Extract

What I wanted was to die among strangers, untroubled, beneath a cloudless sky.

A boy discovers that the image of Saint Sebastian, bound and pierced with arrows, stirs in him something the world will not name. Yukio Mishima published this novel in 1949 at twenty-four, and its subject is the architecture of concealment: how a young man constructs, gesture by gesture, a social self that will pass for normal while desire runs like a hidden river beneath every interaction. The prose is surgical and lush at once, dissecting each performance of masculinity with a precision that is itself a kind of confession. Postwar Tokyo glimmers in the background, a ruined city rebuilding its surfaces. The mask, Mishima suggests, is not the opposite of the face. It is the face, the only one the world will be permitted to see.