Perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into
a line of poetry written with a splash of blood.
Yukio Mishima: Forbidden Colours - Reviewed by Tim Pendry
An early Mishima novel that shows him at his most paradoxical. The style is mannered at times, realist at others. It is highly referential to a specific post-war Japanese culture, half-way between defeat and economic miracle, and yet looks back to European decadent and classical literature.
There are two barriers to understanding here. First, we wonder whether the translator (Alfred Marks) has always been able to communicate the subtle behaviourial codes of an upper class that hovers between traditionalism and business.
Second, Mishima's partly satirical posturing on art and beauty through the cynical, bored and rather unpleasant novelist Shinsuke, will result in some small moments of dreariness. Few of us in the twenty-first century can get truly excited by debates on lost aesthetics.
But these are relatively minor concerns because Mishima brilliantly portrays the homosexual underworld of post-war Tokyo in a culture that disapproves of it but more as a social weakness than as a moral failing. It is unnatural but not evil.
The mood is thus turn of the century Europe, rather than offering us the visceral horror of the deviant to be found in the then-contemporary West and still to be found amongst many religious troglodytes in the Americas and Africa.
A sub-culture is here denied entry into the wider culture on equal terms but it is allowed its dark space. In that space, homosexuals seem to live a vacant and sad but tolerated life, albeit with more than a hint of desperation.
Mishima (when he is not posturing as the superior Japanese traditionalist able to be more modern than the moderns) writes as brilliantly here as elsewhere. He also has the ability to dissect formal heterosexual relationships as he does homosexual within a culture of shame rather than guilt.
The character of Yuichi (Yuchan to his homosexual associates), often taken to be Mishima himself, remains a cypher throughout - a cool and self-regarding person with a limited emotional range.
What is more interesting is the way he impacts on others, giving us the paradox of the cool Mishima being able to define quite precisely the emotional responses of a range of figures: his wife, his mother, a high-born female, a shallow female and all grades of male lover.
As a non-procreative male, the extent of Mishima's imaginative genius can be found not only in his portrayal of women but in his unsentimental portrayal of a new-born baby while giving a good account of the way that Yuichi (as a man) can love both wife and baby as a father.
The book is about the complexity, lack of fixedness, of love. Yuichi is detached but no psychopath. He can feel but his position as the object of projected desires means that he is often not allowed to by circumstances. If he weakens, he may be denied access to his true nature for ever.
This is the fascination of the book - to see how a pure beauty without apparent moral content creates a range of desires and needs in others within a society that is layered with codes on what is acceptable or is not acceptable, wholly unlike our own in the West.
It is no accident that the sophisticated novelist with a broad education brings cruelties and small evils into the world of Yuichi, whereas Yuichi merely acts, like an animal, according to his rather limited range of needs.
Shunsuke's desire for a vicious revenge on women shows a person who has ceased to function as a human being and has no place on the planet as a vindictive, desiccated old man who has lost his creative spark.
His agent (Yuichi) is so detached that it becomes clear that the novelist is only half directing events. The women he wants to humiliate are all humiliated through Yuichi but they retain their power and dignity and Shunsuke is left with nothing.
Yuichi blithely sails through the events of the novel, somehow always landing on his feet like a cat, never feeling the pain he inflicts. The book is an essay both in the injustice of life and on the Nietzschean position of a general object of desire in the world.
As a result, although the actual sexual content is limited, the book gives off an aura of eroticism even when the reader (like myself) is very dominantly heterosexual.
What Mishima does, which is remarkable, is suggest to the male heterosexual reader what parts of himself as a male would re-emerge intact within a homosexual male - in other words, what it is about being a male that exists as essential whether one is gay or not.
To make a heterosexual male empathetic to the world of the homosexual would be no mean feat today - in the early 1950s, it would have been startling.
But the book is not so much about homosexuality as about desire itself and the way that desire has a life that is far more significant than any actual meaning to be placed in the desired object - because, in the end, Yuichi is always simply an object who finds it reasonable to be an object.
There are few occasions when Yuichi/Yuchan expresses genuine unhappiness so long as he is following his true nature. His cruelty is casual, the flow of the river through the easiest channel. Shunsuke is malicious, as are others, but Yuchan is as disinterested in malice as in kindness.
This a-morality (not immorality) is perhaps what will shock most readers - especially in one particularly nasty incident where a somewhat shallow bimbo who had hurt the novelist is seduced by the two conspirators' trickery into being, in effect, raped by the novelist in the dark.
The women are treated like objects in a very different sense but there is a sense that the novelist has seduced Yuichi into treating women as things through being directed into the realisation that everyone treats him as a thing (even if he does not care overly).
And, disturbingly, we have none of the hysterical self-traumatizing of Western women but only a determined dignity where the impression is left that these women have come to terms with their position with far more dignity than the ultimate loser in the game - the manipulative novelist.
The book brings us, the Westerner (from a culture with a serious problem in managing desire), into a medium (Japanese traditional culture) that is alienating to the degree that desire is clearly given form and that this form is then articulated in almost ritualistic ways.
By the end of the book, we are left wondering whether it would be better or worse to give desire its outlet through rigid codes and appropriate forms than (as our culture did at that time) deny it any role in formal society at all.
Homosexuality was illegal in the UK at the time the book appeared but, being Japanese, nothing is illegal here, merely shameful.
Any English homosexual reading the translation at the time must have had mixed feelings about its message - an acceptance and management of shame through combinations of secrecy, hypocrisy and denial but the vice being permitted nevertheless. He might have lived with that.
