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A review by worm_food
Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima
2.0
If I had a nickel for every book I read in 2025 that mentions inversion and Hirschfield I'd have two nickels! Which isn't a lot but it's weird that it happened twice, right?
I wrote a whole review and then storygraph crashed and I don't feel like rewriting the whole thing. Very interesting read knowing how his life panned out and ended, especially after having read the sailor first - seeing the flowery prose be a lot more prominent. Looking at inversion as a fact of this book, it's also interesting to me that the conclusion of it being a natural thing was reached by the end instead of being the logic from the get go. It's the one thing that differentiates it from the well of loneliness, a book very much still indulgent in its self loathing but one offering a much more forgiving narrative nonetheless.
Overall, it was a bit insufferable to read for reasons similar to why the sailor was insufferable to read, but in a different way, which is intriguing in its own right I guess. What the whole book is, is simply mental acrobatics, what it would take for someone to reason their way out of naming their desires, framing them in a way that makes them excusable, but also treating them as vile and inexcusable anyway. Which is a way to talk both of and about comphet, sure, with none of the hindsight or self awareness. Anyway. Rest in peace I fucking guess Yukio Mishima. It's a real shame post WWII Japanese ethnicist alt right mentality got you, but not really surprising. I think bringing him back to life to explain who aroace and bi romantic homosexual people are just to have him try n kill me is the main desire this book elicited and I think that's fair.
I wrote a whole review and then storygraph crashed and I don't feel like rewriting the whole thing. Very interesting read knowing how his life panned out and ended, especially after having read the sailor first - seeing the flowery prose be a lot more prominent. Looking at inversion as a fact of this book, it's also interesting to me that the conclusion of it being a natural thing was reached by the end instead of being the logic from the get go. It's the one thing that differentiates it from the well of loneliness, a book very much still indulgent in its self loathing but one offering a much more forgiving narrative nonetheless.
Overall, it was a bit insufferable to read for reasons similar to why the sailor was insufferable to read, but in a different way, which is intriguing in its own right I guess. What the whole book is, is simply mental acrobatics, what it would take for someone to reason their way out of naming their desires, framing them in a way that makes them excusable, but also treating them as vile and inexcusable anyway. Which is a way to talk both of and about comphet, sure, with none of the hindsight or self awareness. Anyway. Rest in peace I fucking guess Yukio Mishima. It's a real shame post WWII Japanese ethnicist alt right mentality got you, but not really surprising. I think bringing him back to life to explain who aroace and bi romantic homosexual people are just to have him try n kill me is the main desire this book elicited and I think that's fair.