Gain Confessions Of A Mask Fabricated By Yukio Mishima Rendered As Print

anlayabilmek için ne yazdıysa hepsini okumak gerekiyor bana göre, Zira koskocaman bir resmin ufak parçaları olarak görüyorum ben eserlerini, 'Bir Maskenin İtirafları'nı da o resmin merkezinde konumlanan, sonrasında yazdığı her şeye 'ondan' bir bakış atılmasına imkan sağlayan özel bir anlatı olarak kabul ediyorum, Bu yüzden üçüncü kez okudum, Mishima okuması yapacaksanız, sağlam bir zemin atmak için, bu kitabı ilk sıralara koymanızı tavsiye ederim,
İyi okumalar!

/It is crazy to think that next year we will be celebrating Confessions of a Mask'sth birthday, Mishima's queer classic, his second novel written in his earlys and earliest currently available in English, is a comingofage story of a young boy who struggles with his queerness.


When Kochan happens upon a reproduction of Reni's Saint Sebastian in a book he is immediately drawn to the overt homoeroticism of the work, The perfect male physique pared with the gashes and wounds of the arrows implanted within his torso act as a mirror for the novel itself, For the two main themes of Confessions and quite a lot of Mishima's other works are male queerness and sadomasochism, Both are explored beautifully through Mishima's unflinching prose,

When reading this I was somewhat taken aback by its sheer influence on the world of queer literature, particularly in the works of Edmund White, I was not aware of just how much of A Boy's Own Story owns a debt to Confessions, In fact nearly all major comingofage queer tales seem to eventually trace their genealogy back to Kochan,

An engrossing and influential tale, Confessions of a Mask is still as fresh and shocking inas it was in, It was the foundations upon which Mishima planted his immense literary legacy, An essential book in the queer canon, I think I just found a new favorite author! I'm obsessed! I've been on a roll lately, discovering fivestar read after fivestar read, With this classic novel translated from Japanese I got the bonus of being introduced to one of the most fascinating and enigmatic artists to ever live: Yukio Mishima, That's not just hyperbole. I enjoyed researching the author on YouTube just as much as I loved every gorgeous page of his writing, What a singular and impressive human being, I'm ashamed and honestly a bit disturbed that I'd never heard of this man who I now consider to be one of my favorite and most intriguing literary figures, Confessions of a Mask was the short novel that would propel Mishima to international fame, It's amazing to me that it was published in Japanese inwhen the author was in his early twenties and in English inbecause it contains such a controversial semiautobiographical confession that was unspeakable at the time that the main character is secretly a homosexual man.
In the days surrounding the second World War, our protagonist Kochan struggles to accept his own identity and attempts desperately to hide his feelings behind a masculine, hetero mask, We follow his lifelong journey from his childhood as a conflicted and confused little boy, From boyish crushes to very adult confrontations with his sexuality, Kochan explores and explains his identity crisis with unfiltered honesty and intensely intimate thoughts of complex inner conflict, The main relationship here is not a traditional romance but an illfated and heartbreaking last attempt at conforming to societal pressures with a beautiful young girl named Sonoko, It's an alltoocommon right of passage that exemplifies the queer struggle to be accepted by the world, their families and even themselves, I'm thrilled that I related so much to these words written over half a century ago in another language and halfway around the world, Mishima is insightful, funny and frightening in his poetic prose and his raw, brutally honest confessions, His novel is surprisingly accessible, fresh, and profound, His use of close firstperson narration is one of the best I've ever read and should be studied by all aspiring writers, There were acute observations and fascinating themes at play throughout this novel that I found absorbing, insightful and powerful, I will be reading everything I can get my hands on by this artist, model, actor, director, political activist, and allaround genius, He was a prodigy from his youth and remains a Japanese literary icon and many of his artistic gifts and fascinating idiosyncrasies are on full display in this stunning short novel.
He was a man plagued by many contradictions and challenging obsessions but he was intensely open and honest with the world about them and I'm immensely grateful for the candor in his gorgeous words.
What a gift this was to the world and to me, His entire life was his Art and whether you like it or not, it was bold and brave of him to expose himself so fully so that, in his confessions, we might understand ourselves and each other more.
Mishima's attempt at portrayal of homosexuality gives only mix tesults, The generalisations made about himsexuals makes one want to throw the book, If you can ignore those couple of sentences though, it is an intresting portrayal of psychology of a a homosexual person living in a society where homosexuals are not supposed to exist.
Intresting because I don't always find the author agreeable,

