Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4

Yukio Mishima, The Man and Literature (Shoichi Sayeki)
About "Confessions of a Mask" (Tsuneari Fukuda)
Commentary | Confessions of a Masked Writer (Heo Ho)
Translator's Note
Yukio Mishima's Chronology

“He is a magician who creates something out of nothing.
“Confessions of a Mask” is not only the best work he has written, but also one of the best achievements that will remain for a very long time in postwar literature.” --- Fukuda Tsuneari (literary critic)

"Confessions of a Mask" is the first full-length novel by Yukio Mishima, a representative Japanese aesthetic writer. Its groundbreaking content and elegant descriptions not only gave a fresh shock to the Japanese literary world at the time of its publication, but it also holds the most important value as a source for the study of Mishima's literature. Furthermore, it is a sensational work that announced the emergence of men's literature.
The very fact that he logically expressed his own intimate homosexual tendencies, linking them to his upbringing from birth to adulthood and his surroundings, was a fresh shock to the Japanese literary world at the time.
Critics welcomed the emergence of this new literature with rave reviews, such as, “This work marks the beginning of the 20th century in Japanese literature.”
This work clearly displays the aesthetic worldview of Yukio Mishima, who considered life itself to be the highest art.

Yukio Mishima's autobiographical novel, which created a unique world of beauty with its splendid prose.

To properly understand the autobiographical nature of 『Confession of a Mask』, we must first examine his life.

Yukio Mishima, whose real name was Kimitake Hiraoka, was born on January 14, 1925, the eldest of two sons and one daughter, to an elite bureaucrat who graduated from the University of Tokyo, and a mother who came from a family of educators.
Born prematurely, he survived several near-death experiences and spent his childhood under the overprotection of his grandmother.
He completed elementary, middle, and high school at Gakushuin, an aristocratic school. He graduated at the top of his class in 1944 and entered the Faculty of Law at the University of Tokyo at his father's recommendation.

Mishima, who had been actively engaged in creative work since the age of thirteen, fully displaying his precocious talent, made his official debut in the Japanese literary world in 1946 when his short story "Cigarettes" was published in the magazine "Human" at the recommendation of Yasunari Kawabata.
After graduating from university, Mishima worked at the Banking Bureau of the Ministry of Finance, but resigned after less than a year and began his career as a full-time writer.
At that time, I received a request from Kawate Shobo to write a long novel, and the novel I wrote was “Confession of a Mask.”
He did not agree with the proletarian literature that was popular at the time, and instead built his own world of beauty with his splendid prose. He published masterpieces such as “Thirst for Love,” “Blue Days,” and “The Sound of Waves” in succession, and reached the peak of his literary career at the age of only thirty-one with “The Temple of the Golden Pavilion,” the pinnacle of Mishima’s literature.

Yukio Mishima, in his late 30s, published the "February 26 Incident Trilogy" based on the February 26 Incident, a coup d'état by young military officers, and showed a tendency toward both civil and military discipline and nationalism.
And in September 1965, when he was forty, he began serializing the four-part series "The Sea of ​​Abundance" in the magazine "Shincho," and on the morning of November 25, 1970, after submitting the final manuscript to the magazine, Mishima arrived at the Ichigaya Garrison of the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force with four of his followers, took the commander-in-chief hostage, gathered the men under the balcony, and gave a speech urging the Self-Defense Forces to rise up, but when there was no response, he committed suicide by seppuku in the commander-in-chief's office according to a traditional ritual.
He was forty-five years old.

Confessions of a Mask, or the Artist's Bare Face

Numerous writers have written 'Portraits of the Artist in His Young Days' about themselves.
It was out of the opposite desire that I wanted to write this novel.
In this novel, I am completely conceived as a ‘writer.’
......
I tried to create a complete confessional fiction.
The title 'Confession of a Mask' also contains such meaning.
(Author's Note)

The first-person novel, "Confessions of a Mask," is composed of four chapters, starting with the episode about the protagonist's birth and continuing until his mid-twenties, when he graduates from college and resigns from his job, which is almost identical to Mishima's chronology introduced above.


From around that time, I began to vaguely understand that what appeared to others as my acting was an expression of my desire to return to my essence, and that what appeared to others as my natural self was in fact my acting.
(Author's Note)

Yukio Mishima could not help but discover his bare face in the very desire for art, that is, the desire to wear a mask.
"Confession of a Mask" expresses this desire without filtering.
Also, the author's own commentary included in the first edition includes the following words:

This book is my last will and testament to the realm of death where I have lived until now.
Writing this book means paradoxical suicide for me.
If you film a suicide and then replay it, the person who committed it will fly from the bottom of the valley to the top of the cliff at a furious speed and come back to life.
What I have attempted by writing this book is a technique for restoring such life.
Although it is called a confession, I let 'lies' run wild in this novel.
Let those lies spread wherever they wanted.
Then the lies will be abundant and will not disturb the field of 'truth'.
In the same sense, only a mask that has dug into the flesh, a mask with flesh on it, can confess.
The essence of confession is that it is impossible.
(Author's Note)

The content that Yukio Mishima stated in “Confessions of a Mask” is truly varied and colorful.
It is interesting that in the first part, he starts off with an unbelievable story about seeing the scene at the time of his birth, and then starts his candid confession as if the work were all fiction. However, the story of his childhood as the eldest son in a family whose fortune was rapidly declining and being overprotected by his grandmother and living like a girl, the story of wanting to be a sewage collector after seeing one, the story of young people going wild at a festival, the story of being excited about dressing up, his attachment to tragedy, Joan of Arc facing death, a fairy tale prince being killed by a dragon, masturbation, 'acting' in a war game and the shock of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian, and his love for his older classmate Omi are listed in the first half, Chapters 1 and 2.
Chapters 3 and 4 then describe in detail how such a protagonist reacts to interactions with the opposite sex in real life, perhaps based on his own experiences.
Sonoko is actually modeled after the younger sister of Mishima's close friend.
"Confession of a Mask" differs significantly from existing confessional literature in that it conceptualizes past episodes rather than realistically confessing them. It is also on a different level in that it focuses on the truth hidden behind the act of confession.
Mishima himself described this work as "excrement born of a mental crisis," and the reactions of critics at the time were similar: "It feels like being possessed by a fox," "A sharp and paradoxical work," "The emergence of male literature," "Self-praise, self-intoxication," "He is completely new."
The intense expressions such as 'The 20th century begins only through this work' stand out.


After writing a novel like "Confessions of a Mask," which seemed to have barely conquered the monster within, two conflicting tendencies clearly emerged in my twenty-four-year-old mind.
One was the feeling that I had to survive somehow, and the other was the inclination towards a clear, intellectual, and bright classicism.
(Author's Note)

"Confessions of a Mask" is not only one of Yukio Mishima's finest works, but it also marks the beginning of a new era of Japanese literature after the war, proving that Yukio Mishima's sensuous yet sophisticated prose still possesses literary value.