[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 early signs of his homosexuality, ostensibly to aid and abet his “rhetoric of confession.”¹ I argue here that it is only through careful attention to the later chapters, which describe a strategic attempt to mask homosexual desires through courtship with a young woman, that the complicated structure of this novel can be fully appreciated. With the help of Judith Butler's theory that gender is best understood as a performance played out within available social scripts (rather than as the result of a biologically-determined “essence”), we can see that the overt staging of this heterosexual “plot” reveals that the confessional pose of the narrator is just as theatrical: he is really neither apologetic nor interested in repressing his homosexual desires. In fact, it is precisely through writing his supposed confessions that he creates an opportunity to manipulate or outwit the social scripts which might otherwise dictate or direct his performances. He finds an escape from the strictures of heterosexuality (particularly acute in the wartime setting of the novel) because a confessional stance allows him the opportunity to linger over male bodies, devoting his descriptive energy to their curves or muscles. He also creates a small space—the scene of writing or fantasy—in which he can imaginatively escape what Deleuze and Guattari have described as “oedipalized territoriality,” in this case, that of a nation set on war.² In the midst of a vast war machine in which every male body must be marked as visibly heroic or pathetically unfit, the narrator subversively focuses on other machines: the body as a system of hydraulics and plumbing (erection and ejaculation) and the construction and maintenance of an elaborate “machine of falsehood” to mask his homosexual desires.

The narrator himself describes his construction of a heterosexual identity or mask as a disciplinary task. For example, when he is pressured into visiting a brothel with some suspicious college friends, he prepares for the venture through an exercise of sexual discipline:

I devised a pathetic secret exercise [renshū]. It consisted of testing my desire by staring fixedly at pictures of naked women … As may be easily imagined, my desire answered neither yes or no. Upon indulging in that bad habit [akushū] of mine, I would try to discipline my desire, first by refraining from my usual daydreams, and later by forcibly calling up mental images of women in the most obscene poses. At times it seemed my efforts were successful. But there was a falseness about this success that seemed to grind my heart into powder.³

The repetition of the ideogram read phonetically as “shū” in the two Japanese words that I have signaled out in this passage suggests an early displacement of writing as discipline (the renshū of school exercise) to (a type of) writing as pleasure, the bad habit or exercise (akushū) of masturbating. However, the narrator's attempts to exercise or discipline his sexual performance so that he can pass as heterosexual prove futile. He is unable to get an erection during this visit to the brothel, and his friends suspect as much. Yet his emphasis that he can sustain a fabricated heterosexual performance by training his corporeal self to act the “right” way comes surprisingly close to recent theorizing about gender as performance. For example, Judith Butler argues that gender identification is fashioned by an idealized coherence which is, in turn,

an effect of a corporeal signification. In other words, acts, gestures, and desire produce the effect of an internal core or substance, but produce this on the surface of the body, through the play of signifying absences that suggest, but never reveal, the organizing principle of identity as a cause. Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means.⁴

Mishima's narrative highlights the ways in which practices of cultural coherence (adherence to cultural definitions of heterosexuality, for example) shape a social space for the body through what Butler calls “regulatory grids of intelligibility” (p. 131). This is dramatized in Mishima's novel in that the novels and sex encyclopedias which the narrator consults to help him define and understand heterosexuality (scripts, of sorts, for his performance) can be read as literal examples of such regulatory grids. The actual writing of the text that is Confessions, on the other hand, allows the narrator, who is very self-consciously writing the text we read, the opportunity to manipulate vocabulary and typography in order to ensure that the body of his text, if not his own body, attests to the naturalness of his desires. Using Butler's terminology again, the narrator fabricates a heterosexual identity by manufacturing and sustaining this mask through the discursive means available to him—the act of writing the novel.

