Forbidden Colors

by Yukio Mishima

  His stomach periodically knew artistic cramps. Then his hair began to change to the white hair of the artist.

  Since he met Yuichi, the work he had dreamed about had to be crammed with a perfection cured of the disease of perfectionism, a health of death cured of the sickness of life. It had to be the recovery from everything: from youth, from old age, from art, from life, from venerableness, from world knowledge, from madness. Through decay, victory over decay; through artistic death, victory over death; through perfection, victory over perfection. All these things the old man dreamed of through Yuichi.

  At that time, suddenly, that strange illness of his youth returned; incompleteness and outright failure caught Shunsuke while he worked.

  What was this? He hesitated to give it a name. The horror of giving it a name made him hesitate. In truth, was it not a peculiar quality of love?

  Yuichi’s face never left Shunsuke’s heart day or night. In his torture, he reviled him; by all the mean names he knew he cursed this false youth in his heart. Only then was he at ease in the knowledge that he clearly detested this young scoundrel. With the same mouth he had used to sing praises of Yuichi’s complete absence of intellect, he now ridiculed him for his lack of intellect. Yuichi’s inexperience; his annoying lady-killer pose; his self-centeredness; his intolerable self-love; his outbursts of sincerity; his capricious naivete; those tears; all the rubbish of his character: Shunsuke took them up and tried to laugh at them, but whenever he realized that he in his own youth had not a single one of them, he sank into abysmal jealousy.

  The character of the youth called Yuichi that he had once grasped was now a will-o’-the-wisp. He realized that he had until now not known one thing about the youth. Yes, he didn’t know a thing. To begin with, where was the evidence that he did not love women? Where was the evidence that he loved boys? Had Shunsuke been on the spot so much as one time? But, then, after all, what did it matter? Wasn’t Yuichi supposed to have no actual existence? If he was real, his meaningless changeability would be tricking Shunsuke’s eyes. How could something so unreal put it over on the artist?

  Nevertheless Yuichi was gradually—above all through this silence—at least as far as Shunsuke was concerned, attaining the state Yuichi himself had so dearly wished for, in other words, the “real existence.” He now appeared before Shunsuke’s eyes in his uncertain, untrue, yet real, beautiful form. In the middle of the night, Shunsuke started to ponder: Somewhere in this great city, now, whom is Yuichi embracing? Yasuko? Kyoko? Mrs. Kaburagi? Or some nameless boy? He did not go back to sleep. On the day after such nights he would go to Rudon’s. Yuichi, however, would not appear. It went against Sunsuke’s grain to meet Yuichi accidentally at Rudon’s. It would be particularly horrible to receive a distant nod from this lone youth who had slipped his traces.

  This Sunday was especially hard to take. He looked out of the window of his study at the withered, tufty lawn of the garden. There was a hint of snow. The color of the dry grass seemed faintly bright with warmth; it made him think a weak sun was shining. He strained his eyes. The sun wasn’t coming through anywhere. He closed his Tale of Shotetsu and put it aside. What was he looking for? Sunlight? Snow? He rubbed his shriveled hands as if they were cold. He looked down at the lawn again. As he did so a wisp of sunlight bled into the front of that gloomy garden.

  He went down to the garden.

  A lone surviving Corbicula moth was fluttering about on the lawn. He stepped on it with his garden geta. When he sat down in a chair in a comer of the garden he took off one geta and looked at the bottom of it. A scaly dust mixed with frost shone there. Shunsuke felt refreshed.

  A human shape appeared in the dark veranda: “Master, your scarf, your scarf!”

  The old maidservant was calling inconsiderately in a loud voice. Over her arm fluttered a gray scarf. She put on garden geta and started to come down into the garden, when she heard the telephone ringing in the dark house. She turned her back and lunged off in that direction. To Shunsuke, that intermittent, sharp ring sounded like an auditory hallucination. The pulse raced in his breast. This vision that had betrayed him so many times, would it be Yuichi on the phone this time?

  They met at Rudon’s. After getting off the trolley from Kanda Station at Yurakucho, Yuichi lithely threaded the Sunday throng. Everywhere men and women were strolling together. Not one of those men was as beautiful as Yuichi. The women all stole looks at him. Bold women turned their heads. In that moment women in their hearts forgot the existence of the man beside them. At times when he perceived this, Yuichi reveled in the abstract joy of his hatred of women.

  In the daytime Rudon’s was like the usual tea room, even its clientele. The youth sat down in his usual chair in the back. He took off his scarf and overcoat and held his hands out toward the gas heater.

  “Yuchan, you haven’t been here for a while. Who are you meeting today?” asked Rudy.

  “Grandpa,” Yuichi replied. Shunsuke had not yet arrived. In a chair across the way a woman with a face like a fox, her hands folded in their soiled deerskin gloves, talked chummily with a man.

