Confessions of a Mask

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Yukio Mishima's first novel, Confessions of a Mask (ISBN 081120118X), launched him to national fame though he was only in his early twenties. It is an account of a latent homosexual growing up in a Japan that is war-torn and consequently militaristic, both in the expectations it has for the behavior of its men, and in the work they must perform. Entirely unsuited by nature to this environment, the narrator must weave an intricate and profoundly self-defeating facade around himself. This mask leads him into a pitiful "affair" with a young woman which only redoubles his fear of his peculiarity, into deceiving his parents, and into effectively becoming further estranged from himself the older he becomes. He claims at one point that his mind became like a strip of paper twisted once and attached at the ends - a Möbius strip; in essence, a circuitous loop that could neither escape from nor reflect upon itself. It also becomes fixated upon the link between sexuality and violence, and the narrator's tendency to dream in this vein is recounted with mixed feelings of horror and fascination.

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