How long does it take to read Forbidden Colors?
Yukio Mishima, Noriko Thunman
Forbidden Colors by Yukio Mishima, Noriko Thunman takes about 7 hours 23 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 7 hours 23 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1964. 403 pages, about 110,825 words.
15 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 12 hours 19 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 7 hours 23 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 4 hours 37 minutes |
The page count is the median across 26 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Forbidden Colors (禁色, Kinjiki) is a 1951 novel (禁色 Part 2 秘楽 (Higyō) "Secret Pleasure" was published in 1953) by the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, translated into English in 1968. The name kinjiki is a euphemism for homosexuality. The kanji 禁 means "forbidden" and 色 in this case means "erotic love", although it can also mean "color". The word "kinjiki" also means colors that were forbidden to be worn by people of various ranks in the Japanese court. It describes a marriage of a gay man to a young woman. Like Mishima's earlier novel Confessions of a Mask, it is generally considered somewhat autobiographical.
Subjects: Fiction, Gay youth, Young men, Japanese Novelists, Gay men, Autobiographical fiction
