[When] Mishima stated that he had "somehow conquered his inner monster" by writing Confessions of a Mask, it did not mean merely that he had finally confronted his homosexual temperament, but also that he had found the way to deal with his desire to express his temperament in literature, the way to fictionalize his temperament.

Besides being a confessional novel, Confessions of a Mask is a novel about Mishima's method for the novel; indeed, it is as significant to Mishima's novel as The Counterfeiters is to Gide's. If the temperament and "sensuous perception" underlying his metaphysical and aesthetic world are poetry, this novel is the logical architecture of that world and the means to give it logical form (by fictionalizing it). For Mishima, the novel meant the method, and the question of the novel and the question of methodology were inseparable. Indeed, for Mishima, who preferred masks to real faces, structure to lyricism, and artificial effects to real facts, "fiction" was the key term.

When it first appeared, however, Confessions of a Mask was considered solely as an openly autobiographical work, an I-novel in which a bold confession of the author's homosexuality takes place. In fact, the protagonist of the novel is meticulously presented as identical to the author insofar as his biographical data are concerned. If the novel is a confessional I-novel, then the identification of the protagonist with the author is not in doubt, and the confession of the protagonist is the confession of the author. The novel must be understood accordingly as the removal of the protagonist-author's social mask, an exposé of the real face hitherto hidden behind the mask. (pp. 182-83)

There is no doubt that Mishima meant the protagonist to be taken as the author himself, as his meticulous effort to make the protagonist identical to him indicates, and it is also evident that Mishima intended to make his homosexuality public by writing this novel. Indeed, confession exists at the core of modern fiction, and the modern novel is a means for "confession." (p. 183)

What did Mishima intend to do by letting his protagonist confess, and what did he want to reveal by wearing the mask of the homosexual protagonist? Mishima was not like Shimazaki Tōson and Tayama Katai, writers who were urged on in their art by a desire for self-revelation for ethical or artistic reasons; nor was he like Shiga Naoya, a writer for whom the search for self provided the structure and the materials for his novels. Yet in creating his prototypal, ideal heroes, Mishima was almost exclusively involved in creating heroes who reflected various aspects of his own personality. Whether Mishima was an egomaniac seeking to express himself in terms of his heroes or merely tried fastidiously to identify himself with the heroes he created, there is no doubt that the protagonists' worlds were what inspired Mishima's dream and passions as his own inner world.

Mishima's well-known dislike of Dazai Osamu certainly reflects on the surface his criticism of those I-novelists who use openly their own weakness and desperation as subjects of literary pursuit. Yet one cannot but feel that Mishima's dislike of Dazai is due to his disgust at seeing in Dazai his own egotistical inclination exposed so defenselessly. Mishima's attack on confessional I-novels and their authors—brooding, self-destructive intellectuals who could be interested only in their own inner agonies—and his criticism of the tendency among Japanese writers to identify life and art, can best be understood as paradoxical rhetoric used to hide his egotistical involvement in himself. (pp. 183-84)

Although there is no doubt that Confessions of a Mask is about himself, what is revealed by the confession is not the real face of Mishima; the novel is another "masked play," enabling him to survive not as a writer who lives in daily social life, but to survive as a writer.

Prior to writing Confessions of a Mask, Mishima wrote several nihilistic aesthetic works which appeared anachronistic in the postwar literary atmosphere. He had already discovered his central theme, the life whose beauty and brilliance are supported by its impending annihilation. His "sense of ending" had already found the metaphors of summer and sea, metaphors which were to occupy an increasingly important place in his later works. Mishima started as a writer with his "aesthetics of annihilation (ending)" serving as the raison d'être for both his life and his art. Just as Mizoguchi in Kinkakuji … felt threatened when he learned that the temple had escaped, now that the war was over and destruction no longer seemed inevitable, Mishima felt threatened by having to face the postwar era of peace in which a long life seemed assured to him, thus depriving his art of its basic metaphysics. The tragic stance which Mishima and his protagonists could assume when confronted by predicaments in which their death seemed assured would no longer be possible for them, and Mishima had to create new predicaments which would enable them to be tragic heroes, heroes in the world of his "aesthetics of the ending."

In this sense, Confessions of a Mask is his successful attempt to create a new "fate" for his hero, a fate that would condemn him to inevitable "destruction." In the novel, his destruction or death is only a social one, taking the form of absolute alienation in a spiritual sense from peaceful, "everyday life." The novel is a deliberate declaration of the identity of the author and his hero as masochistic homosexuals. The declaration is a challenge to society, but not a challenge to accept the protagonist-author as a homosexual. Rather, establishing his "abnormality" was an attempt to separate himself absolutely from the world of daily life and to force society, therefore, to condemn him.

The novel is, therefore, a rational articulation of his relation to the world and to the age. It is a novel in which Mishima made a statement about his "being in the world," to use Sartre's phrase, attempting thereby to retain the possibility of being identified as a tragic hero and thus to maintain his aesthetics of death. If Mishima "confessed" in the novel, he confessed his deep-seated fear of living in the peaceful postwar world where his raison d'être as a man and as a writer no longer existed. (pp. 184-86)

Mishima's homosexuality was a "fate" which he deliberately chose, a fate which separated him (and his protagonist) from ordinary life….

In order to make his homosexuality "fate," it was necessary for both society and Mishima himself to condemn his trait or temperament. (p. 186)

Defining oneself as an outsider, a "pagan" who cannot occupy a place in a normal, humane life, is one of the singular means artists have used for self-definition in modern industrial society, a utilitarian society hostile to art….

In modern Japanese literature, such I-novelists as Katai and Tōson converted their failure in everyday life into privileges of the novelist which would enable them to concern themselves exclusively with their isolation and to write about it. Dazai Osamu also deliberately acted out the role which others forcibly imposed on him. In Mishima's case, homosexuality presented a stronger rationale for the protagonist's isolation and uniqueness, for the isolation is physically real rather than just mental. As for Mishima himself, in like fashion precisely, his "abnormality" was the license for his art, his license for writing. (p. 189)

Confessions of a Mask is the story of the birth of an artist, that of Mishima himself. The homosexual protagonist who at once fears and aspires for pure flesh is a metaphor for the writer who, belonging to the world of intellect, writes because he aspires for the tragic intensity of life. In this sense the novel is about himself, about the search for the author. The self-search of the protagonist is identified with the self-search of the author, his ontological quest for what he is; it is the self-search of "a creature, non-human and somehow strangely pathetic." In this sense the novel can be called truly confessional.

The novel is, however, a fictional work and not a real account of Mishima's life. In his notes for Confessions of a Mask, Mishima wrote that true confession is impossible ("the true essence of confession is its impossibility"), for only a mask with flesh can confess, and that he intended to write a perfect fictional work of confession. In order to pursue the ontological quest of the mask, a mask must deliberately be worn. If Mishima's mask were forcibly taken away, we might discover that there is neither a face nor any naked facts at all behind it; there would be nothing, or at best abstract passion, which was for him the substance of life. (pp. 189-90)