In the narrator's attempts to manufacture and sustain a simulacrum of desire that will match the real desire of his peers, he must determine just what gesture or act is the clearest and most convincing sign of a masculine, heterosexually-aligned identity. Ejaculation has been called “the trace that authenticates the ‘truth’ of the male body, a signifier that verifies male subjectivity,”⁵ but ejaculation is not the whole issue for Mishima's narrator. If this were the case, the effusive ejaculations described in chapter two of the novel, for example, the first explosive response to Guido Reni's painting of St. Sebastian, or the dramatic beach scene in which the narrator is aroused by the seething violence of the waves, would leave little doubt that this desiring body does indeed signify male. But for the narrator of Confessions of a Mask, ejaculation is no guarantee of the elision of difference between himself and his male peers. As a maturing adolescent, he seeks to understand this difference, focusing on the visible sign of desire on his body and what this same sign might signify on the bodies of his peers. In retrospect, he realizes,

I never guessed that they could be sharply distinguished from me, not only in their inner feelings, but even in hidden external signs. I did not realize, in short, that they immediately had an erection when they saw a picture of a woman's nude body, that I was alone in remaining unmoved at such at time …

Novels abound in kissing scenes, but none that I had read made any reference to such a thing as erections on such occasions. This was only natural [tōzen], as it is scarcely a subject to be described in a novel. But even the sex encyclopedia said nothing concerning erection as a physiological accompaniment of the kiss, leaving me instead with the impression that erection occurred only as prelude to carnal relations or in response to a mental picture of the act. I thought that when the time came, even if there were to be no desire, I too would suddenly [totsuzen] have an erection, exactly as though it were an inspiration from beyond the skies.

(Pp. 109-10; Kamen, p. 92)

Erection, then, especially when kissing a woman, becomes the guarantee that the mask adequately represents, i.e., that this simulacrum can convincingly be taken to be real.

The narrator's inquisitive forays into novels or sex encyclopedias sometimes lead to more troubles than comforting answers, yet he characteristically negotiates such problems through the means of clever linguistic play in the text he writes, the narrative we read. When he explains, in the quote above, that writing “naturally” doesn't include the details he seeks, he uses the word tōzen (naturally, the right or appropriate way) to characterize writing. The second ideogram in this compound, phonetically zen, is the same one that appears in shizen, nature. The implication here seems to be that if he were “natural,” he too would know what others don't need to learn and which thus “of course” or “naturally” is not detailed in novels. The narrator, however, finds a way around this; when he writes that even without desire he will suddenly rise to the occasion, the word translated as “suddenly” is totsuzen. The narrator comes close to re-fashioning his fantasized sexual reaction as natural [tōzen] through this homonymic echoing, for the second ideogram in this compound is again the zen of tōzen and shizen. In addition, because the ideogram for totsu carries the meaning of “to lunge or thrust,” the narrator grants himself, through his writing, the phallic energy he fears will be missing when the time comes.

This insistence that erection signifies normalcy marks this passage in another way as well. In the nine sentences which detail the narrator's later realization of the differences in sexual response between himself and his male peers, from which I quoted above, the Latin word erectio, conspicuously written in roman script, is repeated six times. The letters e-r-e-c-t-i-o are written sideways, following the top-to-bottom structure of the Japanese orthography. These repetitions of erectio, the letters strikingly visible in their simple, rounded lines amidst the columns of densely stroked ideograms, end up “performing” as little textual erections, achieving on a textual or typographical level what the narrator is unsure he can achieve when he kisses a woman.

The narrator not only fashions the text which he is writing into one which linguistically or typographically encodes his heterosexual success, but he also deals with the constricting definitions of gender in the tales he reads by negating the role played by physical desire in these stories, so that he can find a place for himself in their worlds of happily-ever-afterdom. The narrator explains.

Surprisingly enough, I was so engrossed in tales of romance that I devoted all my elegant dreams to thoughts of love between man and maid, and to marriage, exactly as though I were a young girl who knew nothing of the world. I tossed my love for Omi [a male schoolmate to whom the narrator has been extremely sexually attracted] onto the rubbish heap of neglected riddles, never once searching deeply for its meaning.

