Most of human emotions are left forgotten and unheard of in the passage of time without them being remembered. Some were lucky enough to have them recorded and understood decades later since their bodies decayed. At one point, these psychological experiences can turn to be inexplicable when mental confusion hits: some things were not yet understood and acknowledged.
It was too taboo to be addressed, and some thought that their distinct identities were rather deviant, so they had to put masks to be perceived.
Confessions of a Mask is a reflective book about human experience released in 1949, written in a semi-autobiographical approach in which Yukio Mishima wrote in a pseudonym. A young guy named Kochan is grappling with secret feelings of homosexual tension, emotions, and memories. He opens with one of his first recollections, seeing a night-soil guy and thinking him attractive, which he feels that it formed who he became to be. As he grows older, he doesn’t understand he’s different from other boys, except for the fact that he’s little and skinny and gets ill a lot more frequently. He finds himself captivated by guys, particularly laborers, and he’s not sure whether this is what he’s meant to be feeling.
The pleasure and rapture he finds in St. Sebastian paintings conceal horrible drives of murder and misery. His childhood crush, on the other hand, disrupts him amid uncertainty until he ultimately convinces himself that he was never in love at all; his attempts to become “normal” result in emptiness and despair. Kochan has no one to speak to, no family to depend on, and no means of knowing if what he’s experiencing is positive or negative.
All he knows is that the other lads are obsessed with women, and he is obsessed with other males. As he thrives in isolation, he matures into a pale, lonely faded man. No other youngster, as far as he knows, has felt the way he did, and the only other one he knows of — Oscar Wilde — is long dead. His need to blend in with the rest of the world drives him to play an elaborate game, to wear a mask that is so convincing that he almost believes it himself. Being able to conceal who he truly is and what he truly desires becomes an issue of concealment from himself. And, as everyone who has attempted it knows, hiding from oneself only lasts so long. As word of the war reaches Tokyo, Kochan muses about Japan’s fate and his role within its deeply ingrained propriety.
The use of the first, reflective point of view in the book almost felt like a real memoir when I read it. Yukio Mishima delivered the complexity of human mind and emotions as glib as possible that make it personal and hurtful along the way. He meticulously depicted how one’s mind deals with psychological account of secrets we can’t tell, the philosophy of happiness and death, and self discovery. It encapsulates many unheard stories where people deal with their identities in order to be perceived by others during the aftermath of the World War II.
The theme of the book is what makes me interested in reading it in the first place. By reading the first fifteen pages of the book, Confessions of a Mask immediately pulled me into Kochan’s world. What I love is how this book is like an open window to lean in closer to another human’s inner mind and emotion on a more visceral level, since Yukio Mishima depicted the life of Kochan realistically with depth and details.
Like a document of one’s life that will never be revealed and directed to nobody but yourself, the imagery and issues addressed in the book are hard to read — I had to stop and reread several lines because of how violent they could get. There are drives that go toward the obsession of death and taking your life on your own terms, a sense of disgust and shame about yourself, detachment from others, and other bizarreness one can never reveal to anyone.
“I felt my entire body becoming paralysed with such a pain, a pain that was intense, but still could not be felt at all.”
It is about a journey of realizing that you’re different in a place and time where no one would understand you. At times, Kochan’s desperation can turn into sadistic feelings, believing that his suffering could only be comforted by blood, thereby holding belief that he’s not human enough to live as one.
Although it is set in the Japan post-war period, the theme of the story is timeless, as the essence of it is still relatable and universal to many people including me: the idea that people put on different masks that they can pick to show particular aspects of one self that they want or do not want to reveal in different contexts of social interaction. Sometimes we do this in order to be perceived as we expected to be. For Kochan — especially during the ravaged aftermath of war — this mask is like a double-edged knife that protected and tortured him at the same time.Kochan’s constant struggle with his self-consciousness and fear also represent something special that pulled me to get closer to his character at how real he was, taking into account of depicting many marginalized shadows from the past, or people who are unheard of with depth and complexity.
“Most people are always doubtful as to whether they are happy or not, cheerful or not. This is the normal state of happiness, as doubt is a most natural thing.
One specific line I love from the book addresses the philosophy of the complexity of human feelings in which our feelings are not always stagnant in one type of emotion. Sometimes you are confused about what you feel, whether it is happiness or doubts. Then, this line only makes sense our confusion, implying that emotions don’t have to be one thing; it is everything, everywhere, all at once. Emotions and feelings assail our mind whenever it can, but it is a matter of how we let those emotions collide, as it is the most natural thing.
Confessions of a Mask is dark and disturbing, but it’s also a way to understand the complexity of human experiences as it showcases differences that don’t only lie in something we can see, but some things that can only be felt. It’s just one of many unheard stories from shadows in the past, standing strong ahead of those who didn’t live long and lucky enough to be accepted and understood.
