Pierced Again and Again: Yukio Mishima and Confessions of a Mask

Content note: This article discusses Mishima’s suicide in some detail.

Confessions of a Mask was Japanese literary giant Yukio Mishima’s second novel, and the one that launched him to national and international prominence. Mishima himself described it as an I-novel, a Japanese literary term describing something like the Western roman à clef but without the satire, a bit more like Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. An I-novel is not quite a memoir, but also not a complete fabrication. Confessions outlines the struggles of a thoughtful, sensitive boy to fit in and find a place in an environment that prizes strength and masculinity, and how he and the world around him navigate change in the wake of the Second World War. Lead character Kochan’s¹ sexual awakening begins with an image of St. Sebastian², and he spends the rest of the novel erotically drawn to male bodies, violence, and destruction. He flirts with women. He longs for men. He will forever be drawn to danger, to pain, to masculine bodies.

He was a contender for the Nobel Prize in literature; it’s generally thought that Yasunari Kawabata, his mentor and another Japanese literary giant, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968 because Japanese literature had finally become too big to be ignored in the West,³ and Mishima was too controversial. In 1952, The Sound of Waves drew critical praise. It was considered in some circles to be so reactionary the label “fascist” started being used.⁴ Mishima took up bodybuilding in 1955. In 1958, he married a woman he may have loved but definitely didn’t stop cheating on; they had two children. His writing grew increasingly political, and in the late 1960s, he created his own personal militia. He told a friend in September 1970: “There is a green snake⁵ in the bosom of Japan. There is no way to escape this curse.”

In November 25 of that year, he delivered the last book in his Sea of Fertility tetralogy to his publisher. It is, to be glib, something of a downer, describing a hollowed-out and sterile postwar Japan. Later that day, he and his militia went to the Camp Ichigaya military base in Tokyo, with the goal of inciting a coup.⁶ He was mocked by the soldiers there, the coup attempt quickly fell apart, and Mishima died by his own hand at Camp Ichigaya, with a friend and reported lover acting as his second.⁷ He was 45.

It’s not particularly easy, even now, to get a full picture of Mishima’s life. Our own E. Rose Nelson has sometimes struggled to find confirmation of the love lives of actors and entertainers in the closet, even those who seemed pretty open about their lives at the time. Japan’s treatment of homosexuality has never been exactly what it is in the West⁸, and Mishima also seems to have lived pretty openly. But his family, particularly his widow Yoko Hiraoka, worked to suppress any mention of his homosexuality at all after his death.⁹ To my knowledge, there has never been a public showing of Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters in Japan that didn’t cut the scene of Mishima in a gay bar. Hiraoka also refused to license the explicitly queer Forbidden Colors for the movie, leading Schrader to translate Kyoko’s House and slot it in Colors’ place. Of course, I’m a casual scholar at best who speaks a handful of Japanese words. And. Well.

The whole business feels like investigating an empty space. Here is another reported lover, singer, actor and drag artist Akihiro Miwa, who starred in his adaptation of Black Lizard, where Mishima also played a human statue.¹⁰ Here’s a story about two people who die rather than face societal rejection. Here’s Confessions of a Mask and the manipulations and counter-manipulations of the queer men in Forbidden Colors. Here’s sex and violence, with the violence often turned inward: even when the obsessed, tortured narrator of The Temple of the Golden Pavilion sets fire to the titular Kinkaku-ji, he’s driven by self-destruction¹¹. It’s tempting to want to fill this absence. Confessions of a Mask certainly looks like the skeleton key that will crack Mishima open. (In The Japan Times, Iain Maloney called it “the key text to understanding Mishima’s later novels.”) There’s so much of his life in the pages; Mishima’s longing, his obsession with ecstatic suffering, his upbringing as an isolated child surrounded by girls, and his discomfort when launched into the world of boys. Viewing Confessions of a Mask as a partial autobiography wouldn’t be a wholly inaccurate take. But it is, of course, a reductive one.

Mishima is Kochan, but Kochan is also very much his own character. Mishima may have chosen fiction as a gloss to his own experiences, but that act does indeed create distance. Kochan picks and chooses masks to show to the world as he becomes an adult; Confessions of a Mask is itself a mask Mishima drew over his own experiences. The truest thing about Confessions, and perhaps the most universal, is the mask itself. 

In the end, the answers we want may not be the ones we need. Sometimes we just have to live with what we know and open ourselves to the work.

