Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima

modified 20/04/2024 23:55

“Confessions of a Mask” by Yukio Mishima is a book about an individual struggling to fit into society. In short, the protagonist only becomes sexually aroused by thinking about strong male bodies being killed or injured (imagine stabbing naked bodies with knives, blood flowing all over their muscles, that kind of stuff). The first part of the book shows the development and events that have led to acquiring this fetish. The second part presents the struggles of the narrator to live with it.

The narrator (Kochan) tries to suppress this side of himself, slowly realizing that he’s different from boys his age (he’s not aroused by naked women, for instance). He builds his life around a facade and hides behind a mask (Confessions of a Mask) of normality while suffering from it. This is the first of many examples where the effects of society are visible. As the story progresses, the protagonist realizeshe’ll never be able to fit in. So he dreams of dying, not by committing suicide (afraid he’ll be labeled weak if he does so), but instead dreams of dying in war, which he thinks is a simple and logical end to his life (and a glorious one at that). But he’s too weak to be taken into the army, so after being declared unfit for service, he doesn’t know what to do. What’s interesting at this point is that when it happens, he’s happy he escaped—this being one of the manifestations of his true personality. The entire book is sprinkled with such little deviations from the role he’s playing.

He then tries experiencing love (forces himself to love). But after kissing Sonoko, he realizes he doesn’t like it. Here, again, he’s forced into thinking that he’s not normal, as everyone (including most books) tells us love is enjoyable and a good thing, so if you don’t enjoy love, there must be something wrong with you. So that’s the conclusion he comes to. He’s wrong, and everyone else is right. He’s not normal, so he doesn’t deserve good things to happen to him. He starts hating himself and his life. He hates his true self and his inability to be “normal,” to fit into the mold that society requires of him (you need to love someone, and that someone needs to be a woman, and you need to have a family and a good job, and a big house, and if you don’t—you’re a weirdo). Normal is what everyone else thinks is normal.

This book is a demonstration of the way in which society forces one to do things opposite of one’s true nature, thus taming one’s uniqueness and shackling it. Mishima really pushes the border of what’s acceptable here and shows how unprepared and unaccepting society is for things that are out of the ordinary. Interestingly enough, this book reflects some of Mishima’s own childhood and is thought by some to be autobiographical¹. This book provides some interesting food for thought. Some interesting observations and open questions I’ve come out of this reading are:

• How can society account for different individualities if it’s built around generalizations?
• Most art and culture are also built around things society regards as normal.
• What if society is wrong about what’s “normal”? Who’s right then?
• Is it possible that the things we believe are wrong (killing, for example) may not in fact be wrong, but only are so because everyone else agrees they are wrong? Either way, it’s hard to find justification for why they’re wrong. We just believe they are because everyone else believes they are. Either way, there’s a lot of stuff we believe without any good reason, and even if there’s a good reason, we generally didn’t think it through.