["Forbidden Colors"] insists upon comparison with an even earlier Mishima novel, "Confessions of a Mask" ["Kamen no Kokuhaku"] …, and it is inferior to the earlier novel in most respects save price and bulk. Both works have as their heroes handsome young homosexuals. Both contain a strong element of narcissistic subjectivity, not to say self-gratification; in both there is a great deal of sadism and masochism, quite at home in a flamboyantly amoral world; and in both a denial of intellect and glorification of the senses, fundamental to all of Mishima's writing, is incongruously combined with rather a lot of quite strained intellectualizing.

One would expect the more subjective and autobiographical of the two, "Confessions of a Mask," to make one more uncomfortable; but such is not the case. It is not easy to say why, unless perhaps the point is that the hero of "Confessions of a Mask" is in the hands of nature and is able to convey to us what it says and does to him, whereas the hero of "Forbidden Colors" is essentially passive in the hands of an abstraction, and is himself an abstraction, an assertion of beauty (with what frequency the author uses the word!) that goes unrealized.

The other abstraction comes nearer having life. Early in the book, in a somewhat improbable scene, the young hero is impelled to confess his proclivities to an aged, ugly and very famous novelist. Thereupon he becomes the device through which the older man has his revenge upon the female sex, and becomes at the same time a sounding board and proving ground for his theories of art….

At moments when there ought to be conflict and exchange between the two, the older man has a way of vanishing in a flood of words and the younger into a vortex of silence….

But one must go a little further in trying to define why this is, in the end, a cold, repellent book. At one point, perhaps a quarter of the way along, when revenge upon the female sex is proceeding nicely, the older man writes of the younger in his diary: "To have found such a perfect living doll as this! Yuichi is truly exquisite. Not only that, he is morally frigid." One wonders again: can a morally frigid novelist really be much of a novelist at all?