Booky Ooky!

Confessions of a Mask / Yukio Mishima
New Directions, 1958 (paperback)
254 p. — translated by Meredith Weatherby

Yukio Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask turned out to be a lot more than I imagined and a little less than I had hoped. I initially approached this book through the lens of Japanese fiction. Knowing this was a book about Japan during WWII and having read the author’s The Sound of Waves, I had a certain set of expectations.

What surprised me is that I also found myself evaluating the book as a piece of gay fiction, which I hadn’t originally intended. I knew the book was about a homosexual man, and based on the title, I assumed he was keeping this hidden, but for some reason, prior to starting the novel, to categorize it in the corpus of gay writing seemed inaccurate and insulting. Inaccurate because it’s older and by a heterosexual(?) man. Insulting because — and this should come as no surprise — I hate gay fiction.

Within the first 20 pages, I had completely changed my mind. During the first 100 pages of the novel, I felt like Mishima was living in my brain, pulling forth memories I didn’t know I had of my own coming-of-age and sexual awakening. In other gay works, there is a lot of emphasis on sex, relationships, alienation, and violence, but it’s often superficial and always contrary to my personal experience. The first third of this novel, however, is about the protagonist as a child, and Mishima captures so accurately many of the confusing and also nonplussing thoughts that a to-be-gay child might have, and certainly that I had. A lot of what went on in the character’s head felt perfectly normal to him, though they were thoughts that would later set him apart from his peers. The fascination with masculinity, the mistaking of sexual attraction for aesthetic appeal, the natural disconnect between fantasies in the mind and what they mean in life. It was so similar to what I experienced, it was scary. These aren’t things that I’ve talked about with anybody, so as sappy as it sounds, reading this book made me feel like I wasn’t alone.

If you read this, though, bear in mind that the guy’s obsession with death and stuff was NOT part of my experience. It’s icky.

After the first third or half of the book, though, the protagonist’s experience varies drastically from mine, so I was able to bring my mind back to a more subjective place from which to evaluate the novel. It’s here that his story becomes intimately tied with his life in Japan during and after the war, and what the rest of the book focuses on other than his thoughts are his relationships with women and how lying about sexuality to the world inevitably led to tension and a great deal of self-deception. It remains a good book with that quiet, introspective style I’ve come to associate with Japanese literature, but it does get a little dry at times and somewhat repetitive. Every now and then I wanted to say “Ok! We get it! You’re conflicted! It sucks to live a lie. Now can we please move on?!” But ultimately, the book is still insightful and engaging.

One thing the book encouraged me to do was take another look at some gay fiction. I replaced a category in that mammoth 888 Challenge to include 8 books that I feel will span a spectrum of themes (and quality, I’m sure.) I replaced the category called “Professionally Relevant” because I figured you guys wouldn’t want to read about that boring stuff anyway.