Forbidden Colors

by Yukio Mishima

  He saw Yuichi and attempted to squeeze past him and escape, but he was caught by the wrist. Yuichi pulled him out into the front yard. He hit him squarely in the jaw with his fist. The student fell flat on his back in the shrubbery around the well. Yuichi struck him in the face again and again.

  This, to Yasuko, was an incident she would never forget. That night Yuichi stayed home. She believed in his love completely. And no wonder. Yuichi had protected Yasuko because he loved her. Yuichi guarded peace and order because he loved his home.

  This strong-bodied, reliable husband did not talk to his mother about what he had done. Why, she did not know, but there was something embarrassing to him about the secret reasons for displaying his strength. There were two reasons. First, that student was beautiful. Second—and to Yuichi this was the most difficult reason to assert—that student had offended him by revealing at close quarters the painful truth of how much he desired woman.

  It so happened that Yasuko did not menstruate during October.

  Chapter 11 FAMILY RITUAL: TEA WITH RICE

  ON THE TENTH of November, when his classes were done, Yuichi took the suburban car and met his wife at one of the stations. Because they had a visit to make, he had worn a suit to school.

  Through the introduction of his mother’s attending physician, they were going to the home of a famous gynecologist, a man in the early autumn of his years, head of the gynecology department, who went to the University Hospital four days a week. On Wednesdays and Fridays he was at home, where he had a fully equipped examination room.

  Yuichi hesitated for a long time over whether he would do any good by coming along. Her mother should have been the one to accompany her. Yasuko, however, wheedled him into coming, and he didn’t see how he could refuse.

  Cars were parked in front of the doctor’s quietly elegant Western-style home. In the dim living room, by the fireplace, they waited their turn.

  It had been a frosty morning. The afternoon was particularly cold. The fireplace had been lit. The air smelled faintly of the white bearskin on the hearth. On a table a large cloisonne vase overflowed with yellow chrysanthemums. The room was quite dark, and the flames of the fire came warmly off the dark-green surface of the vase.

  Four people were seated in the living room when they entered: a middle-aged lady accompanied by her servant and a young woman with her mother. The middle-aged lady’s hair looked as if she had just come from the beauty parlor, and she held her face as if she was afraid to disturb her heavy makeup. This face encased in white powder looked as if cracks would open up on the skin if she so much as smiled. Her little eyes peered from behind a wall of powder. Her “lacquer” kimono spattered with blue shells, her sash, her jacket, her huge diamond ring were all slightly suggestive of a costume in accord with the current notion of what was extravagant. She had a copy of Life open in her lap. Ostentatiously she brought her eyes close to the small type of the captions and moved her lips as she read. She had a habit of flicking away nonexistent stray hairs as if she were brushing cobwebs. In the chair behind her waited her maid, who when addressed by her mistress would answer, “Yes,” with a look as if her life depended on it.

  The members of the other party glanced at these two every once in a while as if they despised them. The daughter was wearing a large purple arrow-feather pattern, the mother, a striped crepe in a waterfall design. The girl— one could not tell whether she was married—frequently exposed a white arm, poised a fist like the paw of a young fox, tilted her head to the side, and glanced at her tiny gold watch.

  Yasuko saw and heard nothing. Though she strained her eyes to look at the gas flame in the fireplace, it cannot be said she saw it. For several days she had seemed not to be concerned with anything but this headache and nausea, slight fever and dizziness, and a peculiar throbbing sensation that had suddenly seized her. Engrossed in this welter of symptoms, her expression seemed artless and earnest, like a rabbit with its nose buried in its feed trough.

  When the two earlier patients had left, and Yasuko’s turn had come, she pleaded with Yuichi to accompany her to the examination room. They passed down the hallway heavy with disinfectant. A cold breeze drifting in from the hall made Yasuko shiver.

  “Come in,” called a calm, professorial voice from within.

  The doctor had the look of a figure in a portrait as he sat in his chair leaning toward the door. With a hand white and dehydrated from being dipped in disinfectant, bony and abstract, as it were, he indicated where his visitors might sit down. Yuichi gave the name of their mutual friend and introduced himself.

