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  • Published: 15 September 2017
  • ISBN: 9780241301197
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 176
  • RRP: $28.00

Confessions of a Mask




The dawning of a young man's homosexual and sadistic desires

A Japanese teenager is overcome with longing for his male classmate. Each night he imagines his body punctured with arrows, like the body of St Sebastian in Guido Reni's painting; the objects of our hero's desire are tortured, killed and maimed, over and over again each night in his private fantasies. He must hide his lust from a homophobic and stiflingly conventional Japan. Self-loathing and desperate, he begins acting out a love affair with the sister of a school friend, while grappling with his hidden desires under the shadow of a Japan under threat from World War Two.

  • Published: 15 September 2017
  • ISBN: 9780241301197
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 176
  • RRP: $28.00

About the authors

Albert Camus

Albert Camus (1913-60) grew up in a working-class neighbourhood in Algiers. He studied philosophy at the University of Algiers, and became a journalist. His most important works include The Outsider, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Plague and The Fall. After the occupation of France by the Germans in 1941, Camus became one of the intellectual leaders of the Resistance movement. He was killed in a road accident, and his last unfinished novel, The First Man, appeared posthumously.

Praise for Confessions of a Mask

A terrific and astringent work of beauty... a work of art

Times Literary Supplement

A writer of immense energy and ability

Time Out

Mishima is lucid in the midst of emotional confusion, funny in the midst of despair

Christopher Isherwood

Never has a "confession" been freer from self-pity and emotional over-indulgence

Sunday Times