Forbidden Colours Attawapiskat First Nation walkers trek to Ottawa with message CBC News. A Japenese masterpiece, reissued in Modern Classics Written when Mishima was only twentysix, Forbidden Colors is a depiction of a male homosexual relationship, in which a rich older man buys the love of a young man who is stunningly handsome but who lacks the ability to love. As in Mann's Death in Venice, the older man's longing for the beauty of youth is associated with aestheticism and death.