Book - BookDetective

Name: Confessions of a Mask

Author: Yukio Mishima
Year: 1949
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Genres/categories:
Classic
Culture: Japan

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ISBNs:
9780720610314
9780811201186
0720610311
081120118X

Confessions of a Mask is the story of an adolescent who must learn to live with the painful fact that he is unlike other young men. Mishima's protagonist discovers that he is becoming a homosexual in polite, post-war Japan. To survive, he must live behind a mask of propriety.

Christopher Isherwood comments - "One might say, 'Here is a Japanese Gide,'....But no, Mishima is himself - a very Japanese Mishima; lucid in the midst of emotional confusion, funny in the midst of despair, quite without pomposity, sentimentality or self-pity. His book, like no other, has made me understand a little of how it feels to be Japanese. I think it is greatly superior, as art and as a human document to his deservedly praised novel, The Sound of Waves."