Risky Masquerades: The Play of Masks in Yukio Mishima’s Confessions and Qiu Miaojin’s Crocodile

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores queer masquerade and risk by comparing Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask with Qiu’s Notes of a Crocodile. Although masquerade is typically discussed in terms of performativity, insufficient attention is paid to masquerade as a play-form, particularly in scholarship on East Asian literatures. This offers a new perspective on Confessions and Notes, which are persistently read as autobiographical representation. Focusing on the trope of the mask in Confessions and Notes, this article shows that masquerade oscillates between different masks rather than between being and appearance. It reveals risks to identity and the body, and experiences and interpretive modes that are obscured by identitarian and epistemic categories. Instead of a gay novel, Confessions vehemently opposes fixing identity in any way. Similarly, Notes does not reflect Qiu’s own life and sexuality so much as a queer postcolonial rewriting of Confessions. While both novels demonstrate that masquerade is coercive play when it is a “straightening device,” they also suggest the notion of “ludic risk,” showing that masquerade offers the possibility to play with different identities and disrupt established patterns of behavior and recognition. Mishima’s and Qiu’s fiction helps us understand masquerade as risky play and a queer method.