(P. 81)

This tendency to separate romantic love and sexual desire into two distinct spheres comes to the fore when the narrator tries to enact such idealized romances in his relationship with the young woman Sonoko. When the narrator meets Sonoko and her family to accompany them on a visit to her brother Kusano, who is away at boot camp, he describes his first glimpse of Sonoko as follows: “What I saw come running toward me was not a girl, not that personification of flesh which I had been forcibly picturing to myself since boyhood, but something like the herald of the morning tidings” (p. 143). To describe Sonoko as a “herald of the morning tidings” is to position her in the world of fairytale, myth, or romance, in the world of the “elegant dreams of thoughts of love” which the narrator evokes as he reads. But what is potentially more interesting here is the narrator's claim that he has been forcibly picturing personifications of “girl” flesh since boyhood. This is a rather glaring example of the ways in which the narrator fictionalizes and restructures the past. He fails to mention here the male bodies that he so pleasurably remembers (and which attract the bulk of the narrative's attention to detail). Instead, he emphasizes the female bodies that he supposedly so forcibly pictures to himself. However, evidence that he has not been subjecting himself to picturing “girl” flesh appears elsewhere. Compare his earlier admission:

But at the moment of indulging in my bad habit [akushū] did I never even once picture to myself some part of a woman? Not even experimentally [shikenteki]? No, never. I explained this strange lapse to myself as being due simply to my laziness.

In short, I knew absolutely nothing about other boys. I did not know that each night all boys but me had dreams in which women—women barely glimpsed yesterday on a street corner—were stripped of their clothing and set one by one parading before the dreamers' eyes …

Was it out of laziness that I had no such dreams? Could it have been because of laziness? I kept asking myself. All of my earnestness toward life as a whole arose out of this suspicion that I was simply lazy. And in the end this earnestness [kinben] spent itself in defending myself against the charge of laziness on this one point, insuring that my laziness could remain laziness still.⁶

All of his earnestness is supposedly part of the “Spartan course in self-discipline” (p. 79) which includes the writing of Confessions. Yet his earnestness also affords and protects a small space where laziness can remain laziness, where desire can operate and respond in a way less circumscribed by the limits and disciplinary constraints of compulsory heterosexuality.

Further evidence that the narrator is not too apt to forcibly picture “girl personifications” shows up a page later when he relays his decision to catalogue his memories of women: “This earnestness led me in the first place to resolve to gather together all my memories concerning women, starting back at the very beginning. What an extremely meager collection it turned out to be!” (p. 112). He can “collect” only the memory of a cousin who lays her head on his lap and that of an anemic young lady on a bus.

These examples emphasize that the narrator has, at best, only a scanty psychic reservoir of images of women as corporeal, as desirable or desiring bodies. When things between the narrator and Sonoko progress to the inevitable first kiss, he relies not on these meager experiential memories to try to understand Sonoko's reactions, but on the scripted roles of his storybooks, pointing out that “There had always been a storybook quality about her face and figure. Now there was an air about her that reminded one exactly how a storybook maiden looks and acts when in love” (pp. 197-98). He also compares Sonoko to Shakespeare's Juliet; in addition, part of his seduction strategy is played out through books. He lends Sonoko books and explains to the reader (of his book) that “There will be no need to give their titles when I say they were just the sort of novels that a young man of twenty should choose for a girl of eighteen” (p. 163), and adds later that “Like an errand boy from a book shop I again held out several sugary novels” (p. 168).

When the narrator receives his first letter from Sonoko, the expectations resulting from the heterosexual scripts enacted in these sugary novels are mocked and criticized. So eager over receiving the first love letter of his life that he cannot wait until he reaches home to open it (as per Sonoko's instructions) he hurriedly opens it on a train, and,

As I did so the contents all but spilled out. There were several silhouette-cards and a sheaf of those imported colored postcards that seem to be the delight of mission-school students. Among them was a doublefold of blue notepaper, decorated with a Disney cartoon of Red Riding Hood and the Wolf.

