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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Subtle evil is more beautiful than coarse goodness, and is therefore moral.", January 6, 2007
Bitter and brilliant, Forbidden Colors is a tough book to like. Someone asked me if I enjoyed it, and I honestly cannot say that I did. It moved me. It filled me with both admiration and pity. It depressed me, and ultimately troubled me. Mishima at his best is a writer of terrible vision. Even though I might not have liked what he had to say in Forbidden Colors, I believe that it is one of his best works.
Forbidden Colors is a relentlessly bitter book. When the imperfect and intellectual collide with beauty, nobody comes off well at all. Women are shrill, easy to manipulate, and stupid. Gay men are grasping and shallow. Even the intellectual writer who starts the whole plot is pilloried for his age, perpetual failure, and incompleteness of his vision. Only the beautiful emerge relatively unscathed, their shortcomings in other areas obviously unimportant put next to their aesthetic value. It is an unhappy and unkind view of the world. It becomes an unpleasant experience to read since Mishima is such a skilled writer that by the end you suspect that this perspective may be right after all. And which of us can lay claim to the beauty of Yuichi?
This is not an uplifting novel. I gave it five stars despite myself. I admired it tremendously, but when I was done I still almost wished that I had not read it. Recommended for people interested in Mishima, the Japanese modern novel, and representations of gender and sexuality in modern literature. Although sex is at the center of the book, it is not explicit or graphic. Many of the ideas are similar to those in Mishima's essay book Sun and Steel, but Forbidden Colors has the advantage of being much more readable than the non-fiction.
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18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A dark and subtle story, December 16, 2000
Mishima's "Forbidden Colors" is in some ways a dark, homoerotic, post-modern allusion to Dickens' "Great Expectations", with the beautiful Yuichi replacing the outwardly-impeccable Estella. Unlike Dickens more direct style, however, Mishima's writing is challenging to read, with layer upon layer of metaphor and allusion. This is not a happy story. The characters are deeply flawed, and their struggles to overcome their lackings are often futile. The most deserving characters wind up with the least, while Yuichi's beauty carries him through a whirlwind of undeserved fortune. While reading this book is a substantial investment of time, the sordid beauty of writing, as well as its unusual themes, made me feel as if my time was spent wisely. A great book for anyone interested in Japanese counter-culture!
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9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Signature Mishima, January 14, 1999
This compelling book strings the usual subtle tones of homoeroticism that run through most of Mishima's work. Lyrical and engrossing, there are many themes parallel to his own life at the time: fraught mother, beautiful and subservient wife, decadent secret life of the Japanese homosexual underground. The existential end punctuates this almost journal-like tale.
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