Confessions of a Mask

I almost dropped this book. Since I had already dropped another Yukio Mishima book before starting 'Confessions of a Mask', I wanted to stick with this one. I also knew that if I drop it, I won't pick it up again. It also took me way too long to read it.

The book became interesting to me about 50 pages in, but it kind of backfired because as soon as it did, my expectations shoot up way too high. I guess I was expecting a lot more drama.

However, despite all this, the book is great. I liked the setting and I liked the main character's journey. I liked getting to know him in such an intimate way. I actually can't think of a single thing I did not like or any way this could have been more entertaining to me.

Maybe it just wasn't the right time to read this book, or maybe it's that I can't relate to it. I really don't know, could be something else entirely.

At one point, though, the book really inspired me. There is a scene on a train that pushed me to do a pixel of a train scene. It didn't come out precisely as I imagined it, but either way, I'm quite proud of it and since this book inspired it, I'm linking it here.

Confessions of a Mask is the precise analysis of a youth estranged from reality. From the start Kochan is isolated from the very concept of normality. His overbearing grandmother shields him from the social company of other children and forces him into a world of introspection and bookish over-analysis and melodrama. His frailty torments his self-image and fills him with a hatred for himself and his body. His sexuality, rooted so deeply in his own self-image and, in all likelihood, a mysogny born from his grandmother, is treated like deepest crime hidden beneath the Mask.

But the Mask and Kochan are markedly different in how they view the world. To the Mask his sexual desire is shameful and secretive, whilst in the temple of his mind Kochan explores himself with a feverish enjoyment.

“...surely at that time I would be able to do it. Surely normality would burst into flames within me like a divine revelation.”

“This was the first time I used my love for Sonoko as a justification for my true feelings.”

Mishima knits the complexities and tensions of the narrator together until, tying off knot after knot, you feel his prison yourself. From end to end the emotions he suffers are made beautifully clear.I do wonder if Mishima had read Dazai's [b:No Longer Human 194746 No Longer Human Osamu Dazai https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1422638843s/194746.jpg 188338], which came out the year before, as there are some strong similarities between the way each narrator describes his life.You know when you read or watch something that's so good you immediately throw yourself into the rest of what that creator has to offer? That's what I'm doing as soon as I hit “Save.”I have just one question...Why did i wait so long to read Mishima?

This reminded me of the much more recent novel by Sayaka Murata, Earthlings, a personal favorite and likewise pronouncedly Japanese novel on pining for a sincere expression of being. The agents of desire repression, desire for an authenticity precluded by society, are described in both via mechanistic terms, machines and factories, accompanied by a sense of such profound alienation that the narrators declare themselves inhuman. There's a Deluzian analysis of the two waiting to be exercised that I might some day undertake. There is so much to process here-I'll be sifting through the memory of many passages for months to come, I'm sure. Exceptional, and an essential read for the queer and the deviant.