Confessions of a Mask
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
"Thus, when confronting those possessors of sheer animal flesh unspoiled by intellect- young toughs, sailors, soldiers, fishermen - there was nothing for me to do but be forever watching them from afar with impassioned indifference, being careful never to exchange words with them. Probably the only place in which I could have lived at ease would have been some uncivilized tropical land where I could not speak the language. Now that I think of it, I realize that from earliest childhood I felt a yearning toward those intense summers of the kind that are seething forever in savage lands..." --Confessions of a Mask (1949) by Yukio Mishima |
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
Confessions of a Mask (1949) is the second novel by Japanese author Yukio Mishima.
Confessions of a Mask is an account, usually considered at least semi-autobiographical, of a boy growing up in a Japan that is war-torn and militaristic. Entirely unsuited by nature to this environment, the narrator must weave an intricate and profoundly self-defeating facade around himself as he discovers his homosexuality. 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. The novel 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.
