REVIEW: Confessions of a Mask – Yukio Mishima (1949; 1958, New Directions)
Those familiar with this book, or at the very least, its reputation, will likely find this an odd choice of review for The Pillarist. This was not one that this writer read with the intention of reviewing, in large part due exactly to those reasons. However, as should become clear from the review, the book’s reputation deserves to be a lot more nuanced than what popular opinion has flattened it out to be. Nor should it have ever been championed by certain segments of sexual revolutionaries who have tried to make Mishima one of their own.
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.
In the West, the closest approximation to an I-novel might be something like Karl Knausgård’s My Struggle, though even this comparison isn’t quite appropriate due to its length. The I-novel that Westerners will probably be most familiar with is Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human, which—as hopefully this review will reveal—might serve as an amusing counterpoint to Mishima’s own Confessions.
The Encyclopedia Britannica defines the I-novel as “characterized by self-revealing narration, with the author usually as the central character”1. Though vague, where this differs from standard autobiography is the intensely psychological and aesthetical characteristics of the genre’s approach. Autobiographies tend to be something of a commentary on the events of a person’s life, if written in the form of a retrospective, or alternatively, a simple narration of those events from memory. By contrast, I-novels are meditative exercises in which very little narrative space is given to the actual events of the narrator’s exterior reality, while the interior elements of it—his thoughts and passions, feelings, fears, considerations, suppositions and fantasies—are prioritized instead.
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.
Confessions of a Mask is no different, and in fact, many who have read the book, at least in the West, have positioned this gloomy self-obsession around the ‘confessions’ part of the title. After all, a lengthy and self-critical narrative should only be expected with such a word in mind. Of greater importance, however, is the term neglected here: that these are the confessions of a mask, specifically. Anyone familiar with Mishima’s literary output would acknowledge that he is far more clever, and far more interested in the personality and utility of masks, to write something as dull as an I-novel that drew attention to the formulation of social personas. In other words, anyone who was read Confessions of a Mask and comes away with the belief that it’s merely a book about a man who had to wear a figurative mask of ‘straightness’ in public because he thought he was gay is, frankly, someone with the reading comprehension of a worm.
But before getting to that, the confessions do have to be addressed.
Confessions
By design, it is difficult to tell where the self-belief of the I-novel’s author ends and his fictive mode begins. To even approach an I-novel with this interpretive method is in error, as had the author intended to write an autobiography, he’d have dispensed with the garrulous task of writing a lengthy self-absorbed meditation in the first place. As this is the case, rather than simply referring to Mishima himself in the course of this review, we should consider instead Mishima as he depicted ‘himself’ within the book: the character of Kochan—itself a childhood nickname derived from his own: Kimitake.
The book is divided into four chapters. In the first, Kochan describes his early life, beginning with the insistence that he remembers the day of his birth despite recognizing that such a thing should be impossible, and it ends with his memory of a manic shrine procession stumbling into his manor’s front yard to ruin their garden. In between, he recounts the distance that was put between himself and his parents on account of an overbearing grandmother, the size of the house he grew up in and its number of maids, as well as episodes of early childhood frivolity. Of the latter, many commentators are drawn to the emphasis with which Kochan proclaimed his fascination with detached, moody feminine figures such as the theater magician Shokyokusai Tenkatsu or Cleopatra.
Both of these are relevant to touch on, but not out of order: Kochan’s rich interior fantasy world is such that he considers it to separate him from the rest of life, and the figures which he considers himself to have attached to as a child all reveal different aspects of this conflict. And the first ones aren’t of women, but of apparent ‘nobodies’ that litter the background of what once served as everyday urban experience.