There are two barriers to understanding here. First, we wonder whether the translator (Alfred Marks) has always been able to communicate the subtle behaviourial codes of an upper class that hovers between traditionalism and business.
Second, Mishima's partly satirical posturing on art and beauty through the cynical, bored and rather unpleasant novelist Shinsuke, will result in some small moments of dreariness. Few of us in the twenty-first century can get truly excited by debates on lost aesthetics.
But these are relatively minor concerns because Mishima brilliantly portrays the homosexual underworld of post-war Tokyo in a culture that disapproves of it but more as a social weakness than as a moral failing. It is unnatural but not evil.
The mood is thus turn of the century Europe, rather than offering us the visceral horror of the deviant to be found in the then-contemporary West and still to be found amongst many religious troglodytes in the Americas and Africa.
A sub-culture is here denied entry into the wider culture on equal terms but it is allowed its dark space. In that space, homosexuals seem to live a vacant and sad but tolerated life, albeit with more than a hint of desperation.
Mishima (when he is not posturing as the superior Japanese traditionalist able to be more modern than the moderns) writes as brilliantly here as elsewhere. He also has the ability to dissect formal heterosexual relationships as he does homosexual within a culture of shame rather than guilt.
The character of Yuichi (Yuchan to his homosexual associates), often taken to be Mishima himself, remains a cypher throughout - a cool and self-regarding person with a limited emotional range.
What is more interesting is the way he impacts on others, giving us the paradox of the cool Mishima being able to define quite precisely the emotional responses of a range of figures: his wife, his mother, a high-born female, a shallow female and all grades of male lover.
As a non-procreative male, the extent of Mishima's imaginative genius can be found not only in his portrayal of women but in his unsentimental portrayal of a new-born baby while giving a good account of the way that Yuichi (as a man) can love both wife and baby as a father.
The book is about the complexity, lack of fixedness, of love. Yuichi is detached but no psychopath. He can feel but his position as the object of projected desires means that he is often not allowed to by circumstances. If he weakens, he may be denied access to his true nature for ever.
This is the fascination of the book - to see how a pure beauty without apparent moral content creates a range of desires and needs in others within a society that is layered with codes on what is acceptable or is not acceptable, wholly unlike our own in the West.
It is no accident that the sophisticated novelist with a broad education brings cruelties and small evils into the world of Yuichi, whereas Yuichi merely acts, like an animal, according to his rather limited range of needs.
Shunsuke's desire for a vicious revenge on women shows a person who has ceased to function as a human being and has no place on the planet as a vindictive, desiccated old man who has lost his creative spark.
His agent (Yuichi) is so detached that it becomes clear that the novelist is only half directing events. The women he wants to humiliate are all humiliated through Yuichi but they retain their power and dignity and Shunsuke is left with nothing.
Yuichi blithely sails through the events of the novel, somehow always landing on his feet like a cat, never feeling the pain he inflicts. The book is an essay both in the injustice of life and on the Nietzschean position of a general object of desire in the world.
As a result, although the actual sexual content is limited, the book gives off an aura of eroticism even when the reader (like myself) is very dominantly heterosexual.
What Mishima does, which is remarkable, is suggest to the male heterosexual reader what parts of himself as a male would re-emerge intact within a homosexual male - in other words, what it is about being a male that exists as essential whether one is gay or not.
To make a heterosexual male empathetic to the world of the homosexual would be no mean feat today - in the early 1950s, it would have been startling.
But the book is not so much about homosexuality as about desire itself and the way that desire has a life that is far more significant than any actual meaning to be placed in the desired object - because, in the end, Yuichi is always simply an object who finds it reasonable to be an object.
There are few occasions when Yuichi/Yuchan expresses genuine unhappiness so long as he is following his true nature. His cruelty is casual, the flow of the river through the easiest channel. Shunsuke is malicious, as are others, but Yuchan is as disinterested in malice as in kindness.
This a-morality (not immorality) is perhaps what will shock most readers - especially in one particularly nasty incident where a somewhat shallow bimbo who had hurt the novelist is seduced by the two conspirators' trickery into being, in effect, raped by the novelist in the dark.
The women are treated like objects in a very different sense but there is a sense that the novelist has seduced Yuichi into treating women as things through being directed into the realisation that everyone treats him as a thing (even if he does not care overly).
And, disturbingly, we have none of the hysterical self-traumatizing of Western women but only a determined dignity where the impression is left that these women have come to terms with their position with far more dignity than the ultimate loser in the game - the manipulative novelist.
The book brings us, the Westerner (from a culture with a serious problem in managing desire), into a medium (Japanese traditional culture) that is alienating to the degree that desire is clearly given form and that this form is then articulated in almost ritualistic ways.
By the end of the book, we are left wondering whether it would be better or worse to give desire its outlet through rigid codes and appropriate forms than (as our culture did at that time) deny it any role in formal society at all.
Homosexuality was illegal in the UK at the time the book appeared but, being Japanese, nothing is illegal here, merely shameful.
Any English homosexual reading the translation at the time must have had mixed feelings about its message - an acceptance and management of shame through combinations of secrecy, hypocrisy and denial but the vice being permitted nevertheless. He might have lived with that.
Note: this review by Tim Pendry originally appeared on Goodreads (Dec 28, 2011): click here. It is reproduced with the author's kind permission. To visit Tim Pendry's user page on Goodreads, click here.
See: Yukio Mishima, Forbidden Colours, trans. Alfred H. Marks, (Penguin Books, 2008).
For the first part of this post, featuring Tim Pendry's review of Mishima's Confessions of a Mask, click here.
