Forbidden Colors

by Yukio Mishima

  This spiritual father looked earnestly at his beautiful son. His old eyes were faded. When they attempted to look fixedly at something, anguished wrinkles stood out beneath them. “You must not fear life. You must make up your mind that pain and unhappiness will never come to you. Never to take on responsibility or duty is the moral code of beauty. Beauty has no time to assume responsibility for each and every unforeseen effect of its powers. Beauty has no time to think of happiness or things of that sort. Particularly not the happiness of other people. For that reason, however, beauty has the power to make suffering, even dying men happy.”

  “I now understand,” said Yuichi, “why you are against an abortion. That way you think Yasuko won’t suffer enough don’t you? In order to get her into a predicament where she cannot divorce me even if she wants to, the best way, you think, is for her to have a child. I think Yasuko has suffered enough now. She is my wife. I’ll return you the five hundred thousand yen.”

  “Again you’re contradicting yourself. What do you mean by saying ‘Yasuko is my wife; I must take pains to see that she can divorce me with ease’? You are afraid to see Yasuko suffering at your side all your life.”

  “How about my suffering? I am suffering now. I am certainly not happy.”

  “Forget about what makes you feel guilty, what makes you feel pain and remorse. Yuchan, open your eyes! You are absolutely innocent. You didn’t act out of desire. Guilt is the seasoning of desire. You only tasted the seasoning and now you make a sour face. Why do you want to divorce Yasuko?”

  “I’d like to be free. To tell the truth, I myself don’t know why I am acting as you say I do. When I see myself as a person without a will I feel desolate.”

  This tritely innocent statement gushed out and gradually rose to a shout. He continued: “I want to become something. I want a real existence!”

  Shunsuke listened intently. He felt he was hearing the first wail from one of his artistic productions. Yuichi went on, sadly: “I’m tired of secrecy.”

  This was the first time Shunsuke’s works had been given a tongue. The terrible voice of this youth made Shunsuke feel as if a groan of the awful Tabor expended in the construction of a bell had become the diapason of a well-wrought masterpiece. At the same time, Yuichi’s childish fretfulness made him smile. It was no longer the voice of his creation.

  “I am not at all happy to be called beautiful. I would be much happier to have everybody call me that nice, interesting fellow Yuchan.”

  “But”—Shunsuke’s tone had become somewhat placid— “it looks as if it is the destiny of you fellows not to be able to attain a real existence. In place of that, within the limitations of art, your fellowship can become a terrifically heroic antagonist to reality. The men of your street seem to be vested with the mission of representation when they are born. At least that’s the way I see it. The action called representation straddles reality and pricks it to a halt; it is action that stops the root of reality’s breath. Through this process, representation always becomes the heir of reality. This joker, reality, is moved by those whom it moves and is controlled by those whom it controls. For instance, those who are directly in charge of reality, who push reality and control reality, are the masses, you know. When it comes to representation, though, that is hard to push. Nothing on earth can force it to act. The person in charge of it is the artist. Only representation can give reality to reality; realism does not exist in reality but in representation.

  “Compared with representation, reality is tremendously abstract. In the real world, mankind, men, women, lovers, the home, and so on live higgledy-piggledy and that is all. The world of representation, on the contrary, presents humanity, manhood, womanhood, lovers that are worthy of being lovers, homes that have been made homelike, and the like. Representation seizes the nucleus of reality, but it is not carried away by reality. Representation reflects its image in the surface of the water like a dragonfly; it skims that surface. Before one knows, it has laid eggs on the water. Those larvae are brought up in the water in preparation for the day they will fly about in the sky. They become conversant with the secrets of the water, but they hold the world of the water in contempt.

  “This, indeed, is the mission of your fellowship. Once you told me of your annoyance over the principle of majority rule. Right now, I don’t believe in your annoyance. What is so original about men and women being in love? In modern society institutions based on the instinct of love are becoming increasingly rare. Customs and models have permeated even the first impulses. What models, do you think? Shallow, artistic models. Many young men and women are stupidly convinced that only the artistic love is the true love, and their own loves are only clumsy copies.

