Confessions of a Mask

About

From childhood, Kochan knows he is performing. He studies the boys around him and learns to imitate normalcy — to fake interest in girls, to suppress the desires that surface unbidden at the sight of a classmate's body, to construct a self that will pass inspection in postwar Japan. Yukio Mishima's semi-autobiographical second novel is one of the first works of Japanese literature to confront homosexuality directly. The mask of the title is not a metaphor for dishonesty but for the exhausting, moment-by-moment work of existing in a society that has no room for what you are. Written at twenty-four with a precision that is almost clinical, this is the novel that made Mishima famous — and the one that cost him the most to write.

Awards

• ★Modern Classic(1949)