Forbidden Colors

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.

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.

Im not a gay and Im not even bisexual (maybe im latent :) ), but I loved the book anyway. To appreciate male beauty you dont have to be a gay, especially if this beauty is portrayed in Ancient Greek sort of way and the most characters who worship it (are are destroyed by it) are females. Add to this the superior descriptive brilliance of Mishima and subtle pleasing decadence of the story and you will get an excellent novel. A very sensual and aestetical book. Some people compare it to Plato's "Symposium" and a think it is a great comparison.

Can we dare to be honest with ourselves and open ourselves to what is Beautiful in life and nourish and revel in the sensuality of Beauty? Or would we rather run away from our True Desires in terror, sinking into selfishness and cruelty and polite, hypocritical social artifice? These are some of the questions Mishima explores in this remarkable book, wonderfully translated by Alfred Marks. A haunting story of repressed desire and the pain repression causes. No matter how diligently the characters try to "order" their repressed, false lives, Reality comes breaking in, (notice as you read the novel how every time some new revelation is about to occur, a fire breaks out...);Beauty and desire haunts these people, but they dare not embrace it, it always seems out of reach; they sink into selfishness and despair. An incredible book.

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.