Name: Confessions of a Mask (Peter Owen Modern Classics)
Rating: 4.019230769230769 (78 reviews)
ISBN: 9780720610314

Yukio Mishima

Confessions of a Mask (Peter Owen Modern Classics)

fira

'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 true nature, whatever the cost. 'A terrific and astringent work of beauty' The Times Literary Supplement 'Mishima is lucid in the midst of emotional confusion, funny in the midst of despair' Christopher Isherwood 'Never has a "confession" been freer from self-pity' Sunday Times

Confessions of a Mask

Tim Pendry

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 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 - <a target="_blank" href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/252185847" rel="nofollow noopener">https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...</a> 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.

Confessions of a Mask tells the story of a Japanese boy's development towards a homosexual identity during and after the Second World War. In narrating his progress from an isolated childhood through adolescence to manhood, he exposes his inner life, full of repressed homosexual desires and preoccupations with sadomasochism and death. The enduring power of the novel is in part owing to its themes of fantasy, despair, and alienation, its eloquent voice, but also its autobiographical nature --the equally enduring fascination with the life and character of one of Japan's most turbulent artists. As part of the new Peter Owen Cased Classics series, this special hardback edition carries an elegant dust jacket with a false die-cutting of a mask, while printed on the cover board is the work of British contemporary artist Fraser Taylor.

got a lot of introspection concerning my personal relationship with shame, otherness, love/desire, and sadism after this…

etienne

jess

Exploring the journey of a man who had identity crises infused by the conformity of social norms in post-war era. Hitting close to home, where he has to choose to wear a mask to hide himself from his truly real desire, and Mishima, being an absolute badass for eloquently describing this clearly-an-autobiographical-tale-of-his, the main character's experiences, pains, self-introspections, sexual awakening and more.

enya

cant decide if this was good or insufferable... mmmhm a bit of both maybe

confessions of a mask aka exploration of homosexuality and compulsory heterosexuality

Amy Grieve

I’ll admit that I was actually vibing with the reflective writing style. It flowed really well, but I was mainly uncomfortable with some of the more gore adjacent content. I feel like there should be a content warning for some of the things that the central character imagines/fantasizes about.

I know that the main narrative voice was attempting to make sense of his own sexual attraction to men in the landscape of wartime Japan. This was not a story of coming to terms with sexuality. It was a story about both consciously and unconsciously concealing ones true self under the heteronormative binary that demands men can be masculine. The narrative voice is ashamed of the things he finds feminine within his own self and creates a mask of masculinity that he wears to face the world.

Confessions of a Mask (Peter Owen Modern Classics)

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