(P. 171)

The little note under the cartoon, “written in neat characters that smacked of painstaking penmanship” (p. 171), is just as banal as the childish contents, for this note contains nothing more than an expression of gratitude for the loan of the books, a promise to write again (Sonoko's family is evacuating war-torn Tokyo), and her address. The narrator fumes and rages at his own foolishness, chastising himself and laughing bitterly over his dashed expectations of a love letter worthy of his idealized romance.

However, just as he has written earlier that his earnestness is a protection or defense [bengo] which safeguards his laziness (i.e., his difference) so here his desire to write a reply “gradually arose to the defense [bengo] of the first ‘state of ecstasy’ I had ever had” (p. 172; Kamen, p. 143). He continues,

The training she receives at home, I immediately told myself, is scarcely the kind to make her proficient in the writing of love letters. Because it's only natural that her hand should be cramped by all sorts of doubts and hesitations and shyness when writing her first letter to a boy. Because every movement she made this afternoon [this refers to her awkward shyness when delivering the letter into his hand] revealed a truer story than any word in this empty letter.

(P. 172)

In order to foster or defend his first state of ecstasy, to validate the heterosexual love story he enacts here, the narrator must read or interpret Sonoko's body rather than rely on the penned lines emptied of meaning due to the restricting constraints of her kateikyōiku—literally, household education. This is extremely ironic, given that he acts within similar constraints (the constraints of the discipline or schooling of his desire) but then blames constraints for apparently prohibiting Sonoko from playing out the script according to his directorial cues.

The narrator's love story—largely an epistolary one—nears its culmination in the letter Sonoko's brother writes requesting that the narrator clarify his intentions regarding marriage. The narrator is at first shocked, for he has regarded what he refers to as the “romantic sway of war” (p. 211) as an excuse to perpetually delay the denouement of the comedy he plays out in his masked performances. He at first considers a Don Juan pose:

I put a brazen, cynical smile upon my lips. I told myself that all I had to do was clear one small hurdle. All I had to do was to regard all the past few months as absurd; to decide that from the beginning I'd never been in love with a girl called Sonoko, not with such a chit of a girl; to believe that I'd been prompted by a trifling passion (liar!) and had deceived her.

(P. 212)

He is aware, however, that this pose doesn't quite suit him: “And yet I could not have been ignorant of the fact that there is no such thing as a libertine who abandons a woman without first achieving his purpose” (p. 213). Of course, the jarring difference between his role as a libertine and the role, and the goal, of his literary libertine precursors is the absence of the denouement he so assiduously avoids: the final, sex “act.” Ironically, it is precisely because his relationship has not included sexual intercourse that his mother approves of his decision to decline the invitation to declare his intentions to marry, and thus to sever his ties with Sonoko. When he consults his mother, she cuts through his lame excuses with a straightforward: “So then, how do you really feel? Do you love her, or don't you?” However, she returns a few minutes later to worriedly inquire: “‘Listen, about what we were just saying—’ She looked at me with an odd expression, as though she were a strange woman looking at me for the first time, ‘—about Sonoko. You—she—if you've—well—.’” The response, given what the reader knows, but what the mother does not, is extremely ironic: “Do you really think I did any such thing? Do you trust me so little?” (p. 215).

The allusive reference to sex in this conversation between mother and son—a word never directly pronounced within the discourse of the novel—presages the conversation between the narrator and Sonoko which ends the novel. In turn, this final conversation with Sonoko, in which she playfully but euphemistically refers to sex, parallels a scene at the beginning of the novel in which the narrator as a young boy perceptively observes that the adults fear that he knows more than he should about sexuality. A close look at each of these scenes reveals what these thematic and structural parallels contribute to the overall structure and complexity of the narrative. In both the final scene with Sonoko and the opening scene of the novel, the narrator manages to successfully subvert the pressures and pretense of both confession and reform by lingering over descriptions of gleaming or glittering fluids, which, I argue below, are metaphorically linked to a homosexually-aligned pleasure and identity.

