Eh...
Al principio se me hizo aburrido. El final se me hizo exageradamente recargado.
Lo del medio estaba bien.

Me parece que al escritor se le va demasiado con temas paralelos que sólo sirven para recargar un libro de por si muy denso. Le sobran como 150 páginas.
A parte de eso, es el típico libro japonés, con sus suicidios, sus crisis de identidad, sus aventuras extra-matrimoniales y esas cosas. Para mi, leído uno, leídos todos. No estoy hecho para ellos, simplemente. ( )

A tragic story of denial and sublimation. Only Mishima could have written about this kind of love which is so utterly and obssessively compromised and doomed to failure. ( )

In Japan, Yukio Mishima's novel Forbidden Colors was released in two parts. The first eighteen chapters were compiled in 1951 while the collection with the final fourteen chapters was published in 1953. The English translation of Forbidden Colors by Alfred H. Marks was first published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1968. Like Mishima's earlier novel Confessions of a Mask, Forbidden Colors deals with prominent homosexual themes, although the two works approach the material in vastly different ways. Also like Confessions of a Mask, and many of Mishima's other works, Forbidden Colors contains some autobiographical elements. In addition to being my introduction to Japanese literature, Mishima and his works fascinate me. I've been slowly making my way through all of his material available in English, but I was particularly interested in reading Forbidden Colors.

After being betrayed time and again the aging author Shunsuke Hinoki has developed an intense hatred of women. Seeking revenge, he enters into a peculiar arrangement with a beautiful young man by the name of Yuichi Minami. Yuichi has come to realize that he loves men and is tormented by what that means living in a society which doesn't accept homosexuality. Shunsuke is willing to assist Yuichi in hiding his secret by helping to arrange his marriage and to develop a reputation as a philanderer. In exchange, Yuichi promises Shunsuke to make the women he seduces miserable. They may fall in love with him, but he will never love them in return. The agreement is advantageous for both men. Yuichi will have a perfect cover allowing him the freedom to explore his sexuality--no one would suspect a married man and a womanizer to have male lovers--and Shunsuke will have the revenge he so greatly desires.

Shunsuke is an unapologetic misogynist. His anti-women rhetoric can be difficult to take, but without it the plot of Forbidden Colors would never go anywhere. It is necessary and important as the story's catalyst. Mishima has very deliberately created a distasteful character who at the same time is enthralling in his extremes. Yuichi, despite being loved by all, isn't a particularly pleasant person, either. However, I did find his portrayal to be much more sympathetic. He's vain and self-centered, but he also has an air of naivety and innocence about him. Both men and women fall victim to his charms but Yuichi himself is often manipulated as well. Forbidden Colors is an absorbing tale as Yuichi struggles to keep his two lives separate, sinking deeper into Japan's underground gay community while trying to keep up appearances in his public life. It's an outlandish battle of the sexes that is hard to look away from and no one comes out unscathed.

Forbidden Colors explores and deals with a number of dualities: homosexuality and heterosexuality, love and hatred, youth and old age, beauty and ugliness, truth and deceit, cruelty and kindness, morality and immorality, and so on. Mishima plays the dichotomies off one another, but also reveals how closely intertwined they can be. The complexities of the characters' relationships show that opposites are rarely just that and how at times in the end they aren't really all that different. Yuichi, for example, comes to genuinely care for his wife but in his twisted way of thinking expresses that love through cruelty. There is a certain logic to his decision and his concern is real, though someone else might not reach the same conclusion. At it's heart Forbidden Colors is a fairly dark story with erotic underpinnings and characters who, though often unlikeable, are captivating. I found the novel to be incredibly engrossing.

Experiments in Manga ( )

A book at turns both scorning and beautiful. The collision of the ideals of beauty and the ugliness of life. ( )

"Even in that moment I could not believe that my interior beauty was consonant with Yuichi's exterior beauty. Socrates' prayer to the various gods of the place on that summer morning when he lay under the plane tree on the bank of the Ilissus River, chatting to the beautiful boy Phaedrus until the day cooled, seems to me the highest teaching on earth: "Pan, first, and all the gods that dwell in this place, grant that I may become fair within, and that such outward things as I have may be at peace with the spirit within me."
The Greeks had the rare power to look at internal beauty as if it were hewn from marble. Spirit was badly corrupted in later times, exalted through the action of lustless loathing. Beautiful young Alcibiades, drawn by the internal, love-lust wisdom of Socrates, was so aroused by the prospect of being passionately loved by that man as ugly as Silenus that he crept in with him and slept under the same mantle. When I read the beautiful words of Alcibiades in "The Drinking Party" dialogue, they almost bowled me over: "It would be embarrassing to tell men of intelligence that I did not give my body to someone like you--even more embarrassing that to admit to the uncultured multitude that I had surrendered to you. Much more!" (299-300).

This long citation comes from the Japanese novel Forbidden colours by Yukio Mishima. It shows that the key to understanding this complex novel lies in the understanding of Mishima's ideas about Greek philosophy.

In Forbidden colours an old novelist, Shunsuke Hinoki, wants to take revenge on women, as he feels women have scorned him throughout his life. To effectuate his revenge, Shunsuke has devised a plan in which he will use an irresistibly beautiful young man, Yuichi Minami, to drive women mad with love, and lust, and jealousy. He encourages the young Yuichi to marry Yasuko, and thus destroy her life. He later carefully plots to set other women up against each other, and foment jealousy. Partially successful, the novel develops to explore myriad other human relationships of lovers and friendship. Choosing Yuichi, Shunsuke did not know that Yuichi is gay. Regardless of his sexual orientation, Yuichi is a able to develop true love for his wife Yasuko, while this relation is not governed by lust. For lust, Yuichi turns to anonymous lovers whom he picks up cruising; he does not develop relationships with these young men; in the gay scene of Tokyo, under the eyes of his gay acquaintances, Yuichi appears a very restraint and chaste young man, never giving in to flirts of foreigners or other Japanese men. However, when he meets Count Kaburagi in this scene he develops an extended, sexual relationship with him, despite the fact that he is not attracted to the old man. With Shunsuke, the other old man in his life, he develops a long-term, asexual friendship. The clearly heterosexual Shunsuke's is oriented towards women in his lust, but ultimately decides that his true friend must have been the Narcissistic Yuichi.

Thus, in Forbidden colours Mishima paints all possible human sexual and friendship relations. Shunsuke would obviously stand for Socrates, while Yuichi, takes the role of a young Japanese Phaedrus. In as much as Mishima was fascinated by Greek ideals of love, he must have been shaped by, or have tried to reconcile these Greek ideals with Japanese cultural patterns. The famous chariot parable from Plato's Phaedrus in which the soul is described as a chariot drawn by complementary forces, a good horse and a bad horse, would be very well compatible with Japanese Zen Buddhist views of Yin and Yang, which could help explain the balance achieved between lust and restraint.

It is surprising to see how a young Japanese novelist could be influenced so profoundly by classical Greek literature, at an age just about 70 years into the opening up of the Japanese mind to Western culture.

Forbidden colours is a very long novel, and sometimes plot lines are vague, or even nearly forgotten. It is a very poetic novel, with often many beautiful descriptions. The novel is of special interest to gay readers attempting to understand the complex and hidden gay relations in Asian societies, and it beautifully explains how gay Asian man may truly find fulfillment in marriage, and starting a family. ( )