  ‘The other day I saw a romantic ballet performed by a dancer who I am told is a man of that street. As the lover, expressing in marvelous detail the emotions of a man in love, he was incomparable. The one he loved, however, was not the beautiful ballerina before our eyes. It was the boy apprentice who played an insignificant part and appeared only briefly on the stage. What intoxicated the audience so in his performance was the complete artificiality of it, for the reason that he did not desire the beautiful ballerina who was playing his lover on the stage. But for the young men and women among the unsuspecting audience, the love he portrayed was capable of becoming what can be called a model of this world’s love.”

  This long-winded peroration by Shunsuke made Yuichi feel infinitely disappointed. It had not alleviated his great human problem. The matter he felt to be so important seemed on his way homeward to have been disregarded as of small consequence.

  At any rate, Yasuko wanted a baby. His mother was eager for a grandchild. Yasuko’s family’s attitude was quite what one would expect. Even Shunsuke wanted it! Although Yuichi felt that an abortion was of utmost importance for Yasuko’s happiness, he knew that securing her consent would be extremely difficult. No matter how terrible the morning sickness became, her demeanor would become increasingly obdurate.

  Yuichi felt dizzy watching his friends and enemies dance frenziedly toward unhappiness. He went so far as to compare his unhappiness with that of the prophet who has divined the future, and he fell into despair. That evening he went to Rudon’s, sat there alone, and drank heavily. Exaggerating his own loneliness, he resorted to cruelty and went off to spend the night with a boy completely devoid of charm. Play-acting at drunken roistering, he poured whiskey down the boy’s back. The boy tried to make a joke of it, laughing agreeably in a forced way, peering servilely at his tormentor. This depressed Yuichi. There was a rather big hole in the boy’s sock. That caused an even deeper depression in Yuichi.

  Dead drunk, he went to sleep without touching the boy. In the middle of the night he was shocked awake by the sound of his own voice. In his dream he had killed Shunsuke. In the darkness Yuichi peered in terror at his gleaming hand, wet with cold perspiration.

  Chapter 12 GAY PARTY

  IN PAIN AND ANGUISH, Yuichi’s irresolution crawled slowly to Christmas without change. The time for the abortion had passed. One day, again filled with despair, he kissed Mrs. Kaburagi for the first time. That kiss made her feel ten years younger.

  “Where are you going to spend Christmas?” she asked.

  “I’m afraid I must play the dutiful husband and spend Christmas Eve at least with my wife.”

  “Goodness, my husband hasn’t spent Christmas Eve with me once! This year we’re stepping out separately again, I suppose.”

  Having kissed her, Yuichi was amazed by her prudishness. The usual woman on such an occasion would have set out quite intolerably to play the part of the lover, but Mrs. Kaburagi held her passion in check. It was an escape from the irregularity of her daily existence. Yuichi was all the more terrified by the thought that he was loved by a simple, sober side of her that no man knew.

  Yuichi had quite different plans for Christmas. He had been invited to a “Gei Pa-ti” that was to be given in a house in the hills of Oiso. “Gei” is the American eq
uivalent for homosexual.

  The house in Oiso was a mansion that the property tax had not brought to a forced sale, but it had at least deprived the owner of funds for its maintenance. Jackie, who had influence there for many years, managed to rent it. It was owned by the family of the head of a paper company, which, after the master died, rented a small house in Tokyo and lived modestly. When they occasionally visited the mansion they had rented out, which was three times as big as their house, with a garden ten times the size of the one where they lived now, they were mystified by the constant bustle of guests there. From trains departing from Oiso Station or passing through, the lights could be seen burning in the guest rooms at night. People coming from there to visit them in Tokyo would say that the lights burning redly in the old house made them think of old times. “I can’t understand the high life they live there at all,” a widow remarked suspiciously. “Once I dropped in and found them making amazing preparations for a banquet.” No one could guess what went on inside the house, which looked out at the Oiso Sea across an expansive lawn.

