Mishima, Yukio. Forbidden Colors (1953). New York: Perigree, 1980.

Often, when you come to this blog and find the same old stale book "review" sitting there at the top of the page, chances are I've probably read something, and then I've had to go on some kind of trip, or I've actually sunk myself into some "more important" writing project, and as the days go by that I don't write about the book I Finished! my knowledge of that book and the things of interest I think I could say about it wane more and more, to the point where I just wake up in the morning and can barely even spell "blog" much less remember that I maintain one.

For those who don't know, Yukio Mishima is one of Japan's most-revered writers of the 20th century. He committed suicide in 1970 that tragic and noble ritualistic way they have over there, and he was probably gay, though he was definitely married (to a woman). This novel is, above all, a harsh critique of marriage. Like Thomas Mann, the story begins with an aged, single, famous writer (Shunsuké) at the beach, gazing upon the impossibly beautiful body of a young male (Yuichi, much older than Mann's Tadzio). Shunsuké has been hurt, emotionally, and like embittered by two previous women he was with, and so he takes Yuichi under his proverbial wing as a kind of experiment.

Yuichi is to marry a young woman, but confesses that he can't ever love a woman. He feels nothing for the sex as a whole. Shunsuké tells him that women should be treated as stupid animals, easily manipulated, and tells him to go through with it for the sake of power and position. Then, throughout the rest of the novel, Shunsuké basically uses Yuichi's good looks to get him to seduce and emotionally destroy the very women who emotionally destroyed him.

It's, clearly, a pretty angry book. At one point Yuichi is walking with one of his many lovers throughout the book, and overhears a passing woman say something like "Ugh, gays!" He blows up to his companion:

"Them! Them!" Yuichi ground his teeth. "They who pay three hundred and fifty yen for a lunch hour together in a hotel bed, and have their great love affair in the sight of heaven. They who, if all goes well, build their rat's-nest love nests. They who, sleepy-eyed, diligently multiply. They who go out on Sundays with all their children to clearance sales at the department stores. They who scheme out one or two stingy infidelities in their lifetimes. They who always show off their healthy homes, their healthy morality, their common sense, their self-satisfaction."

Victory, however, is always on the side of the commonplace. Yuichi knew that all the scorn he could muster could not combat their natural scorn. (238, emphasis added)

So an angry book, but a pretty wise one. This is the most articulate version I've read of the idea that a gay man's anger or hatred toward the heterosexual order is always limited by the fact that he came from such an order, whereas a hetero can do everything possible to keep homosexuality out of his life all together, making his hatred for it real, powerful, and thorough.

The copy on the back of my copy of the book is not so wise, however. It interprets Yuichi's situation as being "[d]rawn to homosexuality after a loveless marriage," as though gay sex were some logical form of therapy (which for some married men maybe it is...). Mishima somewhat addresses this pre-"gay rights" homosexual dilletantism late in the book, once Yuichi starts sleeping with Kawada, who is some important financial worker:

The homosexual of promise, whoever he is, is one who recognizes that certain manliness within himself, and loves it, and holds fast to it, and the masculine virtue that Kawada recognized in himself was his ever-ready nineteenth-century predilection for diligence. A strange trap for one to be in! As in that long-ago warlike time, loving a woman was an effeminate act; to Kawada any emotion that ran counter to his own masculine virtue seemed effeminate. To samurai and homosexual the ugliest vice is femininity. Even though their reasons for it differ, the samurai and the homosexual do not see manliness as instinctive but rather as something gained only from moral effort. The ruin Kawada felt was moral ruin. The reason that he was an adherent of the Conservative party lay in its policy of protecting the things that should have been his enemies: the established order and the family system based on heterosexual love. (380)

Paging Larry Craig. Mishima's narrator loves to butt in a lot like this with a grand, sometimes-smirking knowingness about his characters, but it always felt more companionable than intrusive. All-in-all a pretty good novel, though I imagine his better-known books—those without, perhaps, so strong a need to delineate their author's desired position somewhere between the code of the samurai and that of the homosexual—are better reads.

Oh and there's this incredible sentence: "Drunker than if he had drunk saké, he was drunk on intoxication" (222).

Yes!