Forbidden Colors

by Yukio Mishima

  Kimichan and Eichan were invited to the Iranian’s table as a result of his whispering something in Rudy’s ear.

  “There, you’ve got a client,” Rudy said, pushing them from behind. Kimichan was quite reluctant about it. “He’s a mad foreigner; I can’t bear him,” he grumbled. When they got to the table, he asked, in his normal voice: “I wonder if this man can speak Japanese.”

  “He doesn’t look it.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if he could, the way things are lately.”

  Recently the two had been invited to the table of a foreigner and sang him a toast: “Harro, dahring blockhead. Harro, dahring dirty old man,” they sang in chorus, with the insulting words in Japanese. The foreigner laughed: “Dirty boys and dirty old men get along well together,” he said in perfect Japanese.

  Eichan was far from composed. His eyes moved repeatedly toward the door that exposed the night street. He thought of that fierce, sad profile, carved from rare alloys —the boy had the feeling he had seen it on one of the foreign coins he had once collected. He suspected that he had met its owner in an old tale.

  Then the door was pushed open with youthful vigor. A surge of refreshing night air poured in. All raised eyes toward the door.

  Chapter 8 THE JUNGLE OF SENTIMENT

  UNIVERSAL BEAUTY had won all with the first cast.

  Yuichi floated on desire. The look they gave him was like that a woman feels when she passes among men and their eyes instantly undress her down to the last stitch. Practiced appraisers' eyes usually do not make mistakes. The gently sloping chest Shunsuke saw back there in the spray, the slightly tapering, chastely mature trunk, the long easy sinewy legs. When one took these and added them to the matchless, pure, youthful, statuesque shoulders, the eyebrows like narrow blades, the melancholy eyes, the truly boyish lips, the white, orderly, correct teeth, and the beautiful head they composed, the potential lovely harmony between what one saw and could not see seemed as perfect as a product of the ratio of golden section. That perfect neck belonged to a perfect body. The scattered fragments of beauty gave promise of a beautiful artistic restoration.

  Even the normally carping critics at Rudon’s were struck dumb. Before their companions, or the boys who were serving them, they refrained from putting into words the inexpressible admiration they felt. Their eyes, however, were taking the most beautiful visions of the countless young men they had caressed and placing them beside the naked body of Yuichi they had just sketched in their minds. There the vague shapes of the imaginary youths, the warmth of their flesh, the odor of their bodies, their voices, their kisses floated. But when these visions were placed beside the naked form of Yuichi, they shyly stole away. Their beauty was captive in the castle of individuality; Yuichi’s beauty, overriding individuality, gleamed resplendent.

  Their arms folded, they sat in silence, their chairs tilted against the walls in the dim distance. Conscious of the weight of those concentrated glances, he stood with downcast eyes. Thus his beauty took on the semblance of the innocent standard-bearer at the head of the regiment.

  Eichan left the foreigners' table guiltily, went to Yuichi’s side, and touched his shoulder. “Let’s sit down,” Yuichi said. They sat facing each other, conscious of more glances than they dared face. They ordered cake. Unselfconsciously Yuichi opened his mouth wide and stuffed it with a huge piece of shortcake. Strawberries and cream were demolished by those white rows of teeth. To the boy watching, it was as if his own body were being swallowed to his boundless enjoyment.

  “Eichan, won’t you introduce the master?” Rudy said. The boy couldn’t help but introduce them. “How do you do? We hope you’ll come here often. All of our clientele are fine people,” said the proprietor, as if he were stroking a cat.

  After a time Eichan left for the men’s room. Just then a flashily dressed middle-aged man came all the way over to the cashier’s table to pay his check. In his face a certain indefinable childishness, a pent-up childishness, was evident. In the thickness of his eyelids especially, and in the region of his cheeks, the air of infancy was heavy. Bloated, isn’t he? thought Yuichi. The man acted as if intoxicated. The distinctness of the raw lust that gleamed in his eyes contrasted strongly with his assumed role. As if he were groping for the wall, he let his hand fall on the youth’s shoulder.

