Word: mishima
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FORBIDDEN COLORS by Yukio Mishima, translated from the Japanese by Alfred H. Marks. 403 pages. Knopf...
...Yukio Mishima, 43, is clearly out to become Japan's answer to Papa-san Hemingway. He lifts weights. He excels at kendo, a Japanese swordfighting sport. He makes headlines by producing, directing, and acting in films. And, of course, he writes. How he writes! Poetry, modern No plays, short stories by the score, and novels (The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea) at the rate of nearly one a year...
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...