Customer Reviews

Forbidden Colors

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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!

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.

This is one of Mishima's more subdued novels. Although his trademark ideas about death, beauty and glory are present, it is more concerned with psychological study, and the view it takes is extremely bleak. He does an amazing job of portraying the shallowness and hypocrisy of a wide variety of people, from the pretentious and embittered author (who seems more than somewhat autobiographical) to the foppish members of the Japanese homosexual underground, and the flightly and neurotic women who are ruined (deservedly, you often feel) by the author's schemes. If that sort of thing depresses you, you're better off looking elsewhere. I enjoyed it, and sometimes found it very funny, but I would complain that the story seems to drag a little. These characters can't carry such a long story, since they are trapped by their vices and only become more and more pathetic. I would have been happy if it were about a hundred pages shorter. Also, I wouldn't look here for any profound insight into the nature of homosexuality; I don't think Mishima was really concerned with that, here or elsewhere. Homosexuality is a device used to expose flaws in society.

This book was the first of it's kind that I've read; Yukio Mishima came highly recommended by a friend, and I could not find the other books they had suggested, so I took up Forbidden Colors, and was slowly drawn into the book.

Every character was dangerous and flawed in some manner but poor Yasuko, who is a typical woman of her time period. And she gains the least out of all of these characters, as Yuichi is mentored into a tool for revenge againts women by his sponsor and mentor;a libido driven romantic who has been burned once to often and has turned hateful and cruel. Even as he encourages Yuichi to delve into his homosexual liasons, he forces him into a marriage and two affairs in which there is no love--Yuichi loves no one, in fact,but himself. He is a beautiful, vain creature, and not really likable. He has moments, where he almost seems human, gullible and almost likable, but they are few and far between.

However, this is not American literature, and so good is not required to triumph. Yuichi seems rewared for his uncaring demeanor and his beauty both, and it's fascinating to see this play of dark desires clashing againts once another. It's a good read--but it's not an easy one.

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.

Other have attempted to tackle to storyline of this complicate and fascinating novel. I'll only briefly add that the author manages insights (both light and very dark) into the human condition unlike any author I've read before. This is a book that must be returned to after the first (engaging) reading.

This is a tale of forbidden fruit. Delicate and bawdy, unapologetic, passionate, the carnal drive of a man. Interesting read, great work of art, and highly recommended. One of my favorite books. A bit dark, but darkness seems to bring life to an infinite aray of colors.

Yukio Mishima was one of Japan's most prolific writers in the past century and is well known for his The Sound of Waves amongst other works. I've just finished reading Forbidden Colors in a translation by Alfred H. Marks.

Forbidden Colors is the story of Yuichi Minami, a young Japanese student whose beauty overpowers everyone who sees him, irrespective of their sexual leanings. Yuichi is gay and harbors a deep hatred for the strictly heterosexual culture he finds himself in. With the encouragement and guidance of Shunsuke Hinoki, a retired novelist, he marries Yasuko, a young beautiful woman Shunsuke was involved with before she met Yuichi. Yuichi's beauty allows him to carry on simultaneous (asexual) affairs with several different women while also enjoying the indulgence of practically every gay man he meets at Rudon's, an underground gay bar.

Shunsuke's relationship with Yuichi and the young man's overall personality is reminscent of Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray, and like his victorian counterpart Yuichi is a difficult character to feel any sympathy for. Even though Yuichi feels frustrated about the constraints he finds himself in he never exhibits any tenderness or love for anyone at all. Throughout the length of the book he continues to exploit everyone around him, from Shunsuke, who believes he's using Yuichi to avenge the affronts handed over to him by younger women, to Yuichi's silently suffering wife Yasuko.

If you've enjoyed The Picture of Dorian Gray then you'll probably enjoy Forbidden Colors. I certainly did. Recommended.

The two main characters are male and they conspire to degrade and demoralize a number of female characters. The weapon of choice is to have the young male character, a handsome homosexual who has no interest in women, flirt with the female characters and make them fall in love with him.

On the one hand this is a fascinating look at gay culture in post-war Japan, but on the other hand it's a Debbie Downer.

It's also a bit of a soap opera and would make a great movie.