男色から同性愛へ : 三島由紀夫『仮面の告白』の比較研究

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  • From nanshoku to homosexuality : A comparative study of Mishima Yukio's Confessions of a mask

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This article analyzes Mishima Yukio's Confession of a Mask (1949), focusing on the sexuality of the male protagonist "I". Although "I" confesses his sexual desire to the same sex, it is not appropriate to apply the term "homosexual" to him, because his sexual inclination is not exactly equal to the "homosexuality" in the modern Western sense. The fact that he is attracted to men of a different age group from his own is related to the traditional make-up of the same sex couple in nanshoku (the Japanese tradition of male-love), which typically consisted of an older man and a younger boy. There were two different nanshoku traditions; monastic and military, and "I" possesses the features of both: the idolization of the love object of the former, and the educational function of the latter. However, in contrast with traditional nanshoku, which was tolerated and even celebrated in pre-modern Japan, "I" considers his same sex desires sinful and shameful. His notions about his sexuality are influenced by Western prejudices about male love seen in discourses on homosexuality in the West. At the same time, he has a strong sense of subjectivity that makes him capable of expressing and confessing his own sexual desires. With "I"'s confession, a modern subjectivity and sexual identity emerges, and in this sense, he can be called a "homosexual", in the same sense as, for example, the male protagonist Billy in John Fox's Boys on the Rock (1984), a representative work of American gay fiction. By comparing "I" with Billy, I will point out modernized and Westernized aspects of the narrator's sexuality, and conclude that the character "I" represents the mixed characteristics of indigenous and exogenous elements of male love in modernized Japan.

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