47 pages • 1 hour read
Yukio MishimaConfessions of a Mask
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1949A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Tension Between Private Self and Public Persona
Much of the motivation for Kochan’s complex “masks” comes from the need to maintain a good appearance in his regimented, repressed society. To effectively convince others that he is matching social norms, he must also convince himself. He has constructed rigid standards for himself based on his imperfect understanding of social norms, and he loathes himself when he cannot achieve them, leading to paranoia that others can see through his masks in the same way he can. Kochan’s relationships with other people demonstrate and explore this theme, as he uses others as both a testing ground for his personas and a standard for “normal” behavior he should imitate. Kochan’s bifurcated identity can be read in part as an extreme form of what was then an emergent social phenomenon in Japan: the concepts of honne and tatemae. Honne refers to private desires and inclinations, which may run counter to social norms and must be kept hidden, while tatemae refers to the identity one performs in the public eye, typically in strict adherence to social norms. Though scholars disagree on the degree to which this dichotomy is uniquely Japanese, it has close parallels in the Chinese concepts of “inside face” and “outside face” and in the Freudian id and superego.
In his relationship with Omi, Kochan first attempts to convince himself and others that he is “pure.” His family mirrors this obsession, keeping him apart from boys his own age to protect his purity. Despite these efforts, Kochan discovers his sexuality on his own, masturbating to a painting of St. Sebastian at an early age and eventually transferring his sexual imagination to Omi, continuing to masturbate and have erections “without ever becoming aware of the significance of [his] actions” (80). When these attractions arise, Kochan erases the consequences and pretends they have no deeper meaning. He approaches his internal and external self with innocence and lack of thought to avoid having to acknowledge his burgeoning sexuality. He describes how his continual first-love approach to Omi was “purely an unconscious attitude on my part, a ceaseless effort to protect my fourteen-year-old purity from the process of erosion” (72). Kochan must inevitably accept, however, that his concept of purity has never existed, or at least that he has always already been corrupted. When he develops anemia, he believes that one of the causes might be “self-pollution” (92). This creates paranoia that he has been “found out” and causes him to indulge more in his violent fantasies, which he is sure no person could ever predict or discover. As the internal mask of purity deconstructs, Kochan proceeds to deconstruct the external mask, but immediately constructs another in its place.
Kochan replaces the mask of purity with one of “normalcy,” which he defines based on his observations of others. He makes occasional raunchy jokes about women, earning disgust from his companions but causing them to assume that he is, in fact, attracted to women in the same way they are. His relationship with Sonoko is his primary method of evaluating the boundaries of his own normalcy, both internally and externally. Although he does not experience sexual attraction to Sonoko, his relationship with her makes him feel normal, and he is able to use their relationship and their closeness to explain away his lack of attraction towards women. Despite his efforts to convince himself and others that their relationship is just like any other, however, he eventually realizes that he is living a lie and loathes himself for it. After their relationship ends, he becomes paranoid that his singleness and lack of interest in women is unwittingly outing him as gay, as he has lost much of his internal coherency and can no longer mask himself to himself like he used to.
Confessions of a Mask thus explores the tenuous relationship between the inner and outer self; Kochan cannot keep his inner and outer selves separate. The self-loathing he feels when he fails to live up to social expectations, together with the constant fear that he will be found out, prevent him from fully understanding himself. The novel demonstrates that fear is what drives Kochan’s self-hatred and lies; if his secrets are revealed to himself, they might be revealed to the world, and if they are revealed to the world, the consequences could be devastating.
Eroticizing Death and Violence
In the novel’s wartime setting, death and violence are commonplace but largely invisible to Kochan, who initially expects to die violently in battle, though in fact he never gets near the fighting. Kochan’s developing erotic imagination creates complex fantasies in which sex and violence become inextricably linked. Kochan’s dream sequences, which focus heavily on descriptions of the body suffering violence and death, demonstrate this theme throughout. Key to this theme, however, is that Kochan cannot handle violence in reality; rather, he finds real-life mortality and violence pedestrian at best and terrifying at worst—only imaginary violence appeals to him.
Kochan believes that his attraction to men is mysteriously connected to his erotic interest in violence, though he can’t explain the connection. Kochan’s fascinations are described as present from an early age, as before he has even discovered sexuality, he loves to read and imagine stories of princes and heroes dying brutal deaths. Even from an early age, however, he “had an abnormally strong fear of death” (24). Mishima subdivides the theme of mortality within Kochan’s narrative into two groups: real death and imaginary death. From an early age, Kochan is fascinated by deaths that seem unrealistic, like being shot or stabbed, but terrified of deaths he can imagine as real, like being poisoned by a maid he has bullied. As he grows older, he maintains this pattern; he is terrified of becoming a soldier yet longs to die heroically. Just as Kochan cannot face the reality of his sexuality, he cannot face the reality of death; he obscures both under a thick, indulgent fantasy that protects him from real consequences.
Kochan gains insight into this theme throughout the novel, realizing that his love of tragedy, death, and violence comes from his isolation and alienation. Describing his early yearning for tragic figures, he says, “[S]olely through my own grief I was trying to share in their existences” (10). Thus, the development of this theme implies that Kochan’s interest in violence is a complex form of self-harm; if his imagination is a projection onto others of his own emotions, his fantasies about wreaking violence on others come from a repressed desire to do the same to himself without consequences. This, in turn, is eroticized by his habit of masturbation, which connects Kochan’s relationship to his own body to his desires to mutilate others.
The Insidious Nature of Heteronormativity
Although Kochan experiences sexual desire at many points in the narrative, the novel additionally emphasizes his lack of the specific desires society expects him to feel. Thus, another major theme in Confessions of a Mask is the internal misperceptions caused by heteronormativity; if society unequivocally demands sexual attraction towards the opposite sex, absence of this attraction can create confusion and isolation. Kochan has no frame of reference that would allow him to understand what sexual desire for women feels like, and as a result, he imagines desire where there is none, assuming that it should be and therefore is there.
While the deliberate masking of his real desires is an equally important theme, the novel also implies that, without a frame of reference for himself, Kochan had no choice but to assume that he experienced things just as other people appeared to. He says that as a teenager he “devoted all [his] elegant dreams to thoughts of love between man and maid” (81), not as a deliberate pretense but out of assumption that this was how the world worked. Kochan assumes for much of the novel that his absence of desire is the standard; while he is aware that his desires towards men and gore deviate from the heteronormative requirement, and thus actively works to disguise them, he does not recognize his lack of normative sexual and romantic desires. Thus, the novel argues that the first step to developing a cohesive persona is having an unquestioned standard of behavior in place. Kochan’s inability to discern between reality and fiction is rooted in his absence of desire, because neither he nor others question the system they live under.
Even when Kochan realizes that he does not experience the desires society expects him to experience, he still tries to find ways to define his feelings as “desire” to normalize his experience. It is only during an interaction with a sex worker, when he experiences physical pain at sexual contact, that he must acknowledge the absence of desire as real. This is because, in that moment, it ceases to be an absence; it becomes a tangible, painful reality that he is not attracted to women. The novel thus clearly builds the theme that absence of experience enables Kochan to lie to himself more effectively, as he can construct whatever he wants in the imaginary space he thinks attraction should occupy.
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By Yukio Mishima