He gives the most vivid example of this when he speaks of the subway car ticket-puncher: a well-uniformed man in a ubiquitous and menial position of early Showa-era Japan. It is a hidden life that he desires to witness but finds himself locked out of:
Both occupations gave me a strong impression of “tragic lives” of which I was ignorant and from which it seemed I was forever excluded. This was particularly true in the case of the ticket-punchers: the rows of gold buttons on the tunics of their blue uniforms became fused in my mind with the odor which floated through the subways in those days—it was like the smell of rubber, or of peppermint—and readily called up mental associations of “tragic things.” I somehow felt it was “tragic” for a person to make his living in the midst of such an odor. Existences and events occurring at places that not only appealed to my senses but were moreover denied to me—these, together with the people involved in them, constituted my definition of “tragic things.” It seemed that my grief at being externally excluded was always transformed in my dreaming into grief for those persons and their ways of life, and that solely through my own grief I was trying to share in their existences.2
One can easily acknowledge the childishness in the attitude that he goes to great lengths to explain here: it is not some innate tragedy that he intuitively picks up on, but rather, and more honestly, the existence of experiences obscured from his sight, which he will never be privy to, that sculpted his early understanding of tragedy. In plainer terms, it’s a case of ‘no, you can’t have that, put it back.’ For a child, what is unknown is intuitively connected with what is not only forbidden to know, but what is prohibited from all knowledge, yet not from mere awareness. The tension of this awareness and this prohibition is reduced to a childlike tragedy that can be referred to simply as a denial inflicted by an ambiguous external will, and it is this that he projected upon such figures by casting them into a tragic role. Here, Konchan inadvertently discovers the notion of social masks that are oriented towards himself and worn by other figures.
Of Tenkatsu, however, things are a little different. The mask of hers is much more obvious, and therefore, less tragic. More importantly, however, she is herself more enticing. He remarks on her “opulent body veiled in garments like those of the Great Harlot of the Apocalypse,” decorated in stagecrafted jewels that indicated “shoddy merchandise.” However, he makes a deeper insight on account of her character, too: that
all this somehow achieved a melancholy harmony with her haughty air of self-importance, characteristic of conjurers and exiled noblemen alike, with her sort of somber charm, with her heroine-like bearing. The delicate grain of the shadow cast by these unharmonious elements produced its own surprising and unique illusion of harmony.3
Kochan saw no shred of tragic character in Tenkatsu’s stage persona. Instead, the splendor or glamour, or perhaps just the richness of her staged self-importance, shielded whatever tragedy might lurk in her character. It is as if what Kochan identified as tragic in the ticket puncher was in fact the social trappings of politeness and common humility, which the great spectacle of the stage performer dispenses with. The same theme is repeated, more or less, in his description of Cleopatra—one shaped, no doubt, by the 1934 Cecil B. DeMille film of the same name which starred the striking Claudette Colbert as its protagonist.
In both of these cases, he took to dressing up in feminine attire to role-play these larger-than-life women who characterized boldness and the excess of indulgence. His mother was so shocked by his childlike imitation of Tenkatsu, donned up in her own kimono by clandestine design, that he never did it again—and when he eventually saw Colbert’s sultry performance, he took to more secretive sessions of cross-dressing in order to avoid the suspicious eyes of the manor’s adults.
Here in the narrative, Kochan references the most notable of the debauched Roman emperors favorably, having “discovered hopes the same as mine in Heliogabalus, emperor of Rome in its period of decay, that destroyer of Rome’s ancient gods, that decedent, bestial monarch.”4 This remark, like his earlier reminiscences about insisting on the memory of his own birth, should be a clue to readers about the nature of his confessions. But again, before we get to this, the rest of the work should be addressed within its context.
His preoccupations with women’s attire should be remembered alongside his admiration of male beauty—which later he comes to firmly identify specifically with strength—and his utter disgust at seeing that usurped by anything feminine. Upon being told that the knight in one of his favorite storybooks was in fact the great saint Joan of Arc, he reacted with total repulsion and abandoned the book altogether.
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.
Entering into this picture is, as expected, the unfortunate proclivities of a frustrated young man: the sudden and reckless indulgence in self-abuse. The second chapter depicts the awakening of his libido and the extent to which strength and death exert control over it. As his school years progress and he eventually graduates, he finds that the musculature of the male form that he finds attractive is something he seeks to possess himself, whether it is in either the context of athletics or labor. And this is something that comes to be at odds with his own cowardice: a trait inherited from his early childhood illnesses that shielded him, with the assistance of his overbearing grandmother, from otherwise normal play with other boys.