  Shining in a row on the table like a dentist’s tools were forceps used in curettage. The first thing that struck the eye on entering, however, was the examination table, its form designed with a special cruelty. It was an abnormal, unnatural form. The bed was higher than usual, with the lower half raised. On each side, swinging up diagonally right and left, leather stirrups had been fitted. Yuichi thought of the acrobatic figures of the young lady and the affected middle-aged woman which had just before occupied that machine. That odd bed took the form of destiny, one might say. Why? Because in the presence of that shape, the diamond ring, the perfume, the kimono splattered with shiny blue shells, the purple arrow-feather pattern were useless, powerless to resist it. Yuichi shuddered, thinking of Yasuko being fitted to the cold obscenity that unfeeling, implacable iron contrivance was charged with. He thought that he himself was like that bed. Yasuko deliberately kept her eyes from the bed and sat down. '

  Yuichi offered a word now and then as she described her symptoms. The doctor signaled to him with his eyes. Yuichi left Yasuko in the examination room and returned to the reception room. It was empty. He sat down in an easy chair. He was not comfortable. He sat down in a wooden armchair. He was still not comfortable. He could not rid his mind of the idea of Yasuko lying on her back on the table.

  He leaned his elbow on the mantelpiece. Then he took from his inside pocket two letters that had come to him this morning and that he had previously read at school. One was from Kyoko. The other was from Mrs. Kaburagi. It happened that both letters, with roughly the same contents, were delivered at the same time. He read them a second time.

  Since that rainy day, Yuichi had met Kyoko three times and Mrs. Kaburagi twice. On the most recent occasion he had seen them both at the same time. Of course, neither of the woman knew the other would be there. It was all Shunsuke’s idea.

  Yuichi reread Kyoko’s letter first. The lines overflowed with an indignation that gave a mannish strength to the handwriting.

  “You are teasing me,” Kyoko wrote. “I have managed to keep myself from believing that you are deceiving me. When you returned my shoes, you gave me two rare handkerchiefs. I was very happy and have had them washed over and over and always carry one in my handbag. Nevertheless, when I saw Mrs. Kaburagi again the other day, that person was using one of the same handkerchiefs. She and I recognized this immediately, but we said nothing. Women are quick to notice what other members of their sex own. Besides, handkerchiefs are bought a half dozen or a dozen at a time. Did you give her four and me two? Or did you give her two and some other unknown person two?

  “Regardless, I am not thinking about the business of the handkerchiefs particularly now. What I am going to say is very difficult to express, but since the other day when you, Mrs. Kaburagi and I, the three of us, happened accidentally to come together (the second time I had run into Mrs. Kaburagi since the day, whenever it was, I bought my shoes—an amazing coincidence!), I have been tortured by something to the extent that I can’t even eat.

  “When I met you at that time I should have been at the Foreign Office reception, and we were in the dining room at the Fugu restaurant, you lit my cigarette. When you took your lighter out of your pocket, an earring dropped on the tatami. ‘Hm, is that your wife’s earring?* I said immediately. You said ‘Uh-huh,’ and put it back in your pocket without opening your mouth. I soon came to regret the carelessness and the haste wit
h which I commented on that discovery. Why? Because I was very much aware that my tone was filled with jealousy.

  “Thus, when I saw Mrs. Kaburagi the second time, how shocked I was when I saw that person with the same earring hanging from her ear! After that I didn’t open my mouth again, no matter what people may have thought, which must have put you out.

  “I suffered terribly before I made up my mind to send this letter. If it had been a glove or a compact, it wouldn’t have been so bad, but for one earring to get into a gentleman’s pocket is a serious thing, as far as I can see. I am a woman who has come to be praised for not letting annoying things get on her nerves, and I don’t know why I am suffering so much as I am in this instance. Won’t you please do something right away to dispel my childish doubts? Even if not out of love, out of friendship at least, will you please not overlook the pain of this woman carried away by terrible doubt? It is in this hope that I have written. As soon as you get this letter, won’t you call me? Until you call me, I shall stay home every day, pleading a headache.”

