미시마 유키오 ‘관념과 육체’의 상관 -『가면의 고백』을 중심으로 -

Abstract

No one has been so much acutely sensitive to the conflicting relations between the body and the soul as Yukio Mishima. His remark, ‘Our body is eaten away by the language’, epitomizes his admiration for the physical body like no other. It may even be said that the process by which he fashions his life to get a perfect body is made possible by his perception of separation of the body from the soul. His notion of these two conflicting entities is basically a matter of existential anxiety, which was so acute as to drive him to commit suicide. In this paper, I propose a separation between the body and the soul as the central idea in Confessions of a Mask, one of Mishima’s early short stories, In terms of methodology, I focus on the meaning of the ‘mask,’ delving into its multi-layered structure of meaning. Specifically, I try to probe into how the conflict between actual entities and notional entities unfolds, especially by considering the metaphorical aspect of the mask and homosexuality as well as the shift of an illusion to a real-life presence. I also discuss the issue of conceptual aspect of reversion.