Confessions of a mask

Yukio Mishima (1949)

  • Chapter 1:
    • What I mean is that toward his occupation I felt something like a yearning for a piercing arrow, a body-wrenching sorrow. His occupations gave me the feeling of "tragedy" in the most senuous meaning of the word. A certain feeling as it were of "self-renunciation," a certain feeling of indifference, a certain feeling of intimacy with danger, a feeling like a remarkable mixture of nothingness and vital power - all these feelings swarmed forth from his calling, bore down upon me, and took me captive, at the age of four. Probably I had a misconception of the work of a night-soil man.
    • If such were the case, the so-called "tragic things" of which I was becoming aware were probably only shadows cast by a flashing presentiment of grief still greater in the future, of a lonelier exclusion still to come...
    • Ever since childhood my ideas concerning human existence have never once deviated from the Augistinian theory of predetermination. Over and over again I was tormented by vain doubts - even as I continue being tormented today - but I regarded such doubts as only another sort of temptation to sin, and remained unshaken in my deterministic views. I had been handed what might be called a full menu of all the troubles in my life while still to young to read it. But all I had to do was spread my napkin and face the table. Even the fact that I would now be writing an odd book like this was precisely noted on the menu, where it must have been before my eyes from the beginning.
    • Great Harlot of the Apocalypse
    • The plaintive melody of a chant, in which individual words only gradually became distinguishable, pierced through the confused tumult of the festival, proclaiming what might be called the true theme of this outwardly purposeless uproar—a seeming lamentation for the extremely vulgar mating of humanity and eternity, which could be consummated only through some such pious immorality as this. In the tangled mass of sound I could gradually distinguish the metallic jingle of the rings on the staff carried by the priest at the head of the procession, the stuttering roar of the drums, and the medley of rhythmic shouts from the youths shouldering the sacred shrine. My heart was beating so suffocatingly that I could scarcely stand. (Ever since then violent anticipation has always been anguish rather than joy for me.)
    • Through it all there was only one vividly clear thing, a thing that both horrified and lacerated me, filling my heart with unaccountable agony. This was the expression on the faces of the young men carrying the shrine—an expression of the most obscene and undisguised drunkenness in the world. . . .
  • Chapter 2:
    • For over a year now I had been suffering the anguish of a child provided with a curious toy.
    • It was unbearably painful for me to see his clownish face, to see him unwittingly destroy his own beauty.
    • In the woodblock prints of the Genroku period one often finds the features of a pair of lovers to be surprisingly similar, with little to distinguish the man from the woman. The universal ideal of beauty in Greek sculpture likewise approaches a close resemblance between the male and female. Might this not be one of the secrets of love? Might it not be that through the innermost recesses of love there courses an unattainable longing in which both the man and the woman desire to become the exact image of the other? Might not this longing drive them on, leading at last to a tragic reaction in which they seek to attain the impossible by going to the opposite extreme? In short, since their mutual love cannot achieve a perfection of mutual identity, is there not a mental process whereby each of them tries instead to emphasize their points of dissimilarity—the man his manliness and the woman her womanliness—. and uses this very revolt as a form of coquetry toward the other? Or if they do achieve a similarity, it unfortunately lasts for only a fleeting moment of illusion. Because, as the girl becomes more bold and the boy more shy, there comes an instant at which they pass each other going in opposite directions, overshooting their mark and passing on beyond to some point where the mark no longer exists.
    • On this occasion I was too exhausted to ask myself the question I had asked so many thousands of times before : Why is it wrong for me to stay just the way I am now? I was fed up with myself and, for all my chastity, was ruining my body. I had thought that with "earnestness" (what a touching thought!) I too could escape from my childish state. It was as though I had not yet realized that what I was now disgusted with was my true self, was clearly a part of my true life; it was as though I believed instead that these had been years of dreaming, from which I would now turn to "real life."
  • Chapter 3:
    • Everyone says that life is a stage. But most people do not seem to become obsessed with the idea, at any rate not as early as I did.
