So when I saw Yukio Mishima's Confessions of a Mask (1949) on the shelf, I knew that it was gay-themed.
It's about Kochan, a Japanese schoolboy in the 1930s who is tormented by same-sex desire.
Through his childhood and adolescence, Kochan never falters in his belief that he is wrong, deviant, evil, a monster masquerading as human. He watches his schoolmates, especially a muscular boy named Omi who writes his name in urine on the snow.
He tries to suppress his urges for excrement, men, and death, even going as far as to have sex with a woman, but he realizes that he can never truly love anyone. His desires are not only deviant but impossible; male beauty can only appear amid excrement; a man cannot love a man without killing him.
Wow.
A rather depressing view of my future, in spite of the organizations listed in the Gayellow Pages
Mishima was gay himself, and led a tortured life, obsessed with bodybuilders and death. He felt humiliated by the Japanese defeat in World War II, and in 1970 attempted to incite a coup d'etat to restore the power of the emperor. When that didn't work, he committed ritual suicide.
See also: The Flowers of Evil; and Gay Chinese Literature
Japan gets this guy, we get Dances with Karens over there.
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