Word: mishima
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
FORBIDDEN COLORS, by Yukio Mishima. A diabolic story of a staggeringly handsome young homosexual who systematically attracts and frustrates women, cunningly told by an author who is Japan's answer to Papa-san Hemingway...
Paralleling Hemingway the artist as well as the public personality, he has become the leading spokesman for his own "lost generation" of the half-Westernized young. How lost is lost? Pretty desperately far out, as Mishima charts it. In Forbidden Colors, an ugly, aging novelist with a consuming hatred for women makes a devil's compact with a staggeringly handsome young homosexual named Yuichi. For a very cold cash settlement, this irresistible "Apollo molded in bronze" will exact the old man's revenge by systematically attracting and frustrating women-even to the extent of marriage...
Falling in love with Yuichi is like falling in love with cruelty. But Author Mishima's world is rich in nothing if not masochists, male as well as female. For while he is at it. Yuichi gives just as bad a time to his gay boy friends, who range up the scale from waiter to automobile manufacturer...
...scenes are those set in the suffocating, sealed-off community of the homosexual-scenes as diabolic and profaning as a witches' sabbath. Here, in the gay parks and bars frequented by people in "the van of decadence," is modern hell for sure. And Yuichi-make no mistake-is Mishima's modern damned man: he who kills everybody and everything he touches by a kind of pathological indifference. He is a soul capable of being neither corrupted nor redeemed because he really wants nothing, nothing...
Over the Shoulders. At times, Mishima's single-pattern plot seems to glide in slow, repetitive cycles, freezing faces in glaring expressions like kabuki actors: frenzied passion, cross-eyed frustration. Still, what keeps the novel from being another existentialist dead end is the presence of the author. It is finally not the hang-ups of his characters but the questions Mishima asks about them that fascinate-including the ultimate, curiously Japanese question that his novel tests for itself: Can obsession with death, pushed to an extreme, result in some absolute awareness of life...