim of inspiring them to stage a coup d’état. Seeing that the soldiers were unmoved, he retreated inside and committed ritual suicide, known as seppuku, in the Japanese samurai tradition. This sensational death made headlines around the world, and his attempted coup is still known as the “Mishima Incident” in Japan today. 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. One may wonder if this too-clever self-reflexive narrative was intentional. This was, after all, Mishima’s second novel, and he was only twenty-four when it was published. Although it is rich in the imagery that would come to define his literary output, both in its violent and sensual content, as well as the mastery with which it is depicted, it is nonetheless quite undeveloped in comparison to his later work to be found in, for instance The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, much less, Spring Snow. 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. Confessions of a Mask follows a perfectly clear trajectory, in terms of narrative journeying. There is a logical sequence between events.

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. 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. It’s utterly sacrilegious to use an excerpt from my own texts to make the point, but the parallel is too good to pass. The quoted paragraph is from my novel The Other Side of Dreams.For those unfamiliar, Confessions of a Mask has the reputation as Yukio Mishima’s ‘coming out’ book, in which he openly proclaims his homosexuality to the world in the form of his very own I-novel. Two of these subjects are worth considering in greater detail, however: both the sincerity of what he proclaims to be his homosexuality, as well as the sincerity with which he writes his ‘I-novel’. And the latter must be considered first. 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

I really don’t feel a review of Confessions of a Mask can properly reveal the genius of Yukio Mishima. Anyone familiar with Mishima’s life can definitely see parallels between Mishima and the protagonist – whose name is Kochan, the diminutive of Mishima’s real name, Kimitake. When I arrived at the house in the suburbs that night I seriously contemplated suicide for the first time in my life. But as I thought about it, the idea became exceedingly tiresome, and I finally decided it would be a ludicrous business. I had an inherent dislike of admitting defeat. Moreover, I told myself, there's no need for me to take such decisive action myself, not when I'm surrounded by such a bountiful harvest of death—death in an air raid, death at one's post of duty, death in the military service, death on the battlefield, death from being run over, death from disease—surely my name has already been entered in the list for one of these: a criminal who has been sentenced to death does not commit suicide. No—no matter how I considered, the season was not auspicious for suicide. Instead I was waiting for something to do me the favor of killing me. And this, in the final analysis, is the same as to say that I was waiting for something to do me the favor of keeping me alive.” 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. The nature of our protagonist’s angst over the feeling in his chest should, by this point in the book, come across as amusing to the average reader. This is the point at which the book begins to read like parody, not just in the emotional immaturity of its protagonist, but even in his use of melodrama to describe this parting scene. It might as well have been ripped from the celluloid of a classic Hollywood film: the brooding protagonist interiorly aware of his doomed relationship fleeing the warmth of a loving maiden. One can practically see how it would be shot.Worry not; it’s not some opaque, experimental work of fiction that makes little sense but for its own author. 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.

Nevertheless, in my unrequited love for Omi, in this the first love I encountered in life, I seemed like a baby bird keeping its truly innocent animal lusts hidden under its wing. I was being tempted, not by the desire of possession, but simply by unadorned temptation itself. There are no supposed-tos in literature. As a result, I feel silly talking about genre. Moreover, to a great extent, genres as we understand them are somewhat Eurocentric. I-novels tend to be extremely self-critical and, for those unaccustomed to the genre, self-obsessed nearly to the point of absurdity. I-novels are not mere autobiographical exercises, as their authors intend to take full advantage the literary mode to depict a fully interior life even if it means hyperbolizing certain events or to otherwise depict those events in ways that probably didn’t occur in real life. Interpretation of I-novels, in general, comes with the tacit implication that ‘all of this happened, more or less’. They can be as fictional as they are autobiographical.

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. 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. Could this have been love? Grant it to be one form of love, for even though at first glance it seemed to retain its pristine form forever, simply repeating that form over and over again, it too had its own unique sort of debasement and decay. And it was a debasement more evil than that of any normal kind of love. Indeed, of all the kinds of decay in this world, decadent purity is the most malignant. The whole point of the story, in actual fact, is the immense difficulty we face in establishing our own identity.