The segregation of sexes that is made in schools and colleges and jails is probably made with aim of keeping people from having sex but aren't they presuming that all children are hetrosexuals Our narrator studies in one such boys' school.
His constant efforts at denials and pretending to be a straight person is one of the two themes of novel,

The other theme is that of war, In a way, our 'mask' is a war child, Born and raised amid wars, taught in millitary schools, And thus has an obsession with death, An obsession perhaps common to his generation in Japan, That was raised to be soldiers including the famous suicide bombers,

It not so much shocking then that he should find a sexual satisfaction in sadism and death,
A book can be a doorway into another human heart that is the power of reading, The price of entry however is sometimes high what we find can be so disturbing that we question if we really want to go there, even for a visit,

Confessions of a Mask takes us to some dark places,

We all have masks, of course, Living without any form of protection would be living with an open skin, But our masks are usually light, easily taken off or exchanged as need be,

This mask is made of stone,

The title seems to imply a promise "all will be revealed" because after all, it is the mask who is confessing, Well, this exposé is more apparent than real,

Written under a pseudonym, Yukio Mishima, we are given what seems to be a story about a youth named Kochan, But surely it is the secret memories, feelings, and pain of one sad little Kimitake Hiraoka, Yes, it is told in a disarmingly simple style that can be easily breezed through, however you'll want to pause, reflect, study it a careful reading is very enlightening,

And yes, there is violent homoeroticism in Confessions, That, I think, is a mask within masks, Obsession with death the painful knowledge of the impermanence of life, and the need to control it, is the true face underneath the mask, This is a person with a very strong death drive i, e. , a desire to take power from death, The one way to do that is to exit life on one's own terms, And also there's the desire to control beauty and the strongest power over beauty, like life, is to destroy it,

"For many years I claimed I could remember things seen at the time of my own birth, "

This is an opening sentence packed with meaning, There is some ambiguity in the word 'claimed', There is the very stubbornness of the claim, And as it turns out, there is the imagination, that, like the Little Prince, or David Copperfield, is larger than the grownups around him can handle, Kochan was an "unchildlike child",

His childhood was largely spent in his grandmother's sickroom, She was from a Samurai family, and she implants pride and purpose in him, He obsesses over books, pictures and on one in particular, of a beautiful knight, When he found out that it was Jeanne D'Arc not a man, why did that knock him flat

the sweet fantasies I had cherished concerning his death were now gone.


When he was aboutyears old, and a certain 'toy' made its wishes known to him,

It raised its head toward death and pools of blood and muscular flesh,

There's another image he obsesses over, St, Sebastian and he develops a strong attraction to a boy named Omi, His fantasies go beyond mere sexual attraction, In his mind he invents "a murder theatre" in one scenario, a student is violently murdered, put on a table at a banquet, and then "I thrust the fork upright into the heart.
A fountain of blood struck me full in the face, Holding the knife in my right hand, I began carving the flesh of the breast, gently, thinly at first", He becomes "disgusted with my true self" and "feeling the urge to begin living", But how

To begin living my true lifeeven if it was to be pure masquerade and not my life

The price of that decision, at least in part, is paid by the author himself: in, at the age

of, the real flesh and blood Mishima took a knife, sliced open his stomach, and, as required by the rite of seppuku, was decapitated.


His ideal was 'bunbu ryodo', the way of the pen and the sword, He believed they could join only at the moment of death, We know what he did with the 'sword' here is what he could do with the pen:

at a train station after an air raid
As we went along the passageway we did not receive even so much as a reproachful glance.
We were ignored. Our very existence was obliterated by the fact that we had not shared in their misery for them, we were nothing more than shadows,

In spite of this scene something caught fire within me, I was emboldened and strengthened by the parade of misery passing before my eyes, I was experiencing the same excitement that a revolution causes, In the fire these miserable ones had witnessed the total destruction of every evidence that they existed as human beings, Before their eyes they had seen human relationships, loves and hatreds, reason, property, all go up in flame, And at the time it had not been the flames against which they fought, but against human relationships, against loves and hatreds, against reason, against property,

At the time, like the crew of a wrecked ship, they had found themselves in a situation where it was permissible to kill one person in order that another might live.
A man who died trying to rescue his sweetheart was killed, not by the flames, but by his sweetheart and it was none other than the child who murdered its own mother when she was trying to save it.
The condition they had faced and fought against therethat of a life for a lifehad probably been the most universal and elemental that mankind ever encounters, Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima