Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima (1949)

In a reproduction of Guido Reni's Saint Sebastian, the martyr hangs lashed to a tree, arrows buried in his side, his head fallen back in an expression no one has taught the narrator to read as suffering. His body answers before his mind can object, and in that instant a schoolboy in wartime Japan learns the shape of a desire his country has no language to permit. What follows is a life built as performance. He worships a coarse, magnificent schoolmate named Omi from a distance he never closes, then courts a young woman, Sonoko, with a sincerity that is itself the most elaborate disguise, feeling the courtship and feeling nothing it is meant to mean. Mishima writes it all in prose cold and exact as surgery, a young man cataloguing his own concealment without once flinching. Do not wait for the mask to drop. His unbearable finding is that the confession is not the mask's undoing. It is the mask made flawless.