  Yuichi was anticipating Shunsuke’s arrival. He felt like a middle school student who had mischievously concealed something in the teacher’s desk and was now waiting impatiently for the teacher to come in and start the class.

  After about ten minutes, Shunsuke arrived. He wore a black chesterfield with velvet collar and carried a pigskin suitcase. Silently he came and sat down before Yuichi. The old man’s eyes seemed to enfold him in their shining stare. Yuichi perceived in his eyes an indescribable stupidity. Reason enough. Shunsuke’s heart, incapable of learning from experience, was again planning some foolishness.

  The steam from their coffee gave countenance to their silence. They clumsily started to speak at the same time, and their words clashed. This time, oddly enough, Shunsuke was the shy one.

  “It’s been a long time,” said Yuichi. “I’ve been busy for so long with my exams, and there’s been trouble at home. Besides—”

  “That’s all right. That’s all right.” Shunsuke quickly forgave everything.

  In the short time he had not seen Yuichi, the youth had changed. His words, every one of them, were pregnant with adult secrets. All the many wounds he used to lay out before Shunsuke without reserve were now firmly wrapped in antiseptic bandages. Yuichi looked like a youth without a care.

  Let him lie, Shunsuke thought. He seems to have graduated from the age of confession. Just the same the sincerity of his age is stamped on his brow. It is a sincerity appropriate to an age which prefers lies to confession. He asked aloud: “How’s Mrs. Kaburagi?”

  “I’m right at her side,” said Yuichi, thinking Shunsuke must have heard of his becoming private secretary. “She couldn’t live without having me near her to be nice to her. After a while she talked her husband into setting me up as his private secretary. Now we can meet at worst every three days.”

  “That woman has gotten patient, hasn’t she? She didn’t used to be one who would worm herself in like that, did she?”

  Yuichi contradicted him, his voice rising from nervousness: “Just the same, that’s what she is now.”

  “You’re defending her! You haven’t fallen in love with her, have you?”

  Yuichi almost laughed at how widely Shunsuke had missed the mark. .

  Outside of that, however, the two had nothing to talk about. They were very much like two lovers who came to meet each other thinking of all the things they would say when they got together, and when they met had forgotten them all.

  Shunsuke had to turn to his primary proposal: “I’m going to Kyoto this evening.”

  “Is that right?” Yuichi eyed his suitcase without a flicker of interest.

  “How about it? Would you like to go with me?” “Tonight?” The youth’s eyes widened.

  “When you called me, I decided to leave right away, tonight. Look, I have two sleeping-car tickets; one’s yours.” “But, I—”

  “Call
home and tell them; it’ll be all right. Let me talk to them and make the excuses for you. We’ll be staying at the Rakuyo Hotel, in front of the station. Call Mrs. Kaburagi, too; she can fix things up with the count. She trusts me, at least. Stay with me this evening until it’s time to go. We’ll go anywhere you like.”

  “But my job—”

  “It pays to let jobs go once in a while.”

  “But my exams—”

  “I’ll buy you the books you need for your exams. In two or three days* traveling you’d be lucky to read one. All right, Yuchan? Your face looks tired. Travel is the best medicine. In Kyoto you won’t have a care in the world.”

  Yuichi again felt himself powerless before this strange force. He thought a moment and consented. In truth, although he did not know it, a hurried departure on a trip was just what his heart had been crying for. If this opportunity hadn’t come along, this blue Sunday would surely have driven him to take off for somewhere.

  Shunsuke quickly took care of the two telephone calls. Passion drove him to more than ordinary powers. There were still eight hours until the night train departed. He thought of the guests who were being kept waiting and, for Yuichi’s edification alone, used up the time at the movies, the dance hall, and restaurants. Yuichi paid no attention to his aged patron; Shunsuke was happy enough. After they had managed to sample the town’s ordinary pleasures, they walked the streets with happy, mild intoxication. Yuichi carried Shunsuke’s bag. Shunsuke walked with the long strides of a young man, his breathing animated. Both were drunk on the freedom of having nowhere to go back to that night.

  “Today, I didn’t want to go back home, no matter what,” said Yuichi.

  “There are days like that—when you’re young. There are days when everybody seems to be living a rat’s life, and on those days you hate living like a rat more than ever.”

  “On days like that, what can you do?”

  “You can at least gnaw the time up as would a rat. When you do that you make a little hole. Even though you still can’t escape you can at least stick your nose out.”

  They watched for a new cab, stopped it, and directed it to the station.

  Chapter 16 FLIGHT IN FORMATION

  IN THE AFTERNOON of the day they arrived in Kyoto, Shunsuke hired a cab and introduced Yuichi to the Daigo Temple. When the car passed the wintry fields of the Yamashina Valley, some convicts from the prison in that area were repairing the roads. It was like unrolling the scroll of a dark tale of the Middle Ages; the convicts stood clearly visible outside the window, and two or three of them craned their necks to peer inside the car. Their work clothes were dark blue, reminiscent of the northern sea.

