"(A) model of classical psychological fiction," this is "Mishima's greatest masterpiece since Confessions of a Mask"

While Kyoko's House "fails as a full-length novel" and "you rarely get a novel so static, so devoid of conflicts among the human beings," the novel is "nothing but a brilliant success." "What lives in 'Kyoko's House' is the spirit of the era called 'postwar,'" and "(t)his spirit is entirely alien to what popular historians of thought call social reformism, democracy, new education, what the revolutionary intellectuals of the late 1930s called 'the second youth,' and all other fragments of Zeitgeist, and yet it is what lurks at the bottom of it all."

"Balzac would have created a fresco; all Mishima requires is a large mirror…. I wonder if he intended to reflect the outside world. I think this is a trick of Mishima’s: to claim he is going to reflect the outside and actually to show us the inside."

"All the characters are just parts of Mishima; all the novel presents is the extraordinarily isolated, internalized world of Mishima himself... Initially he may have intended the mirror ... to reflect the outside world. But all he actually did was to show us an explanation of his own inner world."

"This is his first big failure."