Yukio Mishima

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 true nature, whatever the cost.

Confessions of a Mask

Viet-Hung Nguyen

I covered her lips with mine. A second passed. There is not the slightest sensation of pleasure. Two seconds. It is just the same. Three seconds. ...I understood everything

My 'act' has ended by becoming an integral part of my nature, I told myself. Ir's no longer an act. My knowledge that I am masquerading as a normal person has even corroded whatever of normality I originally possessed, ending by making me tell myself over and over again that it too was nothing but a pretence at normality. To say it another way, I'm becoming the sort of person who can't believe in anything except the counterfeit.

How would I feel if I were another boy? How would I feel if l were a normal person? These questions obsessed me. They tortured me, instantly and utterly destroying even the one splinter of happiness I had thought I possessed for sure.

Everyone says that life is a stage. But most people do not seem to become obsessed with the idea, at any rate not as early as I did. By the end of childhood I was already firmly convinced that it was so and that l was to play my part on the stage without once ever revealing my true self.

All of these facts taken together made it difficult for me to know the psychology of any of my schoolmates. As a result, my only recourse was to infer from theoretical rules what ‘a boy my age’ would feel when he was all alone.

He believed confidently that he could conquer his reasonless melancholy and ennui by being - or pretending to be - even a little cheerful.

One part of my feeling of superiority became conceit, became the intoxication of considering myself a step ahead of mankind. Then, when this intoxicated part became sober more swiftly than the rest, lcommitted the rash error of judging everything with my sobered consciousness, not taking into consideration the fact that part of me was still drunk. Therefore the intoxicating thought of I am ahead of others' was amended to the diffidence of (No, I too am a human being like the rest.' Because of the miscalculation, this in urn was amplified into 'And also I am a human being like them in every respect.’ The part of me that was not yet sober made such an amplification possible and supported it. And at last I arrived at the conceited conclusion that 'Everyone is like me. The way of think- ing that Ihave called a stepping stone to aberration came powerfully into play in reaching this conclusion... Thus I had succeeded in hypnotizing myself. And from that inme on, ninety per cent of my life came to be governed by this dutohypnosis, this irrational, idiotic, counterfeit hypnosis, which even ldeinitely knew to be counterfeit. It may well be wondered if ere has ever been a person more given to credulity. 

When a boy of fourteen or fifteen discovers that he is more given to introspection and consciousness of self than other boys his age, he easily falls into the error ofbelieving it is because he is more mature than they. This was certainly a mistake in my case. Rather it was because the other boys had no such need of understanding themselves as I had: they could be their natural selves, whereas I was to play a part, a fact that would require considerable understanding and study. So it was not my maturity but my sense of uneasiness, my uncertainty, that was forcing me to gain control over my consciousness. Because such consciousness was simply a stepping stone to aberration, and my present thinking was nothing but uncertain and haphazard guesswork.

Confessions of a Mask

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