    • When a boy of fourteen or fifteen discovers that he is more given to introspection and consciousness of self than other boys his age, he easily falls into the error of believing it is because he is more mature than they. This was certainly a mistake in my case. Rather it was because the other boys had no such need of understanding themselves as I had: they could be their natural selves, whereas I was to play a part, a fact that would require considerable understanding and study. So it was not my maturity but my sense of uneasiness, my uncertainty, that was forcing me to gain control over my consciousness. Because such consciousness was simply a steppingstone to aberration, and my present thinking was nothing but uncertain and haphazard guesswork. My uneasiness was the same as that of which Stephan Zweig speaks when he says that "what we call evil is the instability inherent in all mankind which drives man outside and beyond himself toward an unfathomable something, exactly as though Nature had bequeathed to our souls an ineradicable portion of instability from her store of ancient chaos." This legacy of unrest produces strain and "attempts to resolve itself back into super-human and super-sensory elements." So then, it was this same instability that drove me on, while the other boys, having no need for self-awareness, could dispense with introspection.
    • It is a common failing of childhood to think that if one makes a hero out of a demon the demon will be satisfied.
    • But for my part I definitely did not want to be thought a poet: I had heard that members of the breed of men called poets were invariably jilted by women.
    • Thus it was that I became obsessed with the idea of the kiss. Actually the action called a kiss represented nothing more for me than some place where my spirit could seek shelter. I can say so now.
    • In short, I was mistaking as primary desire something that actually was only the irrational and secondary desire of wanting to believe I desired them. I was mistaking the fierce, impossible desire of not wanting to be myself for the sexual desire of a man of the world, for the desire that arises from his being himself.
    • Between the intervals of these mental efforts I was making toward artificiality I would sometimes be overwhelmed with a paralyzing emptiness and, in order to escape, would turn shamelessly to a different sort of daydream. Then immediately I would become quick with life, would become myself, and would blaze toward strange images. Moreover, the flame thus created would remain in my mind as an abstract feeling, divorced from the reality of the image that had caused it, and I would distort my interpretation of the feeling until I believed it to be evidence of passion inspired by the girl herself. Thus once again I deceived myself.
    • Then suddenly my other voice spoke up within me, telling me that never even once had I truly wanted to die. At these words my sense of shame overflowed the dam behind which it had been confined. It was a painful admission to make, but at that moment I knew I had been lying to myself when I said it was for the sake of death that I wanted to enter the army. At that moment I realized I had been secretly hoping that the army would provide me at last with an opportunity for gratifying those strange sensual desires of mine. And I knew that, far from desiring death, the only thing that had made it at all possible for me to look forward to army life was the firm conviction—arising out of a belief in the primitive art of magic, common to all men —that I alone could never die. . . . But how disagreeable these thoughts were for me! I much preferred to think of myself instead as a person who had been forsaken even by Death. In the same way that a doctor, performing surgery upon some internal organ, delicately focuses all his faculties upon the operation and still remains impersonal, I delighted in picturing the curious agonies of a person who wanted to die but had been refused by Death. The degree of mental pleasure I thus obtained seemed almost immoral.
    • The romantic personality is pervaded with a subtle mistrust of intellectualism, and this fact is often conducive to that immoral action called daydreaming. Contrary to belief, daydreaming is not an intellectual process but rather an escape from intellectualism. . . .
    • At moments such as these my mind was apt to become intoxicated with sudden happiness. For a long time I had not approached the forbidden fruit called happiness, but it was now tempting me with a melancholy persistence. I felt as though Sonoko were an abyss above which I stood poised.
