Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima

A completely egocentric novel: the first-person narrator (hardly ever named, cannot even recall the name) recounts his life since his infancy to his current stage of life, his early adulthood. His narration is marked by an excess of subjectivity, a surfeit of self-consciousness; the novel is a confession where he recalls and analyzes significant life events with the detachment and the precision of a surgeon with his scalpel. Some otherwise important facts of his individual existence are passed off casually as extraneous details and are only mentioned in relation to his self-development: readers learn only on page 85 that he has a brother and sister--Mishima reveals that this very same sister dies with a short and unfeeling comment later on in the novel.

The confession is marked by doubt. The novel begins with a stunning statement: "For many years I claimed I could remember things seen at the time of my own birth..." Is the confessor behind the mask endowed with an unforgetting memory? Or is his memory faulty and events conveniently modified? Is his narrative to be trusted?

The thrust of the narrative (and the aforementioned self-development) is centered on the protagonist's exploration of his deviant sexuality. His earliest unquestionable memory at the age of four sets the theme for the rest of his life: it is of a "young man... with handsome ruddy cheeks and shining eyes, wearing a dirty roll of cloth around his head for a sweatband... carrying a yoke of night-soil buckets over one shoulder, balancing their heaviness expertly with his footsteps... He was a night-soil man, a ladler of excrement" (p. 8). Toward the night soil man he felt "a piercing sorrow, a body-wrenching sorrow. His occupation gave me the feeling of 'tragedy' in the most sensuous meaning of the word. A certain feeling as it were of 'self-renunciation,' a certain feeling of indifference, a certain feeling of intimacy with danger, a feeling like a remarkable mixture of nothingness and vital power..." (p. 9). The swarthy, handsome, well-toned, working class man redolent of sweat and a fatal destiny--these are the men to whom the confessor is invariably drawn; these are the men whose flesh he craves.(Note: This type maps on exactly to the sailor that the adolescent protagonist in Mishima's The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea idolizes). Both Mishima himself and the protagonist are bourgeois and educated (consumer of representations and spectacles, and not engaged directly with the world); they are of smaller stature, weakly and sickly; in body they are nearly directly opposite to their objects of sexual desire. Could this be the source of their attraction, the ressentiment of those imprisoned in a frail constitution against those endowed with an overwhelming and generous physicality?

​The confessor details some of his sexual fantasies; these were graphic and were sometimes difficult to read. The most stunning among them is a clandestine banquet in a cellar, where a beautiful and muscular young man is stripped naked and presented to a handful of guests, faces hidden in the shadows. The confessor kisses the young man's lips and then sticks a silver fork into his heart--"a fountain of blood struck [him] full in the face" (p. 97)--he then starts to carve "the flesh of the breast, gently, thinly at first..." (p. 97)

It is his awareness of deviance and his experience of estrangement with the rest of his adolescent peers that leads to the excess of self-consciousness. The confessor is forced to reconcile himself to his deviant sexuality--this is his true life. He becomes aware that he must always play a role to hide his aberrant subjectivity. While normal men play their role naturally, without doubt and self-comment, his is a practiced act.

Against all odds the confessor eventually falls in love with a woman--this is a "pure" love without the hungering desires of the flesh. The novel ends with a powerful confrontation between the two contradictions.

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