Confessions of a Mask is the growing-up and coming-of-age story of a young man who struggles with a burgeoning awareness of his own homosexuality and sadistic desires, as he grows up in the Japan of World War II. The main character is, if anything, an anti-hero: weak, sickly (autointoxication, no less, quite a serious sickness), cowardly, and deceitful. Yet the reader is given such a powerful insight into his psyche that one can’t help but sympathize—with an understanding that perfect, all is forgiven.
I’ve said before, on this blog and elsewhere, that one of my complaints about Japanese literature is its vagueness, its refusal to make distinctions (as one translator put it), and the deliberate refusal, on behalf of most of the authors, to explain themselves or their characters. Mishima is clearly an exception to this trend: he has a masterful ability to probe the innermost depths of his characters and come out triumphant, with a sparkling portrait of mankind in general, and one man in particular. He was recommended to me by a friend who said he was the “Japanese Dostoevsky,” and I have to agree: in reading his novels, much like Dostoevsky’s, I feel an increased understanding and fellowship with mankind, no matter how dark the actual topic matter presented here.
And the topic is dark—after all, growing up gay and sadist is no easy feat, not to mention in pre-WWII Japan. The story arc takes us from early childhood memories, in particular, the fantasy fairy tale books which first expose our narrator to the thrill he finds in young male bodies, wounded and bloodied, to the reminiscences of a young man pretending to be, or maybe genuinely being, if one can accept, as the narrator can’t, “love with absolutely no basis in sexual desire,” in love with a young woman. Mishima is an artist with the details—each of the picture books, each of our narrator’s young crushes, each of his daydream masturbatory images are lovingly described, perfectly depicted for our eyes. (Note: this book is not for the faint of heart.) He has a way of painting a scene, whether imaginary or real, that makes it, for the reader, more than just real—it is a work of art, on par with any of the Renaissance paintings of Saint Sebastian that so titillate the narrator as a young boy.
Mishima is no less genius with psychology. The narrator is truly twisted, his thoughts, kept to himself, constantly tangled and confused—am I or aren’t I? he asks himself, page after page—and Mishima captures the unsettled confusion of youth with admirable clarity. Of his character’s mental state as a child, he says that childhood is “a stage on which time and space become entangled. For example, there was the news I heard from adults concerning events in various countries—the eruption of a volcano, say, or the insurrection of an army—and the things that were happening before my eyes—my grandmother’s spells or the petty family quarrels—and the fanciful events of the fairy-tale world in which I had just then become immersed: these three things always appeared to me to be of equal value and like kind.” Indeed, this sort of jumbled, what’s-real presentation is typical of the book, and works brilliantly for this sort of piece. The real and the unreal, the true and the untrue, are all jumbled together like old junk at a yard sale, and, as we watch the narrator himself try to sort through them, try to remember for us what he felt and thought and hoped at each moment, we can see what a mind is truly like.
This sort of mixed-up, topsy-turvy thinking shows itself more clearly in the narrator’s late adolescence, as he tries to imitate the behavior of other boys his age, tries to pretend that he, too, is interested in women and not in the nubile bodies of the boys around him. This is the origin of the title: the narrator is forced to take on a mask, a sort of “everything’s normal here” facade to hide his true aberrations, his true self as what the novel calls “an invert.” Mishima shows us the syllogisms of the self, the paths of thinking that keep the narrator hidden behind his safe mask, wondering what he really is: step by step, he transforms himself from a freak, apart from the others, to someone whose only job is to fit in: “therefore the intoxicating thought of “I am ahead of others” was amended to the diffidence of “No, I too am a human being like the rest.” Because of the miscalculation, this in turn was amplified into “And also I am a human being like them in every respect.” The part of me that was not yet sober made such an amplification possible and supported it. And at last I arrived at the conceited conclusion that ‘Everyone is like me.’” Anyone who has lived has experienced this kind of thinking, and Mishima’s genius is using the very processes that everyone uses to show the essential humanity of his character.
Likewise, the narrator is aware of the complications of living his life as a sort of “mask” like this: as time goes on, this mask becomes a deeper and deeper part of his nature, until he is hopelessly confused and unable to achieve any happiness at all, unsure whether to renounce his true desires, those strange tendencies that differentiate him from other young men his age, the very objects of his desires, or to indulge them and, in so doing, renounce his claim to any sort of “normal” life, public or private. As the narrator tells himself, “my ‘act’ has ended by becoming an integral part of my nature, I told myself. It’s no longer an act. My knowledge that I am masquerading as a normal person has even corroded whatever of normality I originally possessed, ending by making me tell myself over and over again that it too was nothing but a pretense at normality. To say it another way, I’m becoming the sort of person who can’t believe in anything except the counterfeit.” By the end, he fundamentally is a mask, still torn between his asexual passion for Sonoko, a tender young woman, and his all-too-sexual passions for the rough, crude young men who are nearly her complete opposite. The novel ends in this state, leaving our character in this hopeless in-between situation, unsure of his place in the world and his future destiny. Mishima surely meant this as a message for his country, to which he was always fiercely loyal; Japan, too, was unsettled at this period, torn between its feudal traditions and the modern world which had so nearly destroyed it entirely. Should, or even could, Japan betray its own unique desires simply “fit in,” or should it follow its own fate and hence be irreparably separate from those other modern nations of the world, its leaders and role models? In showing us the psychology of one desperate, lonely human being, Mishima has not only created a portrait of the intricacies of psychology, but depicted an entire nation struggling at the brink of a new and unfamiliar era. This dual portrait is truly a work of art.
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