Confessions of a Mask

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$19.99

Confessions of a Mask

$19.99

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Mishima's First Masterwork

Yukio Mishima published Confessions of a Mask in 1949, when he was twenty-four years old. It made him famous overnight in Japan and established the central preoccupation of his career: the tension between the inner life and the performance demanded by society.

What the Book Is About

The novel is a thinly veiled autobiography. Its unnamed narrator grows up in wartime Tokyo, discovering early that he is attracted to images of male beauty, violence, and martyrdom. He fixates on a reproduction of Guido Reni's painting of Saint Sebastian, tied to a tree and pierced with arrows, which becomes the book's most famous scene. As he moves through adolescence, he constructs an elaborate social mask: courting a young woman, performing heterosexual normalcy, studying the gestures and responses expected of him.

Mishima writes the narrator's interior life with clinical precision. There is no self-pity, no plea for acceptance. The tone is closer to a medical report filed by the patient. The narrator does not want to be understood. He wants to understand himself, and the book records his attempts to do so with a ruthless honesty that was shocking in postwar Japan and remains striking today.

The wartime setting is not incidental. The narrator's alienation from his own desires is mirrored by Japan's alienation from its imperial identity after defeat. Mishima would spend the rest of his career working through this parallel, up to his ritual suicide in 1970.