The iron century

Confessions of a Mask (仮面の告白, Kamen no Kokuhaku) is the second novel by Japanese author Yukio Mishima. First published on 5 July 1949 by Kawade Shobō, it launched him to national fame though he was only in his early twenties. Some have posited that Mishima's similarities to the main character of the novel come from the character acting as a stand-in for Mishima's own autobiographical story. The novel is divided into four long chapters, and is written using the first-person narrative mode. The book's epigraph is a lengthy quote from The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky ("The Penance of a Fervent Heart—Poem" in Part 3, Book 3).