Despite the obviousness of Kochan’s homoerotic interests, lacking in the book are all of the usual indicators of homosexual ‘development’. He had no close male mentor of advanced age who preyed upon him. He was not what one would typically consider a psychologically vulnerable youth. His relationship with his parents may not have been the best, but it’s clear that it was not one of either open hostility or abandonment. And not only this, his erotic interests in the male figure were never consummated beyond what he considered the “bad habit” of regular and frequent self-abuse.5
And for a confessional that its more odious defenders claim is an ode to his homosexual awakening, it lacks all mention of any so-called partners who would have played a role. The only sexual experience alluded to comes near the conclusion of the book, when he takes a university friend up on the man’s offer to bring him to the red light district for a night with a female prostitute. He describes the experience as a “numbness that resembles a fierce pain,” which “was intense but still could not be felt at all.”6 The entire ordeal, from their entering the brothel to the narrative break is only about five short paragraphs, and what it reveals in Kochan—far from his own heavily implied belief that women specifically just can’t do it for him, is that he has an understandable and innate assumption that sleeping with prostitutes is shameful behavior.
One might then conclude, given the proximity of his visit to the prostitute, that Konchan’s belief about his own sexual inclinations is the right one. Who else would know better than Konchan himself when it came to assessing his own libido? And yet, leaping immediately from the rejection of one mode by experience into the hypothetical acceptance of its opposite mode by imagination is exactly the sort of intellectualized postulation that characterizes Konchan’s psychological immaturity. It’s the reasoning of a child: if X doesn’t work, then anti-X must be the solution. There’s no room for nuance in the chain of reasoning.
Flattening this into a mere closet case scenario ignores the more obvious psychological baggage of Konchan’s passions. He finds a natural, if uneasy, camaraderie among men, and he very clearly falls in love with a woman, Sonoko, whom he finds very beautiful. Meanwhile, his libido is engaged by depictions of great strength and great violence. He’s hardly the picture of a normal, healthy young man, but so too is he hardly the portrait of a homosexual. Kochan’s neurosis is a bit less common than something so simple.
Mask
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.
During one afternoon, they were left to their own devices by their family, whereupon she remarked to him feeling fatigue. After she lay her head in his lap and observed him quietly, he remarked that he “never forgot the feeling of that luxurious weight pressing for a moment upon my thigh,” though he was quick to note—as he always is, with well-practiced consistency—that “it was not a sexual feeling, but somehow simply an extremely luxurious pleasure.”9
This episode would foreshadow and serve as the template, more or less, for his courtship of Sonoko. When the passage is read in full, it reads more like the words of a man protesting against accusations of normalcy that might be leveled against him. “Honest, fellas, I’m totally messed up and not normal at all: see how these women don’t affect me in the slightest!” And yet he includes episodes such as these, ever quick to end with the same caveat, as if to be saying, “these women affected me, mystified me, and I was allured by their curious and impenetrable actions that stirred something deep in my breast, but no, no, I was certainly not attracted to them, not at all, how unthinkable!” It’s the sort of protest that, if it came from a friend, one could only help but smile with a polite if sarcastic agreement, as one would intuitively pick out that this man’s denial ran too deeply into his psyche to be addressed with mere words. “Sure, pal. Go ahead and believe that. If you can.”
With these are preludes, he finally addresses Sonoko. She was the sister of Kusano, a school friend of his that he’d known for quite some time. When we are first introduced to her, it is by the sound of her piano playing when she is seventeen, an intonation that Kochan “prayed that her practice would continue forever,” and which, half a decade later, “in my heart, the sound of that piano still continues today”.10
The misplacement of his immediate attraction to Sonoko, his confusion for it as something else, could be forgiven when his inexperience around women is remembered. Indeed, as with the episodes involving his childhood friend and his cousin, he is quick, upon ruminating on the nimbleness of her feet and the smoothness of her calves as she came to serve them tea, that he was not at all, in the slightest, whatsoever, assuaged by anything resembling sexual attraction:
As I said before, I was completely lacking in any feeling of sexual desire for the opposite sex. This was well proved by the fact that I had never had the slightest wish to see a woman’s naked body. For all that, I would begin to imagine seriously that I was in love with a girl, and the spiteful fatigue of which I have spoken would begin to clog my mind; and then next I would find delight in regarding myself as a person ruled by reason and would satisfy my vainglorious desire to appear an adult by likening my frigid and changeable emotions to those of a man who has grown weary from a surfeit of women.11
Nonetheless, he concluded from this that he “could love a girl without feeling any desire whatsoever,”12 which might be one of the most honest things our speaker says in the entire book, though even this absconds with the extent to which his libido has confused desire. Again, it is with childlike simplicity which Kochan reduces the relations between men and women to mere bestial attraction, a mistake that he never seems to learn from given his much later affair at the brothel toward the end of the book. This is a mentality we see echoed today, and not simply among chauvinistic pickup artist communities, either: the entire thesis of transgender ideology rests on such similarly tedious grounds of sexual misunderstanding, except where the pickup artists have only so much hot air, the targets of the transgender narratives are guarded rather vehemently by their neurotic predators. One shudders at the horrors modern Kochans are subjected to that simply didn’t exist in 1944.