The definitive English translation of Confessions of a Mask, and much of Mishima’s work in English, is by Meredith Weatherby. He was an American publisher who spent most of his life in Japan. and was the long-term partner of homoerotic photographer Tamotsu Yato. Mishima, who was fluent in English, worked closely with Weatherby, and it’s hard to argue with the results. Translation consists of dozens of little choices; Weatherby’s prose is straightforward, generally omitting honorifics and emphasizing clarity and readability. My edition is a second edition of the paperback from the late fifties.

Confessions of a Mask isn’t Mishima’s greatest novel; it might not even be in the top five. But it’s still the work of a giant. Kochan’s first-person narration is often introspective, but his voice is engaging and clear, and there’s an intensity and muscularity to the prose that keeps readers turning pages. Here is a young Kochan seeing Reni’s Saint Sebastian for the first time and being overcome with arousal:

That day, the instant I looked upon the picture, my entire being trembled with some pagan joy. My blood soared up; my loins swelled as though in wrath. 

Repression, breathless adoration, desire; Mishima piles it all on us. Confessions of a Mask catches readers up in this passion; it’s one of those books where, once in a while, I just wanted to read a passage out loud to whoever was passing by, because listen to this, just listen:

There came a day in late spring that was like a tailor’s sample cut from a bolt of summer, or like a dress rehearsal for the coming season. It was that day of the year that comes as Summer’s representative, to inspect everyone’s clothing and make sure all is in readiness. It was that day on which people appear in summer shirts to show they have passed muster.

I know that weather! We had that weather just last week!¹² But I didn’t have the words to make it real to a reader. Mishima did.

For me, Yuko Mishima is a particularly literal example of the death of the author; the work stands on its own, no matter what happened in Tokyo in November 1970. I first discovered Mishima as a high school student on the shelves of a local library; I read every book he’d written in the collection, even as I grappled with understanding some of the themes. Revisiting him isn’t like revisiting an old friend, like going back to Kurt Vonnegut is. (I did the same thing with Vonnegut’s work.) Mishima is more challenging than that, more like going on a familiar hike where you’ll notice something new on the trail every time. We may only have seen Mishima’s masks, but is he wrong when he says we all choose what face we choose to show each other?

1. A nod at Mishima’s real name, Kimitake Hiraoka. ↩︎
2. St. Sebastian is of course something of a queer icon, and Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane very much dwells in the same liminal space between pleasure and pain as the ecstacies Mishima describes. They didn’t have much else in common, aside from the whole staggering talent, being gay, and dying too fucking young. ↩︎
3. When I was researching this piece I found this wonderful essay from Japanese scholar Donald Keene on the bizarre condescension he got from fellow Westerners about his choice of study. It’s from 1968 so the language is a bit outdated, but I found it a fun read nonetheless. ↩︎
4. It was also the first book of his published in America. Yeah. ↩︎
5. This may have meant American money. ↩︎
6. Not everyone is convinced that this was the goal; this may have just been an absurdly overcomplicated suicide attempt, with biographer Henry Scott Stokes calling the death of Mishima and his second Masakatsu Morita a “lovers’ suicide.” Whatever else he intended, Mishima had been planning his own death for more than a year. ↩︎
7. Ritual suicide involves belly-cutting (hara-kiri) with a second to take your head off so you don’t suffer for too long. It didn’t go exactly as planned and a third man had to act as second for them both. ↩︎
8. Wikipedia led me to this fascinating interview with writer Mutsuo Takahashi about queer life in Japan. CW for some experiences that Takahashi does not label as traumatic but that we certainly would call child sexual abuse if it happened in 2026.  ↩︎
9. To be fair, some of her actions were almost certainly taken to protect her children. I am not sure that if my perennially cheating husband took over a government building and committed violent public suicide with one of his maybe-boyfriends, I would have handled it any better. She died in 1995 at 58; his children are both still alive. ↩︎
10. He’s still around at 90, and good for her. Did you know Japanese doesn’t really have gendered pronouns? I believe Miwa considers himself a man (again, there’s some fuzziness in the sources I’ve read) but he’s played many women’s roles, ranging from Miyazaki films to two delightful starring roles in Black Lizard and Black Rose Mansion. Both of those films are super fun, though Black Lizard‘s been out of print and not available for streaming in this country for ages. Shout Factory, where are you? ↩︎
11. As I was putting this together I joked that the only person I knew with more suicidal ideation in their work was Kurt Cobain. At least Mishima committed public suicide, so it was harder to blame his wife. ↩︎
12. Now it’s cold again. Grr. ↩︎