  “Oh, excuse me,” he said, removing his hand. Between these words and the act of taking away his hand, however, in that instant’s hesitation, there was what could be called a kind of groping. The somewhat unpleasant hiatus between word and action left an imprint on the youth’s shoulder like a muscular stiffness. The older man looked toward the youth a second time; then, like a fox in flight, he broke off his gaze and departed.

  When Eichan returned from the men’s room. Yuichi told him what had happened. The boy was dumfounded: “What? Already? That’s quick! That fellow was making a pass at you!”

  To Yuichi, this staid restaurant was rather like the park; he was shocked at how soon it went through its formalities.

  At that moment a small, dark, dimpled youth entered, arm in arm with a handsome foreigner. The youth was a ballet dancer who had recently been given a wide audience; his companion was his teacher, a Frenchman. They had met just after the war. The youth’s reputation at present was largely due to the work of that teacher. For several years the sunny, golden-haired Frenchman had shared his quarters with this companion, twenty years his junior. It was rumored that the Frenchman had recently fallen victim to a terrible whim, which came on him while drunk. He climbed the roof and tried to lay an egg.

  This golden-haired chicken instructed his protege to stand beneath the eaves with a basket and then asked all his invited guests to step out into the moonlit garden. Then he climbed a ladder and went out on the roof, bent over like a chicken. He turned up his tail, flapped his wings and cackled and cackled. As he did so, an egg dropped into the basket. Then he flapped again and cackled. A second egg fell.

  His guests held their sides with laughter. Then they clapped their hands in applause. When the scene ended, however, and the host escorted them to the door, they saw a fifth egg, which he had forgotten to lay, rolling from the cuff of his trousers and splash its contents on the stone step. This chicken’s cloaca was capable of holding five eggs—no mean feat.

  When Yuichi heard the story he laughed and laughed. Then, as if someone had frowned at his mirth, he was silent. After a time he asked the boy: “That foreigner and the ballet dancer—how long has it lasted?”

  “Going on four years.”

  “Four years!”

  Yuichi tried to imagine a period of four years with this boy across the table and himself. Why did he feel certain that the rapture of the night before last would never be repeated in that four-year period?

  The body of a man was something that spread out like the contour of a plain, a vast unbroken expanse. It had none of the fresh little marvelous springs, the mineral caves where exciting crystalline structures were to be seen as with the woman’s body, which held out something new at each encounter. It was a simple exterior, the embodiment of pure, visible beauty. In the first fever of curiosity, love and desire were wagered. Afterward love invaded the spirit or simply and lightly stole away to another body.

  After only one experience, Yuichi had already acquired the right to think: If only in the first night my love makes itself manifest, it would be no more than dishonest to both me and my lover to repeat my clumsy carbon copies of that first night. It will not do for me to judge my own sincerity by the sincerity of my lover, but the reverse of that. Perhaps my sincerity will take the form attained through an unlimited number of first nights spent with a succession of lovers encountered in turn. My constant love will be the common thread in the ecstasies of countless first nights, nothing other than the intense contempt of single encounters unchanging no matter whom I meet.

  Yuichi compared this love with the synthetic love he accorded Yasuko. Both loves drove him without surcease. Loneliness gripped hi
m.

  While Yuichi sat silent, Eichan looked idly over at the table occupied by a group of youths. They sat leaning against each other. They seemed to be conscious of the transience of the ties that held them together and, rubbing shoulders and touching hands, to be barely resisting this sense of uneasiness. The tie that bound them seemed like the mutual affection of comrades-in-arms who sense they will die on the morrow. As if this was too much to bear, one kissed another on the neck. After a time they hurriedly departed, their smooth-shaven napes alongside each other.

  Seated in his double-breasted checked suit and toying with his lemon-colored tie, Eichan opened his mouth slightly and watched them. Yuichi’s lips had once searched his brows, his eyelids, even his mouth like that of a male doll. Yuichi had looked him over. Looking was cruel in the extreme. Every corner of the boy’s body, even to the little mole on his back, Yuichi felt he knew. Once having entered this simple, lovely room, he remembered how it was made. There was a vase, and over there was a bookcase. Surely, until the room crumbled, the vase and the bookcase would remain in the same places, unmoved.