As his relationship with Sonoko progresses, it becomes clear that she thinks both very highly and very fondly of him. Rather than sincerely reciprocate her feelings, he writes at length on the torture he experiences when he is unable to reconcile the contradictions of how he feels he is supposed to act and his own inclinations for violence and grief.
This deserves a relevant side note: his preoccupations with violent fantasies merge into pseudo-realities. When he is called up for service in the military, by coincidence he is ill with pneumonia, and thus granted exception by a misdiagnosis of tuberculosis. He makes no effort to correct the record, however, despite yearning, as he claims, for a valiant young death in battle. In particular, he romanticizes the experience of the kamikaze pilots whose soldier-suicide is offered up as religious rite for the living Showa God-Emperor. And yet, when his lot is drawn, he takes advantage of circumstances that relegate his war service to that of finishing law school and working in factories on home soil. Even in this he is not satisfied, as that dark portion of his conscience still yearned to die in a bombing campaign.
It is, however, with Sonoko whom he would share his first real kiss and engage in his first courtship. They would exchange shy glances, commence the writing of letters to one another, and even stay in contact as the final year of the war brought widespread destruction to downtown Tokyo and forced the transplantation of their families to opposite rural regions in order to escape the flames. When the time comes for their first kiss, which he describes in relative detail, he presents the occasion as a mastermind orchestrating the perfect heist.13
After this visit, Sonoko hints heavily at her interest in marriage. Kochan waves this off as cooly as he can. When she asks if he will come again, he says “Hm, perhaps so, if I’m still alive.”14 The absurdity of his speech is then underwritten in bold by his description of leaving her at the train station:
Sonoko had slipped in through the porters’ gate and was clinging to the black wooden railing bordering the platform. A mass of lace on her blouse overflowed from her checked bolero and fluttered in the breeze. Her vivacious eyes stared widely at me. The train began to move. Her slightly heavy lips seemed to be forming words, and in just that way she passed out of my view.
Sonoko! Sonoko! I repeated the name to myself with each sway of the train. It sounded unutterably mysterious. Sonoko! Sonoko! With each repetition my heart felt heavier, at each throb of her name a cutting, punishing weariness grew deeper within me. The pain I was feeling was crystal clear, but of such a unique and incomprehensible nature that I could not have explained it even if I had tried. It was so far off the beaten path of ordinary human emotions that I even had difficulty in recognizing it as pain.15
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.
Needless to say, the suggestion of marriage is broached by Sonoko’s family. Her brother sends him a letter asking him to clarify his feelings for the girl, and at some excruciating length, as well as a brief talk with his mother, Kochan decides to renege and effectively cuts off contact with Sonoko, much to his own—and surely hers, too—anguish.
What we reach at the end of Confessions of a Mask is the inescapable conclusion that the book’s title could not be any more appropriate. It is not ‘The Confessions of a Man Beneath a Mask,’ nor ‘The Confessions of One Who Wears a Mask’. It is the confessions of the mask itself. Mishima’s characterization of his own personality, and the manner in which he writes both the narrative of his real-life-inspired events as well as the dissection of Kochan’s interior life, all depict the discordant confusion of a mask attempting to define itself without a clear point of reference. It is the mask, not the person beneath it, that deserves special attention in interpreting this work.
A mask is an intermediary positioned between a person who wears it and the person or people to whom it is presented. For the wearer, it acts as a barrier between himself and his audience, and the act of donning it indicates the entrance into some sort of performance space. Masks are necessarily performative; what they cordon off and conceal an actor in order to present a fiction instead.