A year or so after Sonoko has married another man, the narrator and Sonoko meet for a walk, talk, and end up at a tawdry dance hall. The two seek refuge from the sweaty, raucous activity of the hall by sitting in the courtyard. Here, for the first time, the narrator's morbidly obsessive fantasies involving the gory deaths of muscled toughs surface in daylight, in a narrative space not specifically delineated as therapeutically confessional or as a dream. The narrator's attention zooms in on one particular young man in intensely detailed fashion, a passage worth quoting at length because it vividly portrays the power of the narrator's descriptive art when it focuses on male bodies:

His naked chest showed bulging muscles, fully developed and tensely knit; a deep cleft ran down between the solid muscles of his chest toward his abdomen. The thick, fetter-like sinews of his flesh narrowed down from different directions to the sides of his chest, where they interlocked in tight coils. The hot mass of his smooth torso was being severely and tightly imprisoned by each succeeding turn of the soiled cotton belly-band. His bare, sun-tanned shoulders gleamed as though covered with oil. And black tufts stuck out from the cracks of his armpits, catching the sunlight, curling and glittering with glints of gold.

(Pp. 251-52)

Sonoko's sudden comment that “There's just five minutes left” in their meeting disturbs the narrator's reverie and brings him crashing back to reality. Her voice disrupts his immersion into the sphere of fantasy; in fact, for the first time the two spheres he has kept so painstakingly balanced—his heterosexual performance versus his private indulgence in homosexual fantasies—are now in danger of spinning irrevocably apart, tearing off the mask and tearing him in two:

At this instant something inside of me was torn in two with brutal force. It was as though a thunderbolt had fallen and cleaved asunder a living tree. I heard the structure, which I had been building piece by piece with all my might up to now, collapse miserably to the ground. I felt as though I had witnessed the instant in which my existence had been turned into some sort of fearful non-being. I closed my eyes and after an instant regained a hold on my icy-cold sense of duty.

(Pp. 252-53)

This rather precarious stint on the edge is occasioned by the narrator's awareness that he has no essence (“my existence had been turned into some sort of fearful non-being”) without a performance that sustains his existence, a position with which many contemporary theorists of gender would agree. Recall Butler's comment that words, acts and gestures, the signs which designate any given person's gender identity, do not reveal an essence but instead “produce the effect of an internal core or substance” (p. 136). Sonoko's teasing inquiry about heterosexual experience which follows—“Of course you've already done that, haven't you?”—forces the narrator to pull himself together, snap the mask back in place, and assert his heterosexual experience and identity by answering that he has indeed already done that. The novel ends, however, with a backward glance to some shiny, spilled liquid left behind by the young burly men who had so excited the narrator:

It was time. As I got up, I stole one more glance toward those chairs in the sun. The group had apparently gone to dance, and the chairs stood empty in the blazing sunshine. Some sort of beverage had been spilled on the table top and was throwing back glittering, threatening reflections.

(P. 254)

Before mulling over what such glittering fluid in the last lines of the novel suggests, I want to turn first to an analogous scene at the beginning of the novel. The first page opens with the narrator's explanation that as a child he believed and insisted that he could remember his first, post-natal bath. The description of the glittering reflections of light on the tiny waves of the bath is lyrical and convincingly detailed:

However that may have been, there was one thing I was convinced I had seen clearly, with my own eyes. That was the brim of the basin in which I received my first bath. It was a brand-new basin, its wooden surface planed to a fresh and silken smoothness; and when I looked from inside, a ray of light was striking one spot on its brim. The wood gleamed only in that one spot and seemed to be made of gold. Tongue-tips of water lapped up waveringly as though they would lick the spot, but never quite reached it. And, whether because of a reflection or because the ray of light streamed on into the basin as well, the water beneath that spot on the brim gleamed softly, and tiny, shining waves seemed to be forever bumping their heads together there.

(Pp. 2-3)

This is the earliest and perhaps most blatant fiction in a novel that sets itself up to be an eyewitness, first-person account. The narrator admits as much; in fact, he says “the strongest disproof of this memory was the fact that I had been born, not in the daytime, but at nine in the evening: There could have been no streaming sunlight” (p. 3). He explains that his repeated insistence as a child that he could remember this bath characteristically left adults a bit suspicious or uneasy. The narrator recreates their concerns: “The little rascal is surely trying to trick us into telling him about ‘that,’ and then what is to keep him from asking, with still more childlike innocence: ‘Where did I come from? How was I born?’” (p. 2).

