Once again, I wasn’t sure how well I was going to like this one at first. Unlike other books I have read by Mishima in the past, this is strict first person — as if written by a person looking back over their life and trying to explain it to the reader. While first person can be more intimate, somehow I felt more distant from the narrator, especially earlier in the book when he is looking back over his childhood.

It in his early adulthood, when the narrator is convincing himself that he is his mask — that what he should want and what he does want are one in the same, that I was finally all in. I found it such a compelling portrayal of that compulsive heteronormativity — that everyone else assumes he is straight and he himself assumes/convinces himself he is straight and the cracks at the seams are getting wider but his circular self-assessments just get tighter. And even the narrator’s occasional admissions of the difference of his desires are so hemmed in by the rigid models of “inversion” — there are only two types of invert, according the authorities of the time, or at least those available to our narrator.

So yes, in the end, I loved this. I am getting more and more curious about reading more about Mishima as a person. I shall have to see if there are any good biographies available. ( )

Mishima is famous for all the wrong reasons - mainly as a fascist who committed seppuku after a failed military coup - but he's also famous for frequenting Nichome, strenuously denied by his widow, of course. A fascinating character, nonetheless, and this is the first of his books that I've gotten around to reading.

As per the above, this particular novel about a boy dealing with dark sadistic sexual fantasies about other boys comes across as semi-autobiographical, although there's strictly no evidence of such. Certainly Mishima was familiar with putting on a mask, or public face.

It's also a good look at war-time Japan, incidentally.

The translation was a bit strained at times - for instance, I could see the translator struggling to come up with an idiomatic translation of Japanese set phrases like 'ittekimasu' that have no equivalent in English. At another point, the text mentions "H. prefecture near Osaka" and I just wondered why they didn't write "Hyogo". Perhaps when the book was translated in the 50s they didn't think people would be able to handle all the foreign names, a trend that I think has changed since then. I guess I'd read it in Japanese, but my level - and patience to read all the kanji - is still a bit too low for that.

I was a bit disappointed that the main character didn't end up with a guy, and spent most of the second half of the book half-heartedly pursuing a woman. But I guess he was meant to be tortured, or something. ( )

Fuuuuuuucccckkkkk

Escrita en 1949,Confesiones de una máscara es la más representativa de las novelas de Yukio Mishima (Tokio, 1925-1970), y en ellas se narran las peripecias de un adolescente que descubre sus inclinaciones homosexuales y que por ello se ve obligado a representar una complicada comedia para subsistir, a colocarse una máscara con la que aparentar “normalidad” cuando en lo más profundo de su ser se reconoce como un joven diferente, aislado y alejado de los patrones socialmente aceptados. Esta novela biográfica constituye un elaborado y original estudio de la homosexualidad “vista desde dentro”, y en cada una de sus páginas queda de manifiesto la enorme valentía de su autor al describir con todo lujo de detalles las fantasías sádica del protagonista, su irreprimible atracción por la belleza, la sangre y la muerte, su fetichismo sin límites...

penning a mishima takedown saying he doesn't let his queer characters be queer ( )