Fiction, however, is not synonymous with ‘lie’. It is of altogether different mode, sitting downstream from the operation of reason, by which truths and lies are discerned, morality, from which good and evil are discerned, and aesthetics, from which beauty and ugliness are discerned. The fiction that a mask participates in is that of the stage performance, wherein everyone accepts the mask as necessary towards the functioning of the drama.
It is interior presumption, then, to presume, outside of the mode of theatrical performance, that only the chosen few who seek to guard dangerous taboos are those who wear social masks. This is the error of the simplistic attempt to interpret Confessions of a Mask as the dull memoir of a closeted homosexual. Everyone wears some sort of a social mask, as all social interaction bears with it an element of the theatrical. Mishima knows this. What makes Kochan’s mask noteworthy enough to become the subject of a novel is this: he subsumed his entire identity into the mask, such that he refused to turn any of his attention whatsoever to whatever part of himself was wearing it. It wasn’t so much that his mask was Janus-lined, though the analogy could be appropriate. Rather, he made every effort to adhere to the surface of social interaction that he lost sight entirely of his own self awareness. This is especially ironic given how self-absorbed the novel was by its very genre.
The narrative gives us these clues. Kochan’s unreliability as a narrator is spelled out from the first page, as he exclaims, with no small amount of fervent surety, that he remembered the very moment of his birth—and this, even as he explains in detail how his own memories had to be mistaken. His examinations of conscience and explorations of his fantasies, violent or otherwise, would always be doubled-back upon with guilty disdain. The motives he would give for refusing to engage with women, or conversely, for engaging with them, would be riddled with open and obvious contradictions, and then followed up with mechanical reminders that he was in no way attracted to them. And most obvious of these contradictions: he yearned to die and yet retreated from any opportunities that would have granted this in real life.
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.
This all indicates that Kochan’s fascination with strength and how it manifested in his homosexual interests, although relevant to his interior baggage, is not the main subject of the book. Nor is it even the primary issue with which he has to struggle. His mask is the subject of the book: not what lies behind it, but rather its very existence. Confessions of a Mask is about a man who has tried, unsuccessfully, to turn himself into the mask that he is only supposed to wear. The result is a disordered person ruled by his passions and unable to make sense even of who he is.
Conclusion
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.
On account of the book’s more infamous content, it speaks totally past whatever frame of social confinement that is placed upon it by its gay rights defenders. The extent to which same-sex attraction is explored in Confessions of a Mask remains limited to the indulgences of an onanistic self-abuser, and one just as disposed to occupying his fantasies with the shredded musculature of soldiers carrying out athletic exercises as he is with those same soldiers cast in the roles of samurai slicing open their own abdomens. Kochan’s fascination with flesh and death need not be confined to the ‘novel’ part of this I-novel, either, as one is hard pressed to ignore Mishima’s own fascination with the two. But let not his fascination, even romanticism, imply a sense of cluelessness: anyone who has stomached to read his short story “Patriotism” will recognize the penetrating extent to which he understood exactly what the samurai’s ritual suicide entailed.
The reduction of Kochan’s identity to that of the mask, so perfectly worn as to erase entirely his own ability to recognize himself, leaves open the questions of what remains of the world to be understood. Kochan’s attempts to define himself continually cycle back into a tension of presuming social roles and tumultuous interior passions, as if he has no foundation upon which to build an identity that is not somehow beholden to either his friends and coworkers on the outside, or to his unconquerable passions on the inside.
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.
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.
As such, its value can only be found in those looking to understand Yukio Mishima’s corpus. The degree of its explicit violence, as well as his his descriptions of men, flirt with levels of appropriateness that are best left obscured and avoided. Likewise, the book offers little beyond its wildly self-indulgent narrative. Everything that can and probably should be said about it refer almost exclusively to its use as a means of better interpreting the rest of Mishima’s literary output and, indeed, even his life. But so far as casual reading is concerned, one is better off with almost any one of his other books.
1https://www.britannica.com/art/I-novel
210.
316-17.
420.
534-36.
6227.
7185-187.
8112.
9113.
10129.
11131.
12Ibid.
13195-197.
14203.
15205-206.
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