Forbidden Colors

I enjoyed this book

It was my binge of the complete works of Yasunari Kawabata that led me to Yukio Mishima, his friend and colleague, who I'd never read.I read the first of his late tetrology, Spring Snow. Hello, Mishima binge.The breathtaking beauty of Spring Snow led me to have similar expectations of, now that I've decided to read them in their chronological sequence, Forbidden Colors. I found the stark, abrupt, more realist tone immediately a challenge. I'd experienced a similar nostalgia for seemingly lost tone when reading Natsume Soseki's Botchan. Sure enough, once I realized there was a more recent translation, I read it and recognized the Soseki I loved. There are no alternate translations of Forbidden Colors. Alfred H. Marks' version is the only one. I realized that, very jarringly, Mishima is a writer whose whole style began brashly in the Jean Genet verite mold, perhaps, and later works are as incisive, but narrated from a Spartan discipline coupled with transcendent poetics.Matters of tone settled, there is in fact plenty of poetry and an abundance of philosophical insight and exploration in Forbidden Colors.Yuichi becomes involved with the elder writer, Shunsuke through a chance encounter. Shunsuke's had a tiff with his very young girlfriend, Yasuko, and follows her to a resort where she and Yuichi are staying. He emerges from the lake near where Shunsuke is spying, as a Greek god. Everyone describes him that way. Trust me. (Actually, a nice narrative function, the occasionally floating narrative POV, like Robert Altman's Floating Window' camera technique). Shunsuke ends up taking charge of Yuichi, and Yuichi's self-examination lead him to the truth, that he cannot love anyone, and cannot physically love women. Shunsuke, though straight himself, introduces Yuichi into the whole gay underground; the parks, the bars, the closeted captains of industry; more than a little Dangerous Liaisons to the book with its intrigues and intimate cruelties, not least of which is the lie of Yuichi's marriage to Yasuko.Forbidden Colors and his first novel, Confessions of a Mask, are considered autobiographical. Mishima's widow always steadfastly refuted his homosexuality. I can only imagine that a work like this, with its intimate knowledge, redolent appreciation and evocations of scents and sensibilities, the inner workings of a mind coming into its true sexual identity, with in the end true evangelical pride in the community, could only be autobiographical.A truly essential book.

I am by no means a qualified person to give an in-depth review on this book. I am not an overly literary person, I read for fun. With that said this book was still a very good read. Yukio Mishima is such a talented and skillful writer and it’s a shame he’s not more known in the west. To me, the translation was excellent and it was an overall a captivating read. If you’re new to Mishima, Japanese literature or just want something different to read I highly recommend this book, along with all of his others!

This dark tale, full of twists and turns, is the story of a successful 60 year old novelist who decides to seek revenge on the women who have betrayed him in love over the years. He selects as his weapon a beautiful young gay man. Whereas this sounds somewhat like Miss Havisham's revenge on males through the beautiful Estella in Charles Dicken's Great Expectations, Yuichi is far more vacant and far less a noble character than Estella. Estella recognized that she had been reared to be a beautiful monster and thus spurns Pip, the man she loves, and marries a monstrosity of a bully rich boy. Yuichi on the other hand marries a 19 year old girl and makes her life miserable by his nightly cruising in the underground Japanese gay scene. The attraction of age to beauty, the very defenselessness of humans in the face of overwhelming male beauty, the power of eros to undermine reason and wisdom, resonated with Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. The jungle dog-eat-dog world of the underground gay nightlife in Tokyo reminded me of the unsavory bitchy queens in Jean Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers, which fully describes the post-war gay underground in Paris. The book was full of homophobia, especially self destructive internalized homophobia. Gay characters are miseable, catty, competitive, and self-destructive. However Mishima makes his heterosexual characters just as miserable when faced with beauty that they cannot obtain. Mishima's writing style is unique, his use of language superb and shocking at times. However, as I finished page 400, I decided that the book could be shortened to 200 pages and possibly be an improved work of art. Even though the plot line shows how beauty is used as a weapon, the philosophical discussions throughout the book would indicate that it is in human nature to lose reason when faced with overwhelming beauty. The novelist in the story never achieved this kind of beauty in his work, but he certainly knows how to manipulate this beauty to seek revenge. The women on whom he seeks revenge however are totally unsympathetic, as is almost every character in the story except Yuichi's young wife, Yasuko. The characters are trapped together in a vast web of relationships and bonds, appearing more and more pathetic and vapid with each destructive incident, yet fully illustrating how Eros makes fools of us all.

The book was in good condition considering the age of it !

Un libro que transmite tanto sobre una cultura que desconocemos profundamente. Una delicia para cualquier lector entregado... Ojo, no es para principiantes :D