  The boy took in that cool gaze. He suddenly grasped Yuichi’s hand under the table. Cruelly, Yuichi wrenched his hand away. The cruelty was to a certain degree intentional. Overburdened by the resentment against his wife which he would not reveal, Yuichi yearned for the right to be unequivocally cruel to someone he had loved.

  Tears mounted in the boy’s eyes.

  “I know how you feel, Yuchan,” he said. “You’re tired of me already, aren’t you?” .

  Yuichi denied it vehemently, but Eichan, as if speaking from experience of a different level from that of his older friend, went on maturely and decisively: “Yes. I knew it from the moment you came in. That’s the way it must be. That’s the way we are, one-step men. I’m used to it and can take it. But I hoped that you above all would continue to be my big brother for the rest of our lives. Now I’ll be satisfied forever that I was your first lover. You won’t forget me, will you?”

  Yuichi was greatly moved by this tender entreaty. In his eyes, too, tears welled. He sought the boy’s hand under the table and gently squeezed it.

  At this moment the door opened and three foreigners entered. Yuichi remembered having seen the face of one of them. It was the slender foreigner who had come out of the building across the street at the time of his wedding reception. His suit was different, but he wore the same polka-dot bow tie. His hawk’s, eye roved the room. He seemed to be drunk. He clapped his hands smartly and called: “Eichan! Eichan!”

  His pleasant, sweet voice reverberated from the walls.

  The boy looked down so that his face could not be seen. Then he clicked his tongue maturely and professionally: “Oh my, I told him I wasn’t coming here tonight.”

  Rudon flapped the hem of his sky-blue jacket and leaned over the table. Then he said in a peremptory voice: “Eichan. Get over there. It’s your gentleman, you know.”

  The atmosphere of the place was filled with sadness.

  Rudy’s insistent plea added to it. Yuichi was ashamed of the tears he had just shed. The boy glanced at Rudy and stood up motioning as if he were going to throw something at him.

  Moments of decision sometimes provide balm for the soul’s hurts. Yuichi now felt pride in the composure with which he could watch Eichan. His gaze collided with the boy’s uncertainly. Then as if to try again and mend all, their eyes met again, but to no avail. The boy walked away. Yuichi looked in another direction, where he noticed the beautiful eye of a youth winking at him. His heart moved without hindrance, as easily as a butterfly, to meet that look.

  The youth was leaning against the wall opposite. He was dressed in dungarees and a navy-blue corduroy jacket. He wore a dark-red necktie of coarse netting. He seemed to be a year or two younger than Yuichi. The flowing line of his brows and the wavy richness of his hair imparted a legendary cast to his face. Sad as a one-eyed jack, he winked in Yuichi’s direction.

  “Who is he?”

  “Oh, that’s Shigechan. He’s the son of a grocer over by Nakano. He’s rather pretty. Shall I call him over?” said Rudy. He signaled, and that prince of the working classes rose nimbly from his chair. He alertly saw that Yuichi had just taken out a cigarette, and he struck a match with practiced grace and held it within his palm. Translucent in the light of the match, his hand glowed like agate. It was a big, honest hand, however—legacy of his father’s toil, one might surmise.

  The dislocation in the thinking of the men who visited this place was subtle indeed. From his second day there, Yuichi was called “Yuchan.” Rudy treated him more like a close friend than a customer. The patronage of Rudon’s had increased suddenly, after all, the day after he showed up there, as if word of this new face had been deliberately broadcast. On the third day, something happened to swell Yuichi’s reputation even more—Shigechan appeared at the place shaved bald as a monk. Since Yuichi had shared his bed with him the night before, he had, with no regret, cut off his beautiful, abundant hair as a token of his love.

  Numerous fantastic stories of this kind circulated rapidly in the world of this persuasion. By the code of the secret society, stories were not carried one step outside, but once a miraculous story got started on the inside it replaced all earlier secrets of the boudoir. For, after all, nine tenths of the daily conversation was taken up with erotic reports of one’s own and others’ experiences in the bedroom.

  As Yuichi’s knowledge broadened, he came to be amazed at the unexpected scope of that world.

