SOURCE: Rhine, Marjorie. “Glossing Scripts and Scripting Pleasure in Mishima's Confessions of a Mask.” Studies in the Novel 31, no. 2 (summer 1999): 222-33.

In the following essay, Rhine argues that Mishima's novel Confessions of a Mask can best be understood through the later chapters of the novel, in which the work becomes “theatrical” in its portrayal of homosexuality.

Yukio Mishima's first novel Kamen no Kokuhaku (Confessions of a Mask) not only catapulted him into prominence as one of the top writers of postwar Japan when it was published in 1949, but also remains one of the most popular and most often taught and discussed of his novels today, more than twenty-five years after his spectacular death by ritual suicide in 1970. Most critics, however, have focused their attention only on the first half of the novel, in which an I-narrator retrospectively describes his childhood and adolescent experiences in an attempt to isolate...