This paper offers a reading of Yukio Mishima’s Kamen no kokuhaku (1949, Confessions of a Mask) in isolation of its author and the latter’s controversial acts in November 1970. By viewing the protagonist in his structural and diegetic multiplicity under the lens of gender performance, this paper emphasises the artificial and constructed nature of the narrative and its character, revealing the novel’s wary attitude towards the notion of interiority, memory and confession.