  Jackie’s youth had been truly splendid—so splendid that only Yuichi seemed worthy of nomination as Jackie the Second. The times, however, were different. Jackie (despite this name, he was Japanese, and quite respectable) with his beauty as capital made a grand tour of Europe more luxurious than the Mitsui or Mitsubishi officials of that time could ever attain. He and his English patron, however, separated after a few years.

  When he returned to Japan, Jackie lived for a short time in the Kansai area. His patron at that time was an Indian millionaire. At the same time, however, this woman-hating youth was the object of the attentions of three ladies of Ashiya society. The kind of service Yuichi paid to Yasuko he paid to each of these three guardians in turn.

  The Indian was afflicted with a chest ailment. Jackie treated this sentimental big man heartlessly. While his young lover was whooping it up downstairs as usual, with hordes of his fellows, the Indian lay in a rattan sleeping chair in the sun room on the second floor, with his blanket pulled to his chin, reading the Bible and weeping.

  During the war Jackie was a clerk in the Secretariat of the French Embassy. He was thought to be a spy. The elusive quality of his private life was mistaken for official conduct.

  Promptly after the war Jackie got his hands on the Oiso mansion. He brought in the foreigner who was in love with him and proceeded to display his talent for management. He was still beautiful. Just as women have no beards, he displayed no sign of years. Moreover, the gay society’s phallic worship—and this was their only religion—did not spare Jackie honor and adulation for the tireless way he lived.

  That evening, Yuichi was at Rudon’s. He felt rather tired. His cheeks, paler than usual, gave a strangely apprehensive air to his serene, clean profile. “Yuchan has a beautifully cloudy eye today,” said Eichan. Like the eye of a first mate tired of gazing at the sea, he thought.

  Yuichi naturally kept his marriage secret. This concealment was the source of exceedingly jealous rumors. Looking out the window at the street with its bustle of the dying year, he thought about his uneasiness of the past four days. As when he was first married, Yuichi once more dreaded the night. For with her pregnancy Yasuko demanded incessant, unfailing love; punctilious, nurselike devotion. And so Yuichi could not help thinking, as he had before: I am an unpaid prostitute. I am cheap. I am a devoted toy, he reviled himself. If Yasuko wants to buy a man’s soul so cheaply, she’d better learn to take a little unhappiness. Just the same, I’m like a self-seeking maid-— I’m not even faithful to myself, am I?

  In truth, Yuichi’s body lying beside his wife was much cheaper than Yuichi’s body beside a boy he loved, but this perversion of values made what seemed to the world a perfectly matched beautiful young couple into an ice-cold harlotry, a relationship of unpaid prostitution. With this quiet, slow-working virus hidden from men’s eyes incessantly eating away at Yuichi, who could guarantee that, even outside his little “let’s play house” circle, his doll-like, man-and-wife circle, he was not also being devoured?

  For instance, until this time he had been faithful to his ideals in gay society. He never made sexual commitments except with boys who were younger than he and who appealed to him. This faithfulness was, of course, a reaction to his infidelity toward the marriage bed. From the beginning Yuichi had come to this society in faithfulness to himself. In general, however, his weakness and the mysterious will of Shunsuke were forcing him to be faithless to himself. Shunsuke said it was the fate of beauty as well as of art.

  Yuichi’s looks had turned the heads of eight or nine of the ten foreigners who saw him. Disliking foreigners, he had rejected them all. One, for instance, had broken a two-story pane of glass in Rudon’s in a fit of anger. Another, in a fit of depression, had for no discernible reason, slashed the wrists of the boy staying with him. The crowd who specialized in living off foreigners respected Yuichi highly for his attitude. They had a masochistic love and respect for a mode of living that without harming them could lash out against their own subsistence. Why? Because no day goes by that we do not dream of a safe rebellion against our livelihood.

  Nevertheless, Yuichi strove out of his inherent gentleness to refuse without wounding the other parties. When he looked at these pitiful beings who wanted him when he did not want them, Yuichi could not help viewing them with the same eyes he turned on his pathetic wife. The impulses of compassion and sympathy condoned a mood of acceptance not unmixed with disdain for these men, and in this mood of acceptance, oddly, an easy, worry-free coquetry flowered. It was a completely relaxed, aged coquetry like the kind seen in the gentle maternal instincts of old women visiting orphanages.

