Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima

Meeting at the usual place, The Shakespeare Hotel (up stairs), 200 Devonshire Street, Surry Hills, at 7.00pm on Thursday December 11, we will be discussing Yukio Mishima's Confessions of a Mask.

Confessions of a Mask (1949) is around 250 pages in most English editions. It is a semi-autobiographical novel about a young man grappling with his hidden homosexuality in militarist Japan. The narrator feels compelled to wear a “mask” of social conformity while secretly consumed by homoerotic fantasies and violent imagery. Mishima explores themes of beauty, shame, desire, and the tension between private and public lives.

The novel’s frankness about sexuality and inner conflict made it both shocking and groundbreaking in postwar Japanese literature.

Hard copies are available from The Bookshop, 207 Oxford Street, Darlinghurst and soft copies from Amazon. Contact dalemills (at) cantab.net for a free pdf or Kindle-compatible file.

Local library copies are available from City of Sydney, Inner West and Randwick.

Numerous book reviews can be found at https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=conressions%20of%20a%20mask

The novel has not been turned into a movie, but apparently there are allusions to its themes in the very arty movie, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985). A free copy can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQaNkA0l_8U&rco=1

The Shakespeare Hotel is a busy inner-city pub, but we meet in a semi-private room upstairs, conducive for discussion. Many of us arrive around 6.00pm for drinks or food, and the meeting starts at 7.00pm. The format is that we have a focused discussion on the book till about 8.00pm, and then the meeting formally closes. Almost everyone stays back to chat about the book or anything else.