Rikio seems to be longing for something real (although that's not how he, the narrator, puts it): His lover is not some beautiful actress or model, but his assistant and make-up artist Kayo who consciously makes efforts to undermine conventional beauty standards, sporting silver teeth and making herself appear to be older than she is. His constant tiredness appears to be both an effect of his work schedule and his depression.
But his occupation is getting to him: His job is to disappear behind a mask (get it? Confessions of a Mask), to help create an un-reality, to exist in a realm without linear time, where life is out of sequence (because that's how a movie is usually shot) and actions become inconsequential. Our protagonist Rikio is a 24-year-old movie star, in the prime of his career and his looks: Fans freak out when they see him, women can hardly contain themselves, everyone wants to hire him and turn him into an advertisement. This intelligent novella is mesmerizing and serves up almost all Mishima tropes in under 100 pages - beauty, death, love, youth, and everything is rendered in haunting ambivalence.
As I said, there's little in terms of plot, and it's extremely short, but there's an urgency to it… as if he needs to express something and can't quite put it to words that I find fascinating. I do believe the other is a "better" book, but there's something about Star that really worked for me. I said in my review of The Sailor Who Fell From the Grace of the Sea a few months back that it was my current favorite, I will now revise that opinion to the best written of his books that I've read. This may be an unpopular opinion, but I think this may be my favorite book by Mishima. It makes for an interesting parallel with his own life and several of the topics that seemed to dominate it. This is all the more fascinating as Mishima himself wrote it right after acting in a film titled "Afraid to Die" in which he played, you guessed it, a yakuza. There's not much of a plot, more like an examination of what it means to be a celebrity, how people view him/how he views others and how the film industry worked in Japan at the time. It follows a young actor who is filming a yakuza film. This is an absolutely fascinating shorter work from Mishima. If you never cycle out the masks, you run the risk of poisoning the well.
And these masks are worn by stars.īut the real world is always waiting for its stars to die. To keep the public pacified, the spring must always be shielded from the world of masks. They know that the reality everyone thinks they see and feel draws from the spring of artifice that you and I are guarding. But the powers that be are well aware that being seen is no more than a symptom of the gaze.
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