    • But for this very reason I had formed the habit of treating those parts of my character that were in any way my responsibility to exhortations so wholesome and sensible as to be comical. As a part of my system of self-discipline, dating from childhood, I constantly told myself it would be better to die than become a lukewarm person, an unmanly person, a person who does not clearly know his likes and dislikes, a person who wants only to be loved without knowing how to love. This exhortation of course had a possible applicability to the parts of my character for which I was to blame, but so far as the other parts were concerned, the parts for which I was not to blame, it was an impossible requirement from the beginning. Thus, in the present case even the strength of a Samson would not have been sufficient to make me adopt a manly and unequivocal attitude toward Sonoko. So then, this image of a lukewarm man that Sonoko was now seeing, this thing that appeared to be my character, aroused my disgust, made my entire existence seem worthless, and tore my self-confidence into shreds. I was made to distrust both my will and my character, or at least, so far as my will was concerned, I could not believe it was anything but a fake. On the other hand, this way of thinking that placed such emphasis upon the will was in itself an exaggeration amounting almost to fantasy. Even a normal person cannot govern his behavior by will alone.
    • This is a trite device, often adopted by persons who, cut off from all other means of escape, retreat into the safe haven of regarding themselves as objects of tragedy. . . .
    • Sonoko! Sonoko! I repeated the name to myself with each sway of the train. It sounded unutterably mysterious. Sonoko! Sonoko! With each repetition my heart felt heavier, at each throb of her name a cutting, punishing weariness grew deeper within me. The pain I was feeling was crystal clear, but of such a unique and incomprehensible nature that I could not have explained it even if I had tried. It was so far off the beaten path of ordinary human emotions that I even had difficulty in recognizing it as pain. If I should try to describe it, I could only say it was a pain like that of a person who waits one bright midday for the roar of the noon-gun and, when the time for the gun's sounding has passed in silence, tries to discover the waiting emptiness somewhere in the blue sky. His is the rending impatience of waiting for a longed-for thing that is overdue, the horrible doubt that it may never come after all. He is the only man in the world who knows that the noon-gun did not sound promptly at noon.
    • To be half clever was the worst thing I could have done.
    • Two days after my return to the arsenal I received an impassioned letter from Sonoko. There was no doubt that she was truly in love. I felt jealous. Mine was the unbearable jealousy a cultured pearl must feel toward a genuine one. Or can there be such a thing in this world as a man who is jealous of the woman who loves him, precisely because of her love?
    • Then one day some trim planes threaded their way through the stupid antiaircraft fire and rained propaganda leaflets down from the summer sky. The leaflets contained news of the surrender proposals. That evening my father came straight from his office to the house in the suburbs. He came in through the garden and spoke immediately, sitting down on the veranda. "Listen," he said, "that propaganda is true." He showed me a copy of the original English text, which he had obtained from a reliable source. I took the copy into my hands, but even before I had had time to read it I had already grasped the reality of the news. It was not the reality of defeat. Instead, for me—for me alone—it meant that fearful days were beginning. It meant that, whether I would or no, and despite everything that had deceived me into believing such a day would never come, the very next day I must begin that "everyday life" of a member of human society. How the mere words made me tremble!
  • Chapter 4:
    • Perhaps I will not be understood when I say there is a numbness that resembles fierce pain. I felt my entire body becoming paralyzed with just such a pain, a pain that was intense, but still could not be felt at all. I dropped my head onto the pillow.
    • "Are you bored with this?" I asked. "Don't say that." Her tone of voice sounded full of a weariness that was somehow strange. It could even have been called charming. She had turned her head and was looking out the window at the summer street. When she spoke again her words came slowly: "Sometimes I become confused. I wonder why we're meeting like this. And yet in the end I always meet you again." "Probably because at least it's not a meaningless minus. Even if it certainly is a meaningless plus." "But I have something called a husband, remember. Even if the plus is meaningless, there oughtn't to be room for any plus at all.""It's tiresome arithmetic, isn't it?"
    • In the pupils of her eyes I discovered a beauty I had never seen before. They were deep, unblinking, fatalistic pupils, like fountains constantly singing with an outpouring of emotions. I was at a loss for words, as was always the case when she turned those eyes upon me.

Page last revised on: 2024-05-05