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luxxybee97 's review for:
Confessions of a Mask
by Yukio Mishima
3 stars
tl;dr – Madonna’s Confessions on a Dance Floor literally features the line “Other places make me feel like a dork” and it’s still the superior work titled Confessions
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I finished reading Confessions of a Mask with a rather slim idea of what the eponymous confessions might be. Actually, no, that’s not quite fair exactly – I did understand, on some level at least, what Yukio Mishima is trying to tell us in the story of his childhood and early adult life. Yet it felt like he was never telling quite the whole truth, like when you go to actual confession and you water down your sins so that the priest won’t think you’re as bad as you think you are. What, then, is the point of confessing, if you dance around the sins/secrets in endless circles that ultimately lead nowhere?
I might be being too hard on Mishima here. If nothing else, the language used in Confessions of a Mask is gorgeous. It’s deeply evocative, poetic almost to the point of being florid, and Mishima certainly has a remarkable way of relaying his nightmares and dreams (even if his obsession with beauty and death and everything else is a bit intense at times). But it’s still not quite enough. I found myself…not bored by this book, that isn’t quite the right word, but it just failed to engage me. It felt so pessimistic, with the characters coming across as such gloomy embodiments of human nature, that I just couldn’t relate to them. As for the narrator himself, while the complexity of his psyche (and again, the language used to describe it) is one of the high points of the book, I still found myself unable to really care about him. It felt like he was going around and around and around, trying to obfuscate what he wanted to say in a cage of words that, while beautiful, ultimately are too much so that, when you do finally decipher what they mean, it’s like solving a puzzle rather than understanding a fellow human being. There is a kind of satisfaction, but not a relation, no insight. Mishima might not confess all here, or maybe he does, there’s no way to ask him now, but however much he does tell his reader, it’s not quite enough to make us want more. Glad I read it for the prose, if nothing else? You betcha. But will I read any more of Mishima’s work in the future? Well…I wouldn’t want to kiss and tell!
tl;dr – Madonna’s Confessions on a Dance Floor literally features the line “Other places make me feel like a dork” and it’s still the superior work titled Confessions
-
I finished reading Confessions of a Mask with a rather slim idea of what the eponymous confessions might be. Actually, no, that’s not quite fair exactly – I did understand, on some level at least, what Yukio Mishima is trying to tell us in the story of his childhood and early adult life. Yet it felt like he was never telling quite the whole truth, like when you go to actual confession and you water down your sins so that the priest won’t think you’re as bad as you think you are. What, then, is the point of confessing, if you dance around the sins/secrets in endless circles that ultimately lead nowhere?
I might be being too hard on Mishima here. If nothing else, the language used in Confessions of a Mask is gorgeous. It’s deeply evocative, poetic almost to the point of being florid, and Mishima certainly has a remarkable way of relaying his nightmares and dreams (even if his obsession with beauty and death and everything else is a bit intense at times). But it’s still not quite enough. I found myself…not bored by this book, that isn’t quite the right word, but it just failed to engage me. It felt so pessimistic, with the characters coming across as such gloomy embodiments of human nature, that I just couldn’t relate to them. As for the narrator himself, while the complexity of his psyche (and again, the language used to describe it) is one of the high points of the book, I still found myself unable to really care about him. It felt like he was going around and around and around, trying to obfuscate what he wanted to say in a cage of words that, while beautiful, ultimately are too much so that, when you do finally decipher what they mean, it’s like solving a puzzle rather than understanding a fellow human being. There is a kind of satisfaction, but not a relation, no insight. Mishima might not confess all here, or maybe he does, there’s no way to ask him now, but however much he does tell his reader, it’s not quite enough to make us want more. Glad I read it for the prose, if nothing else? You betcha. But will I read any more of Mishima’s work in the future? Well…I wouldn’t want to kiss and tell!