Two Novels by Yukio Mishima 2: Forbidden Colours (Reviewed by Tim Pendry)

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.

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. 

Two Novels by Yukio Mishima 1: Confessions of a Mask (Reviewed by Tim Pendry)

Pain might well prove to be the sole proof of the persistence of consciousness within the flesh, 
the sole physical expression of consciousness. As my body acquired muscle, and in turn strength, 
there was gradually born within me a tendency towards the positive acceptance of pain, 
and my interest in physical suffering deepened.

Still daydreaming as I am about the bodies of Japanese men, thoughts naturally turn to Yukio Mishima - an author with whose work I am shamefully unfamiliar. Fortunately, in Tim Pendry I have a friend who is far better read than I and who has written excellent reviews of two early novels by Mishima: Confessions of a Mask (1949) and Forbidden Colours (1951).

Tim has kindly agreed that I might re-publish these reviews - which originally appeared on the Amazon-owned website Goodreads - here on Torpedo the Ark, beginning with a very recent review of the earlier text and continuing in part two of this post with a review written in 2011 of Forbidden Colours.       

Yukio Mishima: Confessions of a Mask - Reviewed by Tim Pendry 

This is a book written by a man in his mid-twenties looking back on adolescence. To read it as an adolescent without experience (as I did first) is very different from reading it as an experienced adult nearly two decades older than the age at the author's death (as I have just done).

At the age of 19, it had a powerful effect on me for its apparent sexual honesty - a high art Japanese Portnoy's Complaint perhaps. Today, the claim of honesty looks less secure. Is it a fictionalised memoir or a fiction deluding us into thinking it is a memoir?

Mishima refers in passing to Augustine and the comparison with the author of the fourth century Confessions is deliberate. He is writing as a Japanese but paradoxically so since it is equally clear that the Japan of his youth had already been highly Westernised.

His girlfriend is Christian and refers to Jesus. Western clothes, even if militarised, are general. A young German boy rides by on a bicycle without it being anything other than normal. The literary references are essentially Western at every turn, notably to Saint Sebastian.

Although there are references to traditional attitudes, the girlfriend Sonoko and her family may be conservative but they are quite Westernised too. One enlightening aspect of this is that MacArthur's occupation was perhaps not such a break with the recent past as we might believe.

Unlike Germany in the last months of its war, the ordinary Japanese in 1945 were already mentally preparing for defeat while also preparing for sudden death at any time. Even Hiroshima seems less of a shock after the Tokyo fire bombings which are part of the background of the central section.

Whereas Germany in 1945 seems to have been imbued with an atmosphere of terror, Japan in the same period seems to have inclined to fatalism. Whereas the German State brutalised its people, the Japanese State appeared to be giving up the ghost long before it surrendered.

The book starts in the 1930s and moves into the immediate occupation period but the central section is very much that of a teenager not yet old enough to fight and yet too old not to be militarised and be integrated into the war effort albeit in a desultory way.

The book gives us a picture of a country which was suffering shortages and death from the sky but which was also conducting itself (as far as most people were concerned) with an air of normality without the full-on totalitarian systems of the West. The edge had gone off Japanese militarism.

The death instinct of Mishima (if the book is reliable as to his own mentality) preceded the war and cannot be assigned to it but his young hero has a dialectic in relation to war that reconciles the constant possibility of radical loss with a very human desire to keep death theoretical and romantic.

Mishima in 1948/9 is a highly educated young man conscious that he is writing literature, referential literature, and not history and his confessions must be seen in that light - as an ambiguous account of Mishima's own sexual ambiguity in which history is just the back drop.

The core of the book plays out the young man's true nature as a sado-masochistic homosexual in terms of desire for gratification and his undoubted capability, despite his doubts, for the sort of non-sexual love for a girl that most heterosexual men of any sensitivity would recognise.

His true nature is clearly both aspects but the first is not permitted in society (at least overtly) and the second is defined by cultural expectations. The book is the working out of the balance between the two, the acceptance of the first as fact and the containment of the second as secondary.

Mishima's young hero (alter-Mishima) allows himself to become what he is in terms of his sexuality in stages, another dialectical process, so that the final scene, a rather sad scene in many ways, provides a form of resolution where the two sides of him are permitted a shared reality.

His homosexuality is actually not central to the argument - this is not a gay coming out story - and the fact that it is hidden sexuality rather than a specific sexuality would have been the appeal to this reader in his earlier 19-year old incarnation.

This is a book about any sexuality that is not spoken of or made available in polite society set against conventional sexuality as it appears to the young male of a certain type who wants both to be free without feelings and to feel without being obliged to follow through as society expects.

In that struggle, in this book, the social (while being respected as reality) loses out in the scaling of values. What happens next to Mishima is clearer in his third novel, Forbidden Colours, which we have reviewed elsewhere: click here.  

One might think that a later fetishisation of Japanese traditionalism (a little odd in relation to his debt to Western culture) is an attempt to try to contain the local social in order to limit its emotional claims on him where quasi-Western mores might be intrusive on his true nature.

Male Samurai mysticism might also later have given him cover for the expression of that true nature. If so, he is involved in a lifelong appropriation of his own culture (often to the puzzlement of other Japanese) to meet personal goals that owe far more to Western decadence than Japan.

The genius of the book lies in his clever use of apparent honesty to cover up what may lie beneath. The social environment is not romanticised but played straight. It is an ordinary life and he does not even try to be extraordinary either in his behaviour or even in his assessment of himself.

It is his hero's desires that are extraordinary. The mask of the title is a mask of being ordinary because, well, he is actually very ordinary other than his psycho-sexual torment and periodic or incipient unrecognised depression and fully recognised alienation.

As to the book itself, remembering the young age of the writer, it is an odd mix of extremely evocative realist writing based on locale and incident interspersed with quasi-philosophical bouts of self-reflective torment.

The first is remarkable, undoubted descriptive genius. There is no flummery. What happens is described so precisely that the incident is pictured with exquisite clarity - most famously in his first masturbation experience over a Renaissance picture of St. Sebastian.

The second is more problematic. He is struggling to get across feelings and complexities that are not easy to describe. I suspect that translators struggle to deal with the connotative aspects of Japanese when dealing with local emotional colour.

As a result, there are lines and passages that are close to incomprehensible and sometimes contradictory in a way that does not look as if it was intended. This aspect of the book is less successful - the attempt to make feeling literary and not always succeeding.

All in all, a classic first novel by a genius who is never to be analysed simply. His dishonest authorial voice still shows someone whose most central attribute is a refusal to lie about himself or his motivations and yet to try to push shame aside in order to become what he is.

This shame aspect is also interesting because we see no Western guilt but only an awareness of being driven to inappropriate shameful action or feelings without intending harm. Even his vicious fantasies are fantastic, works of imagination, and not the actual intent of the sadistic killer.

It is as if he simply wants another reality where all reality can be concentrated into a moment of death that wipes out the pain of living and where sexual excitation is a fantastic outgrowth of that sentiment.

There is no torturing of animals or deliberate cruelty to persons, just a fear of emotional engagement and a psychology of detachment which becomes more evident in the psychological cruelties of Forbidden Colours. The young hero is depressed far more than he shows anxiety.

Note: this review by Tim Pendry originally appeared on Goodreads (June 16, 2019): 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, Confessions of a Mask, (Penguin Books, 2017).