Confessions of a Mask in mishima

Sep 04, 2010 Sarah Magdalene rated it really liked it

This is an important novel to read if you really want to understand Mishima. Brilliantly written of course. That goes without saying. But it's not nearly as much fun as Forbidden Colours.

It's pretty obviously heavily autobiographical, as most first novels are, dealing with the periods of childhood and adolescence. And as is usual for Mishima, dealing for the most part with sexual and emotional matters. It is all about his bizarre and violent fantasies revolving around the heroic death of muscula ...more

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Jul 16, 2023 Benedek Toth rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: japanese, mishima

An unapologetic confession of grotesque fantasies, suppressed homoerotic lust, and the burden of self-analysis. A prominent voice in traditionalist Japan's post-war identity crisis, Mishima knew he was setting out on a violently transgressive odyssey of self-understanding with this novel.

An author riddled with dichotomies can only approach the world with an unreliable narratorial voice. His conflicting views on love, lust, and death bleed together to create a distorted watercolor portrait of th ...more

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Feb 10, 2023 Charly added it

„What I wanted was to die among strangers, untroubled, beneath a cloudless sky. And yet my desire differed from the sentiments of that ancient Greek who wanted to die under the brilliant sun. What I wanted was some natural, spontaneous suicide. I wanted a death like that of a fox, not yet well versed in cunning, that walks carelessly along a mountain path and is shot by a hunter because of its own stupidity.“

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