Apollo in Hell

FORBIDDEN COLORS by Yukio Mishima, translated from the Japanese by Alfred H. Marks. 403 pages. Knopf. $6.95.

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.

Witches' Sabbath. What follows is a leisurely lover's lesson on the giving and receiving of pain that makes John Updike's Couples read like a children's bedtime story. Besides incomparable good looks, Yuichi has the aphrodisiac of complete heartlessness going for him. Other people exist only as narcissistic mirrors in whose admiring eyes he enjoys himself. The old novelist gives him speeches on "the joy of being without feeling." He hardly needs them.

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.

In fact, the best 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 at all.

Over the Shoulders. At times, Mishima's single-pattern plot seems to glide in slow, repetitive cycles, freezing faces in glaring expressions like kabuki actors: frenzied passion, cross-eyed frustration. Still, what keeps the novel from being another existentialist dead end is the presence of the author. It is finally not the hang-ups of his characters but the questions Mishima asks about them that fascinate--including the ultimate, curiously Japanese question that his novel tests for itself: Can obsession with death, pushed to an extreme, result in some absolute awareness of life?

The weakness--as well as the strength --of Forbidden Colors is that the reader is forced to look over the shoulders of the characters to watch the author wrestling with a problem he only pretended to leave to the participants. It cannot be helped. In print as in life, Mishima remains his own most brilliant character.

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