If you ask most gay people, they say, “I’ve always known I was gay”. They may not have had a name for it (Kochan never refers to himself as gay in his memoir), but nevertheless, it is something that he doesn’t learn from the people around him and it isn’t something he “chose” to be, but it was something that was inherent within him. In Yukio Mishima's novel/memoir, Confessions of a Mask, the main character Kochan is constantly drawn to the male form far more than the female form, and it something that he experienced since he was a child,”I felt as though I had been knocked flat. The person I had thought was a he was a she. If this beautiful knight was a woman and not a man, what was there left? (Even today I feel a repugnance, deep rooted and hard to explain, toward women in male attire)”. Kochan is drawn to all forms and expressions of the uber-masculine men we have in society: knights and soldiers, laborers, lion-like men, devil-may-care people like Omi, Kochan's crush, body hair, which is something that in most society is not viewed as feminine, and many other things. Yukio Mishima really shows how the mind of a gay man operates and what it focuses on. It is not just about sex per say, but it is also about beauty and seeing beauty and eroticism in the male form as a man.
While growing up, many gay men and women find that they identify with the opposite sex in terms of the way they express themselves. I believe that Kochan, and by extension, Mishima, is obsessed with dressing up as a woman at a young age for a specific reason. To me, Kochan doesn’t dress up as a woman as a child because he wants to be a woman; many people believe that gay men want to be women. They think gay men are weak and twisted men. However, as said previously, gay men tend to know their sexual orientation at an early age, both consciously and unconsciously. As such, from an early age, their mind and body focuses and observes from the world around them what they have to do to attract a mate...this is something all children learn and go through. However, most gay men and women are not exposed to pictures that illustrate how gay people attract each other. Gay people then adapt, and learn how to attract potential mates from the opposite sex. While gay men tend to naturally have effeminate ways of being (this is not universal among gay people, you can also find very masculine men and feminine women in the population), young children who are gay will also tend to adopt the behaviors of the opposite sex, simply because they see that it attracts the kind of partner that they want.
I would categorize the character Kochan as gay; even though throughout the memoir he makes note of the beauty of the women around him, he has said himself, “I was completely carried away by the beauty of her legs, perhaps because I had not yet become accustomed to seeing city women wear the bloomer-like trousers of farm women or the slacks that had become the fashion for those perilous times...And yet it would be a mistake to leave the impression that her legs aroused any sexual excitement in me. As said before, I was completely lacking in any feeling of sexual desire for the opposite sex. This is well proved by the fact that I had never had the slightest wish to see a woman's naked body”.
Despite this, he falls for the young woman, Sonoko. This is something quite a few gay men experience when they do not fully acknowledge their homosexuality, or do not know they are gay. Like Kochan, they feel split in two and and conflicted, and they feel anxiety within their soul. Yet, there is no choice to make between whether they are homosexual or heterosexual.
To me, Kochan was a conflicted gay man, not a bi-curious man, not a straight man who needs to have therapy, he is a gay man. A gay man. It is one of the hardest things for a man to admit to in contemporary culture. To admit homosexuality is to admit many things, most of which only exist in the mind of society. Kochan’s story is a sexual coming-of-age, struggling with said sexuality, and a denial of personal truth. To me, Kochan’s story is a universal truth that society has been and is trying to understand.
