princess that engages his attention and his sympathies. He is 'knocked

flat to learn that the figure he has taken for a handsome knight in a picture book is in reality that of Joan of Arc and not a young man. As his school days wear on, there is growing dismay at his inability to be stirred by feminine fantasies of any sort, and his realization that the word 'woman' holds literally no appeal for his emotions. For he receives no more sensual impression from 'woman' than from 'pencil,' or 'automobile', or 'broom.' When a girl cousin leans her head on his thigh, he experiences no sexual feeling, but simple 'an extremely luxurious pleasure, like that feeling produced by the weight of a decoration hanging on the breast.' More positively, the concept of maleness has intoxicated him from infancy. One of his earliest memories is of the attraction felt for a nightsoil man wearing tight trousers. A young high school instructor writing on the blackboard becomes in Kochan's schoolboy imagination a statue of the nude "Hercules Drawing the Bow.' The reader watches Kochan at fourteen fitting his overshoes carefully into the footprints of Omi, a muscular schoolmate who becomes the object of his first love, a love soon acknowledged in Kochan' heart as frankly sexual. Omi sets the pattern of qualities that will attract the physically weaker Kochan throughout life'strength, an impression of overflowing blood, ignorance, rough gestures, careless speech, and the savage melancholy inherent in flesh not tainted in any way with intellect.'

Kochan's woman-dominated childhood may well stand as a sufficient explanation for his homosexuality, but the hero himself seems to believe some what naively, that his condition is congenital. Less dubious is his analysis of his lasting bloodlust as a reciprocal effect of anemia, a theory at least as tenable as current proposals that homosexuality arises from defidiency in hormones or vitamins. Kochan is early obsessed with the 'spectacle of outpouring blood,' and his dreams center on situations such as the planning of a murder theater where young gladiators will of fer their lives for his amusement-'I was completely in love with any youth who was killed.' In frank and never prurient self-revelation, Kochan discusses his addiction to 'the solitary vice' and certain fetishesslaughter, armpits, the odor of sweat.

But Kochan's awareness does not bring acceptance of himself. He is driven to make the attempt, by sheer will, to persuade others that he is just like them. With tragic precocity he devises a masquerade that he will play out to the end. Early, he has played joylessly at war with girl cousins, in that sardonic and paradoxical mood 'by which we crave things which we actually do not want at all.' It is a familiar symptom, this masochistic exploiting of a disliked role. Kochan suffers agonies from the leaden fal seness of his relations with women. He forcibly calls up images of women in lascivious poses. He pretends to be in love with a mattachine REVIEW

succession of women. He permits himself to hope flickeringly that he can 'change,' and even visits a prostitute, with total failure as the result, of

course.

Finally, he pursues Sonoko, a classmate's sister, developing a wistful tendemess for her that awakens the girl's love and allows her to dream of marriage. But at the showdown he backs out, as he has known he would, disappointing both their families. In a subtly conceived final scene, Kochan for a moment half fears and half hopes that he has betrayed his secret to the sensitive girl who has now married another-he has stared with undisguisable passion at one of the tough young males who draw him so irresistibly. But Sonoko, like most of humanity, has been trained not to see things that should not be seen, and fortunately-or unfortunately-does not notice. The reader shares Kochan's own ironic mixture of relief and sorrow that the masquerade has worked and no doubt will continue to work. 'I believed optimistically that once the performance was finished the curtain would fall and the audience would never see the actor without his make-up." It is a hope echoed, and realized, by numberless reluctant wearers of masks since the birth of mankind.

The Occidental reader may be pardoned for wondering whether Kochan and his creator are representative modern Japanese. The book is prefixed with a long quotation from 'The Brothers Karamazov.' Kochan reads 'Quo Vadis,' cites Hirschfeld, pores over illustrations depicting statues of Greek athletes, and shows wide acquaintance with European romantic literature. Still, the setting and the minor characters are exotic despite the vividness of their portrayal, and the book undeniably possesses the added interest of topicalness for the Western reader: Japan in the 30's, Japan in wartime, swept with the 'wave of hypocritical stoicism' that afflicts any country at the outbreak of war but offering youths like Kochan only the trancelike boredom of inefficient camps and a life spent largely in trains; the pervading sense of transitoriness as defeat becomes certain. 'Life struck us as being a strangely volatile thing. It was exactly as though life were a salt lake from which most of the water had suddenly evaporated, leaving such a heavy concentration of salt that our bodies floated buoyantly upon its surface.'

CONFESSIONS OF A MASK brings the modern Japanese homosexual into focus. As the jacket reminds us, the story of Kochan and his mask could happen in any civilized country.

It is better to have a right destroyed than to abandon it because

of fear.

-PHILIP MANN