  Mrs. Kaburagi’s letter went as follows:

  “That practical joke of the other day was in bad taste. I did some quick figuring. If you gave me four handkerchiefs, and you gave Kyoko four, that leaves four. I would like to think you gave them to your wife, but I am not sure about you.

  “I was sad, however, to see that the affair of the handkerchiefs took all the joy out of Kyoko. She’s a sweet girl, isn’t she? Her dream that she is the only person in the world loved by Yuichi was broken.

  “Thank you for the expensive gift you gave me the other day. It’s a little old-fashioned, but that agate is a lovely stone. Thanks to it, everybody praises the earring and goes from that to praising the shape of my ear. If you gave it to me in return for the suit, you’re pretty old-fashioned, too. All a man like you has to do to make a woman happy is simply take what she gives him.

  “The tailors will finish the suit in two or three days, won’t they? Please show it to me the first day you put it on. And let me pick out a necktie, too.

  “P.S. Since the other day, for no reason at all, I have developed some self-confidence where Kyoko is concerned. Why? It may be annoying to you, but I foresee that I am going to win this shogi game I’m playing.”

  “When I compare these two letters, I understand,” Yuichi said to himself. “Kyoko, who seems to have no confidence, is confident; Mrs. Kaburagi, who seems so confident, has none. Kyoko does not hide her misgivings, but it’s plain as day that Mrs. Kaburagi is hiding hers. It’s just as Shunsuke said. Kyoko is gradually becoming more confident that Mrs. Kaburagi and I are having an affair. Mrs. Kaburagi is gradually becoming more confident that Kyoko and I are having an affair. Each is afraid that she will be the one whose body won’t be touched.”

  The only woman’s body this marble youth would touch with his hand now had inserted in it two dried-up, cool, lysol-scented fingers of a man, like the fingers of a gardener thrust into the soil while transplanting a flower. The other dried-up hand was measuring the mass of internal organs externally. The root of life, as big as a goose egg, was touching the warm earth inside. Next, the doctor, as if he were picking up a shovel to dig in a luxurious flowerbed, took a uterine mirror from the hand of the nurse.

  The examination was over. The doctor rinsed his hands and turned to his patient the face wearing the smile of human dedication. “Congratulations,” he said.

  Dubious, Yasuko was silent. The head of the gynecology department had the nurse call Yuichi. He came in. The doctor said it again: “Congratulations. Your wife is two months pregnant. She conceived in the very first days of your marriage. The mother’s body is healthy; everything is normal. So don’t worry. But even if she doesn’t want to eat, she will have to. If she doesn’t eat, she’s apt to get constipated, and if she gets constipated, toxins will accumulate and that’s not good. So I want her to have every day a shot of vitamin Bx in a grape-sugar base. Don’t worry about morning sickness. Get as much rest as possible . . After that he winked at Yuichi, adding, “That business doesn’t hurt at all. At any rate, congratulations,” the doctor went on, comparing the two with his eyes. “You’re a model couple, as the eugenicists would see it. Eugenics is the only branch of study that has hope for the future of mankind. I shall be delighted to see your child.”

  Yasuko was calm. It was a curious calm. Like an innocent husband, Yuichi looked at the area of his wife’s womb bewilderedly. A strange vision made his body quiver. His wife was holding a mirror in the region of her abdomen; from that mirror, he felt, his own face was looking fixedly out at him.

  It wasn’t a mirror. It happened that the western sun was coming through the window, falling on her deep-red skirt and reflecting from it; that was all. Yuichi’s fear was like the fear of a husband who had made his wife sick.

  “Congratulations!” On the way back, he fancied he heard that greeting again and again. Up to now it had been repeated countless times. After this it would be repeated countless times. He felt as if he was hearing the hollow sound of it like a litany. It would be better to say that what was ringing in his ears was not a congratulatory message but a droning of curses.

