Forbidden Colors by Yukio Mishima

Book Club

Saturday, April 1, 2:30—4:30 PM

Burrow into the tortuous mind of controversial Japanese author Yukio Mishima with this tale of homoerotic desire, manipulation and revenge. Widely thought to be autobiographical, the novel follows aging writer Shunsuke, embittered by years of rejection, as he instructs his handsome, unhappily engaged protégé Yuichi in the skill of making the world his plaything, leading to an erotic downward spiral into the gay underworld of postwar Japan. Professor J. Keith Vincent (Chair, World Languages and Literatures, Boston University) will lead a salon-style discussion of the depictions of gender in the novel and A Third Gender: Beautiful Youths in Japanese Prints.

Includes free admission to the gallery exhibition on the day of the event.

Tickets:
$12/$10 Japan Society members, seniors & students
Refreshments served.

Book Information: Forbidden Colors (1999, Vintage Books), available for purchase on Amazon.

J. Keith Vincent teaches modern Japanese literature and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Boston University, where he serves as Chair of the Department of World Languages & Literatures. He has written widely on the work of Mishima Yukio from a queer studies perspective. Recent articles include “Queer Reading and Modern Japanese Literature,” in the Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese Literature (2016) and an essay on Mishima Yukio and Gore Vidal, published in Japanese in Konton to kōsen: Mishima Yukio to Nihon, soshite Sekai (Suiseisha, 2016).  The final chapter of his 2012 book Two-Timing Modernity reads Mishima’s 1949 novel Confessions of a Mask not as “Japan’s first gay novel,” as it is sometimes called, but as a narrative of the “still birth" of gay identity. He is currently co-editing two volumes on the novelist Natsume Sōseki, and his translation of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s novella Devils in Daylight is forthcoming from New Directions. 

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