Confessions of a Mask, Yukio Mishima - thoughts?

I finished this last night and I can't say I liked it at all. Of course, I don't think Mishima set out to write an "enjoyable" novel, but still, the vast majority of the book was painful and unpleasant to me, and probably not for the reasons Mishima was hoping.

It's fitting that the novel starts with a long Dostoevsky quote (from Brothers Karamazov). Felt like Mishima was trying to write a version of Notes from the Underground. Kochan, the main character in the novel, is - like Underground Man - a pretty miserable outcast who engages in an enormous amount of self-analysis and philosophical musings. Like Notes, there's a pivotal scene during which Kochan visits a prostitute. And he's bent on ideas of death, destruction, etc.

But when Mishima wrote the novel he simply didn't have the cognitive power of Dostoevsky. The self-analysis and inner monologues are so overwritten that they make your eyes roll (I'm willing to consider this a translation problem, but I've read different translators of Mishima and I think this is a common issue). Nothing challenges you the way Notes does; only in the final part of the novel is there any pathos or tension.

I've read Mishima's Sea of Fertility series, which I'm very fond of, but everything else I've read of his I've found distasteful. These other novels feel like the same novel rewritten: most of them feature inwardly obsessed closeted gay (or sexually frustrated) men who hate the world and themselves. Temple of the Golden Pavilion, for example, feels like Confessions of a Mask but just in a different setting.

It makes me appreciate Spring Snow all the more.