Overview

This autobiographical novel, regarded as Mis hima''s finest book, is the haunting story of a Japanese boy'' s development towards homosexuality during and after the Sec ond World War '

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9780720617504

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This anatomy of homosexuality is more revealing as a commentary on the literary climate of modern Japan, than as fictional depiction of a man's emotional development. Step by step, the hero retraces his evolution as a homosexual - his first sensual gratification at his mother's breast, his morbid preoccupation with the bloody death of the beautiful young heroes of children's fiction, his painful attachment to a virile young school friend. Drawn by the lonely, the unique, the hero reaches maturity, and despite the mask of normalcy he wears, and his unerotic attachment to a young woman, he is in every sense, the partisan deviant, totally absorbed by his own peculiarity. There are shades of de Sade here, of Oscar Wilde, Huysmans, and Proust. With the fin de siecle appetite for refined perversion, Yukio Mishima's delicate hero makes a ritual of self exposition in a way which to the Western reader seems a little naive and certainly familiar. As a novel there is very little to recommend this painful account of retarded sexuality, but as a testament to the current enthusiasm with which the Japanese have embraced Western literary traditions of the last forty years at the expense of their own heritage, Confessions of a Mask makes a grim and forceful impression. (Kirkus Reviews)

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