Yukio Mishima

Were it possible, I would give anything I possibly could to sit down with Mishima and discuss art and culture and life. While I can respect a lot of his political stances, he was a bit too militaristic for me to ever want to broach that subject with him.

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I recently finished Confessions of a Mask -- Mishima's debut novel about a gay man trying to come to terms with his desires, as well as the sense of displacement and false identity when trying to interact with the outside world of "normality."
A book hasn't had quite the same effect on me as Confessions... since I read Edmund White's The Beautiful Room is Empty for the first time in college. Though, thinking about that now -- I wonder who I would have become had these experiences been reversed and I had discovered Mishima before White, and during a time when I was in much the same headspace, going through a lot of the same emotions, as the unnamed character/narratoe in Mishima's novel. (Oddly enough, the main character/narrator in White's novel also goes unnamed.)