In both Sonoko's mocking words at the end of the novel, “Of course you've already done that,” and in the description of the adults' worries here, the occlusion of a word and an act is motivated by propriety. Sonoko, teasingly, but modestly, refrains from saying things more directly than she has to, and the adults mask what they don't want the child to know. However, in both cases, this occlusion or containment of (hetero)sex is set up in opposition to the narrator's lyrical or descriptive indulgence in the gleaming reflections of fluids: the glittering reflections of the spilled beverage left behind when the young toughs head off to dance, the tiny dancing waves of the bath.

To understand the full import of these images of light-reflecting fluids within the structure of the narrative, a return to the first ejaculation scene is necessary. The narrator explains that after getting aroused by gazing at a picture of Saint Sebastian in an art book, his hands “completely unconsciously, began a motion they had never been taught” and he describes the aftermath of his explosive ejaculation as follows:

Some time passed, and then, with miserable feelings, I looked around the desk I was facing. A maple tree at the window was casting a bright reflection over everything—over the ink bottle, my schoolbook and notes, the dictionary, the picture of Saint Sebastian. There were cloudy-white splashes about—on the gold-imprinted title of a textbook, on the shoulder of the ink bottle, on one corner of the dictionary. Some objects were dripping lazily, leadenly, and others gleamed dully, like the eyes of a dead fish.

(P. 40)

In this passage, the narrator's homosexual desire, manifest in an ejaculation inspired by Saint Sebastian, overtly marks objects which are themselves texts or are metonymically related to texts: books, notes, tiles, ink bottles. Thus, to refer back to my title, he “glosses” texts with the fluid of his body, so that they “gleam dully, like the eyes of a dead fish.”

The glittering images of a spilled beverage and the tiny waves of the bath, in their vividness, detail and strategic placement at the opening and close of the narrative, also mark the text of the narrative we read. Given the narrator's highly-charged description of the young man winding his soiled belly-band in the dance-hall courtyard, a description which ends with an observation of a sticky fluid on a table, it doesn't seem too outrageous to read these bright reflections as metaphorical displacements of the narrator's (fantasized) ejaculatory pleasure, tropic variants of the literal, gleaming ejaculatory fluid that leaves traces on texts in the Saint Sebastian scene detailed above. It may be true that semen doesn't glitter in the same way as do the spilled beverage and dancing waves. Nonetheless, I want to suggest that the supposedly repressed, confessed or exorcized homosexual desires manifest themselves in these images of shimmering fluid as the novel closes and circles back to its beginnings. This is not to say that the baby bath-water is somehow a clue to the closet; instead, I contend that the final scene, certainly, builds up to a rhythmic, highly charged descriptive indulgence in the young man at the dance hall and ends with a sticky fluid left behind, as if the narrative rhythm echoes the explosive tension and release of male orgasm. The fact that this image recalls the opening may suggest that the narrator intends to emphasize that his desires go back to his very beginnings.

Throughout the narrative, then, it is as if the narrator only rises to the occasion (both literally via physical arousal and figuratively in his moments of powerful, descriptive prowess) when his attention focuses on the men of his childhood who aroused his interests or when he indulges in the written recreation of his male-centered fantasies. So, although the narrator claims that it is the disciplinary task of confession and consequent change that inspires and sustains the project of writing, it is not this that propels the narrative but the vividly descriptive textual machinery that details the narrator's homosexual interests. The narrator, it turns out, is neither apologetic nor interested in rigorously repressing his homosexual desires. Instead, he subverts the discipline to which he pretends to adhere by creating, in the process of writing, the opportunity to linger over male bodies in detail, touching upon them once more, and thus scripting or inscribing pleasure. The narrative that is Confessions of a Mask, despite by its very title purporting to be a difficult and relentless exercise in self-hermeneutics, undermines any expectations that remorse or self-improvement might be a product of the narrator's confessional pose. Instead, this confession ends up affording its narrator with myriad opportunities to dwell on his own “second comings”—masturbatory delights—in addition to demonstrating his precocious literariness.