  Muffled in a straw poncho, this world idled through the daylight hours. There was friendship, the love of comrades, philanthropy, the love of master and protege; there were partners, assistants, managers, houseboys, leaders and followers, brothers, cousins, uncle and nephew, secretaries, amanuenses, drivers—there were numbers of other capacities and stations of diverse kinds: executives, actors, singers, authors, artists, musicians, high and mighty college professors, white-collar workers, students. In the world of men they idled, muffled in all kinds of ponchos made of straw.

  They asked for themselves the advent of a world of supreme benison; bound by the spell of their common fate, they dreamed a dream of a simple truth. That dream was that the truth that man loves man would overthrow the old truth that man loves woman. Only the Jews were a match for them when it came to fortitude. In the abnormal degree to which they held fast to a single, humiliating point of view they were like the Jews. The emotion proper to this tribe gave birth to fanatical heroism during the war. After the war it embraced a pride at being in the van of decadence. It thrived on confusion. In that riven ground it grew clumps of tiny, dark violets.

  Across this world of men only, however, a tremendous female shadow lay. All tossed in nightmare under this unseen feminine umbra. Some defied it; some resigned themselves to it; some resisted and in the end were defeated; some worshiped it from the beginning. Yuichi believed he was an exception. Then he prayed that he was an exception. Then he strove that he might be an exception. He worked that he might at least limit the influence of that awful shadow to trivial matters—such as looking in the mirror frequently, or the little habit of turning to look at his form reflected in windows at street comers, or, when he went to the theater, the insignificant, functionless habit of walking affectedly in the hall during intermission. These are, of course, habits common among normal young people.

  One day in the hall of the theater Yuichi saw a singer who, though famous in that world, was married. He had a manly face and figure. He led a busy professional life and, as an avocation, boxed assiduously in a ring he had installed in his home. He had a sweet voice and possessed everything that girls clamored for. Now he was busily surrounded by four or five ladylike young creatures. It happened, however, that a gentleman of about his own age called to him from nearby. He might have been a schoolmate. The singer roughly grabbed his hand and shook it. (They looked for all the world as if they were getting ready to fight.) He shook the friend’s right hand in
great swings and pounded the friend’s shoulder vigorously. His thin, serious friend staggered slightly. The young ladies looked at each other and laughed decorously.

  This scene pierced Yuichi’s heart. It was the exact opposite of what Yuichi had seen in the park—those fellows in all their coquettishness, hips swinging, shoulders drawn together, something so directly opposed that the hidden similar numbers came floating up like invisible ink, touching something disgusting that had been brought to light within him. Were he a spiritualist, surely he would have called it fate. The singer’s empty, artificial coquetries directed at women; his entire life concentrated, his entire peripheral nervous system bent, intent, taut, totally engaged—that strenuous “virile” performance capable of evoking tears was unbearably bitter to watch.

  Afterward “Yuchan” was wooed incessantly. In short, intimacy was forced upon him.

  In a few days a romantic middle-aged merchant came to Tokyo all the way from Aomori because he had already heard of Yuichi and longed for him. One foreigner offered, through Rudy, a suit of clothes, an overcoat, shoes, and a watch—a generous offer for one night’s favors. Yuichi was not interested. One man moved into the chair next to Yuichi when it happened to be vacant and, feigning drunkenness, pulled his hat brim down over his eyes. Then he pushed his elbow far over the armrest and poked Yuichi meaningfully in the ribs several times.

  From time to time Yuichi had to take a roundabout route home to avoid people covertly following him.

  All that was known about him, however, was that he was still a student. His station, his history—above all the fact that he was already married* his lineage, his home, his house number—not a person knew. The being of this beautiful youth, therefore, was soon charged with the fragrance of divine miracle.

  One day a palm reader who dealt primarily with homosexuals came into Rudon’s. He was an old man, wearing a threadbare overcoat of the old Japanese style. He scanned Yuichi’s palm and said, “You have two choices, see. Like the two swords of Musashi Miyamoto, see. Somewhere away from here you have left a woman in tears, and you are here acting as if you don’t know about it, right?”