Date of Award
Spring 2024
Document Type
Thesis
Department
English
First Advisor
Michael Germana
Abstract
Yukio Mishima’s first novel, Confessions of a Mask, was an instant success when it first published in 1949 and served as the beginning of Mishima’s rise to becoming one of, if not the most prominent postwar Japanese writers. However, because of the novel’s heavy nationalistic undertone tied with its very nontraditional and often lamenting perspective towards homosexuality, it has been largely overlooked by Western academia until recently. It presents a complex notion of queer identity, one that John Pistelli describes in his review as “[an] inapplicability of the word ‘queer,’ with all its contemporary political connotations, to a reactionary mid-century Japanese writer who based his sexual identity on fin-de-siècle Decadent literature and modernist sexual science” (Pistelli). As implied by Pistelli’s review, critical essays on the novel tend to be a pull towards two distinct and competing perspectives: either trying to situate the novel within the understood Western notions of philosophical identity, or by reading the novel through a historical perspective towards traditional Japanese culture
Recommended Citation
Mikles, Chase, "Death, Dying, and Overcoming: A Nietzschean Reading of Yukio Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask" (2024). Munn Scholars Awards. 15.
https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/munn/15