Confessions of a Mask

2009, 1st edition, as only Assírio & Alvim knew how to do.
Leafing through it, you would say it has never been read.

Let us pass over the spectacular apotheosis of the mise-en-scène that is Mishima's life, just as we shall pass over the abundant photographic material of himself, which he bequeathed to us, as part of a work that aspired to bring together spirit and flesh, soul and body, in that "sketch of nothingness" that for him was Death, and which appears evoked in the final paragraphs of the tetralogy The Sea of Fertility.

If some words urge, upon breaking the pages of these harrowing "Confessions...", they must be seen as a unique feature of this book, whether in the whole of Mishima's work, or in the inevitable comparison that the reader will be tempted to establish with autobiographical pages that mark our Western culture, from Rousseau to Gide.

Mishima, Writer, playwright, model, martial arts master and leader of a failed coup d'état that ended with his death, in public, by seppuku. He was the most important stylist of the post-war Japanese language. Nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times in the 1960s. He never received it. He maintained, until the end, a total intransigence and obsession with the unity between beauty, eroticism and death.

 "Luxurious vocabulary, decadent metaphors, which fuse traditional Japanese and modern Western literary styles"