  A limousine threaded through the congestion of the street and stopped in front of Rudon’s. A second limousine followed it and stopped. The Oasis Kimichan did a single proud pirouette and greeted the three foreigners with his proudest, most amorous look. There were ten men in the group going to Jackie’s party, including the foreigners and Yuichi.

  When the three foreigners saw Yuichi, a gleam of anticipation and impatience came into their eyes. Who was going to share a bed with him tonight at Jackie’s?

  The ten men were loaded into two cars. Rudy handed a gift for Jackie through the window. It was a bottle of champagne decked with holly.

  Oiso was less than two hours’ drive away. The cars ran bumper to bumper on the Keihin Number 2 National Highway and the old Tokaido Road to Ofuna. The boys were having a merry time. One calculating boy had an empty Boston bag in his lap in which he planned to carry back all the loot he could get. Yuichi did not sit next to a foreigner. The blond young man next to the driver stared covetously in the rear-view mirror, in which he could watch Yuichi’s face.

  The sky was alight—a blue-porcelain night sky where countless stars twinkled, like snowflakes frozen before they could fall. The car was warm, thanks to the heater. Yuichi heard from his talkative seat mate, with whom he had once been intimate, a story about the golden-haired man next to the driver. After he had been in Japan a time, he shouted in the climax of sexual pleasure, “Tengoku! Ten-goku!”—Paradise—which he had heard somewhere, and made his partner break up with laughter. This not unlikely story shook Yuichi with laughter—and just then it happened that his eye met the eye in the rear-view mirror. That blue eye winked, and the thin lips came closer to the surface of the glass and kissed it. Yuichi was amazed— the cloudy print of his lips on the mirror surface was tinged with red.

  It was nine o’clock when they arrived. There were already three limousines in the circular drive. Human figures were moving busily in the windows from which came the sound of music. The wind was very cold, and the boys, stepping out, bent their newly shaven pale blue napes.

  Jackie greeted his guests at the entrance. He sank his face in the bouquet of winter roses that Yuichi handed him and shook hands stylishly with the foreigners with his right hand, which bore a cat’s-eye ring. He was quite drunk, so he greeted everyone, including t
he boy who sold pickles in the daytime in his family’s store, with a “Meri-Kurisu-masu tsu yu” For a moment the boys felt as if they were abroad. In fact, many boys like them had been abroad, accompanied by their lovers. The stories that appear under the newspaper headlines, “Public Spirit Far from Home/ Houseboy Studies Abroad,” generally have this meaning.

  The salon that gave off the entranceway was about twenty mats in size and was lighted only by a Christmas tree in the center, adorned with tiny incandescent candles. A long-playing record sounded from a loudspeaker hung somewhere in the tree. About twenty guests were already dancing in the salon.

  In truth, this evening the pure child was born from an immaculate mother’s womb. The men dancing here were celebrating the nativity like “the Righteous Man,” Joseph. In short, they celebrated their freedom from responsibility for the infant born this night.

  Men dancing together—this uncommon joke. As they danced, the rebellious smiles beaming from their faces said: “We aren’t doing this because we are forced to; we are only playing a simple joke.” While they danced, they laughed—a spirit-destroying laugh. In the usual dance hall, the man and women blithely dancing exhibit the freedom of 154 the impulses they express. But when these men danced, arms intertwined, there was a feeling that they were forced by the impulse into a dark bondage. Why is it that men must, in spite of themselves, assume a posture to show they love each other? What is it but that this kind of love, confused by the impulse, may perhaps not be consummated if the dark taste of destiny is not present?

  The popular piece became a fast rumba. Their dancing became frenzied, lewd. Under the pretext that “It is the music, above all, that is driving us,” one couple joined their lips and, until they fell, whirled about endlessly. Eichan, who had come earlier, winked at Yuichi from the arms of a fat little foreigner. The boy was half-laughing and half-knitting his brows. While they were dancing, the fat dancer kept biting the boy’s earlobe. His mustache, traced with eyebrow pencil, was smudging the boy’s face.