  Even without desire a child is born. In the illegitimate child, born only from desire, there appears a paradoxical beauty; but in the child born from lack of desire, how unlucky must the features be! In artificial insemination, the sperm is that of a heterosexual man. Eugenics, the idea of social improvement that disregards desire—Yuichi hated the chairman of the gynecology department’s beautiful white hair showered with experience. The humble, healthy attitude Yuichi had toward society was based on the fact that his special society had no sense of reality.

  The couple shrank from the wind that gathered in the westering sun and walked with coat collars turned up, leaning toward each other. Yasuko linked her arm in Yuichi's; the warmth of their arms mingled through layers of clothing. What was it that was now keeping their hearts apart? The heart has no body; it has no way of linking arms. Yuichi and Yasuko feared the moment when their nameless accusations would be shouted out. In womanish haste, Yasuko rebelled against this mutual taboo.

  “Well, should I be happy?”

  Yuichi could not bear to look directly at his wife’s face when she said that. All he had to do, he knew, was shout loudly and cheerfully, without looking at Yasuko: “Of course! Congratulations!” A figure happened to be approaching them, however, and he lapsed into silence.

  There were very few pedestrians on the suburban street. On the pebbly white roadbed the jutting and sinking shadows of the rooftops continued as far as the black-and-white grade crossing, mounting off at an angle. Toward them came a Spitz led by a boy in a sweater. Half the boy’s white face glowed red from the rays of the setting sun, but as he came nearer it was plain that purplish-red fire scars covered that cheek. The boy averted his face in passing, but Yuichi thought of the color of the fire in the distance and the fire sirens which so many times appeared before him in moments of desire. The scandalous sentiment of eugenics occurred to him once more. Finally, he said: “Yes, be happy. Congratulations.”

  Yasuko was disheartened by the echo of unmistakable protest in her husband’s words.

  Yuichi’s behavior was buried in obscurity. It was buried like the behavior of a magnificent philanthropist. However, the thin smile of self-satisfaction of the anonymously charitable philanthropist did not hover about his mouth.

  In his youthfulness, he was pained by the lack of an outlet for his energies in daytime society. Was there anything more boring than becoming a paragon of morals and manners without expending any effort? Through the unbearable pain of being able to remain chaste without effort he learned how to hate women as well as morality. The men and women joined by affection that he once looked upon with eyes of envy he now saw with the darkly piercing eye of jealousy. He was sometimes amazed at the depth of reticence he had been driven into. About his nighttime behavior, he kept the marble silence of an immovable statue, but like a
real statue, he was imprisoned in his form.

  Yasuko’s pregnancy filled life in the Minami household with activity, thanks to a sudden visit and a dinner made joyful by the Segawa family. That same night his mother remarked about the restlessness he showed by his desire to go out: “What more can you wish for?” she said. “You have a beautiful, sweet bride, and tonight we’re going to celebrate the conception of your first child.” Yuichi answered somewhat cheerfully that he had everything he wanted, which made his good-tempered mother feel that her son was being sarcastic.

  “What’s causing it? Before he got married he never went out, so that his mother worried about it. Since he got married, on the other hand, he’s always walking off, having a good time. No, it’s not your doing, Yasuko. It’s surely so many bad friends he’s made. Look how his friends never come around here.” Keeping Yasuko’s family in mind, she half-blamed, half-defended her son before his wife.

  Needless to say, the happiness of her son took most of the attention of his outspoken mother. When we plot the happiness of another, we unconsciously impute to the other person what is in another form the dream in which our own happiness is fulfilled. Thus by not thinking of our own happiness we make it possible for ourselves to become egotistic. She thought Yasuko was to blame for the life of dissipation Yuichi led immediately after his marriage. With the news of Yasuko’s pregnancy all her doubts were cleared away. “From now on, he’ll quiet down,” she said, even to Yasuko. “That child is becoming a father.”

  Her kidneys had mended somewhat, but now various cares caused her again to wish for death. Now, however, the fatal illness refused to come. What tortured her was not Yasuko’s unhappiness so much as—thanks to her maternal egoism—the unhappiness of her son. But the fear that this marriage based on impulses of duty was to Yuichi a forced marriage was the deepest root of the mother’s anxiety and remorse.