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Primary Colors (Sangenshoku) is a 1955 play by Mishima Yukio that brings up issues of homosexuality and bisexuality. Its positive treatment of homosexual themes contrasts with the darkness of Forbidden Colors, the author's novel of the same period. While the play has received only a few professional productions, its poetry and theme help us understand Mishima's developing aesthetic.
Introduction: Mishima the Dramatist
Mishima Yukio (1925-1970) will surely be remembered as the most infamous Japanese author of the twentieth century owing to his failed insurrection and subsequent suicide. In spite of his premature death at the age of forty-five, Mishima left behind a body of work that can scarcely be matched by any author in any language. Mishima's most recent complete works, Ketteiban Mishima Yukio Xenxhu (The Complete Works of Mishima Yukio Definitive Edition), published by Shinchosha from 2000 to 2005, runs forty-two volumes.1 This new publication of Mishima's complete works is by no means solely devoted to his fiction. Mishima was also an accomplished playwright. He published more than sixty plays in his short lifetime, and he was also active in theatre production and direction (Mishima 2002: vii). Mishima also distinguished himself by creating a wide variety of dramatic works. The majority of his plays were for the shingeki ("new theatre," modern Western drama) stage, but he also wrote kabuki plays, dance plays, screenplays, musical dramas, radio dramas, and opera librettos. Mishima saw nearly all his plays staged in his lifetime. In certain years Mishima's plays dominated Japanese theatre. For example, in 1955 nine different plays by Mishima were produced by professional Tokyo companies. Oxasa Yoshio writes that Mishima's plays are so well regarded in Japan that a survey of members of the Kokusai Engeki Hyoronka Kyokai (International Association of Theatre Critics) found his play Madame de Sade to be the finest Japanese play of the postwar period (1945-1995), and Mishima was tied for first place as the greatest playwright of the same time period (Ozasa 2001: 30-31).
Mishima approached the art of writing novels and the art of writing plays in fundamentally different ways. He said about the relationship between his plays and novels that "Plays occupy one of the two magnetic poles of my work" (Scott-Stokes 1974: 207). For Mishima, writing plays...