Notes

1. For examples of readings which compare Mishima's biography to this novel, see Andrew R. Smith, “Seeing Through a Mask's Confession,” Text and Performance Quarterly 2 (1989): 135-52, and also Dan P. McAdams, “Fantasy and Reality in the Death of Yukio Mishima,” Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 8 (Fall 1985): 293-317. In The Rhetoric of Confession: Shishōsetsu in Early Twentieth Century Japanese Fiction (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988), Edward Fowler examines the tradition of shishōsetsu, an autobiographical form that flourished in Taishō Japan (1912-26). Fowler has much of interest to say about the tensions inherent in this form, pointing out that it is “riddled with paradoxes. Supposedly a fictional narrative, it often reads more like a private journal. It has a reputation of being true, to a fault, to ‘real life’; yet it frequently strays from the author's experience it allegedly portrays so faithfully. Its personal orientation makes it a thoroughly modern form; yet it is the product of an indigenous intellectual tradition quite disparate from western individualism” (p. xvi). Fowler, because he is tracing this tradition within the confines of 1907 to the 1920s, does not discuss Mishima's work beyond a brief reference in a note, but his comments about the rhetoric of confession as a construction of a seeming truth are suggestive in thinking about Mishima's own play with the shishōsetsu form in his later Confessions of a Mask.

2. See Mark Seem, Introduction to Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1983):

   Against the oedipal and the oedipalized territorialities (Family, Church, School, Nation, Party), and especially the territoriality of the individual, Anti-Oedipus seeks to discover the “deterritorialized” flows of desire, the flows that have not been reduced to the Oedipal codes and the neuroticized territorialities, the desiring machines that escape such codes as lines of escape leading elsewhere.

   (P. xvii)

   Mishima's narrator finds such an escape not only from the constraints of compulsory heterosexuality but away from the “oedipalized territoriality” of a nation set on war. Jennifer Robertson, “Gender-bending in Paradise: Doing ‘Female’ and ‘Male’ in Japan,” Genders 5 (Summer 1989), analyzes gender-bending within the ranks of the all-female Takarakuza Academy/Musical Revue in Tokyo during the pre-war years, and emphasizes that war-time articulations of male and female roles, as might be expected, were particularly fierce (pp. 59-61).

3. Yukio Mishima, Kamen no Kokuhaku (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1972), p. 185. The English translation is Confessions of a Mask, trans. Meredith Weatherby (New York: New Directions, 1958), p. 223; the ellipsis is Weatherby's. Hereafter, reference to Weatherby's translation will be by page number alone. Reference to the Japanese text, when applicable, will be to Kamen.

4. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 136; italics are Butler's. Recent theorists writing about how the body is marked or shaped by cultural constructions of sex, gender and sexuality of course owe much to Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990). For example, in Love of the Samurai: A Thousand Years of Japanese Homosexuality, trans. D. R. Roberts (London: Gay Men's Press, 1989), Tsuneo Watanabe and Iwata Jun'ichi adopt Foucault's analysis to argue that the modernization of Japan, an “indigenous capitalist and industrialist movement,” (p. 124) instigated a governing of sex through knowledge in a way analogous to the genealogy Foucault describes. For an entertaining survey of the status of male homosexuality throughout various historical periods in Japan, see Nicholas Bornoff, Pink Samurai: The Pursuit and Politics of Sex in Japan (London: Grafton Books, 1991), pp. 422-47.

5. Kevin Kopelson, “Wilde, Barthes, and the Orgasmics of Truth,” Genders 7 (Spring 1990): p. 27.

6. P. 111; Kamen p. 92-93. The use here of the adverb shikenteki intensifies the emphasis on schooling, as shiken is the most common word used for school quizzes and tests.