[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...