  “Poor fellows,” said the young man, usually moved only by the pleasures of human existence.

  “I don’t feel a thing,” said the old man. “When you get to be my age, you’ll become like that, I expect—immune even to the fear of having that happen to your imagination. Not only that, fame has an odd effect. Countless people I don’t recall ever having seen before storm up looking as if I owe them something. In short, I am in the dilemma of being expected to have countless emotional responses. If I don’t have even one emotion on call, I find myself branded as a mere brute. Sympathy toward sadness, altruism toward indigence, gladness for good fortune, understanding toward love—in my emotional bank, as it were, I must always have ready gold for countless convertible notes current in society. If I don’t, faith in the bank falls. Since I’ve brought faith down as much as it can go, I’m content.”

  The cab went through the Sammon of the Daigo Temple and stopped in front of the gate of the Samboin. In the square front garden with its famous weeping cherry trees, winter reigned, ordering all into square shapes—winter given over to maintenance. This feeling deepened greatly as they mounted to the entrance with the two characters, Ranho, for the red and the blue phoenix, written large on a single leaf screen, and as they were shown to chairs in the sunny projection of the garden pavilion. The garden was so packed with artificial winter, so controlled, so abstracted, so composed, so carefully planned, that there was no space for real winter to enter. Standing by each and every rock, the graceful form of winter made itself felt. The island in the center was decorated with shapely pines; the little waterfall in the southeastern part of the garden was frozen. The artificial mountain fastness covering the southern side was mostly evergreens, and thanks to that, even in this season, the impression was far from weak that the garden view extended endlessly through groves of trees.

  While they waited until the abbot came, Yuichi bathed once more in the privilege of hearing Shunsuke's lectures. As he saw it, the gardens of Kyoto’s various temples were the most direct statement of esthetic Japanese thinking. The craftmanship of this garden, the view from the moonviewing platform of the Katsura Detached Palace—the most representative example—as well as the copying shown in the glen of the mountains in the background of the Katsura’s Shokatei: in the extreme artificiality of their skillful copying of nature, they attempted to betray nature. Between nature and the work of art, there is a secret rebellion brewing. The revolt of the work of art against nature is like the intellectual defilement of a woman who gives her body away. These famous old gardens are fastened by the cord of a passion for the invisibly faithless female known as the work of art. They are men who have forgotten their basic warlike mission. We look at them and see alliances of never-ending despair, marital lives filled with fatigue.

  The abbot appeared then. He expressed regret that he and Shunsuke saw so little of each other. Then he ushered the two into another room. At Shunsuke’s insistence, he showed them a document that was kept hidden in the most esoteric precincts of the temple. The old writer wanted to show it to Yuichi.

  In the back of the book the date was given as the first year of Genkyo (1321). It was a secret book of the time of the Emperor Godaigo. They rolled the scroll out on the tatami lit by the winter sun. Its name was the Copybook on the Catamite. Yuichi couldn’t read the foreword, but Shun-suke put on his glasses and read it flawlessly:

  About the time the Ninna temple was established, it seems, there was in that place a priest well respected in the world. As he grew older he became distinguished for his knowledge of the three laws, his virtues, and his experience, but he could not refrain from certain practices. Among the many boys serving there, was one whom he loved dearly, with whom he slept. When a man grows old, no matter how high or low his birth, his body will not continue to do what he wishes. Though the priest’s desires mounted, his body was like a scene of the moon sinking into the earth, or the dying fall of an arrow shot over a mountain. The unhappy boy wrote letters every night to Chuta, the son of his governess, and with him did . . .

  The homosexual pictures that were shown following this simple, frank foreword were filled with a pleasant, artless sensuality. As Yuichi studied excitedly every scene, Shunsuke’s mind was drawn to the name of the son, Chuta, the very name of the retainer in “The Broken Inkstone.” The innocent prince had taken the blame of the family retainer on himself. The strength of character that led him to keep silent even until death led one to imagine some kind of pact in the terse, simple description. As a result was not just the sound-of the name Chuta—one given to the person fulfilling that particular function*—enough to bring a dark smile to the faces of the men of that age?

  This scholarly problem did not leave Shunsuke’s mind as they rode back in the cab. When they ran into Mr. and Mrs. Kaburagi in the hotel lobby, all his leisurely contemplations went out the window.

  “Are you surprised?” said Mrs. Kaburagi, holding out her hand from her mink jacket. Nobutaka, looking strangely composed, got up from the chair behind her. For a moment, the older people behaved quite awkwardly. Only Yuichi was relaxed, keenly aware of his extraordinary youthful power.

  For a moment Shunsuke could not grasp what the Kaburagis were up to. He put on the formal scowl he assumed when he had his mind fixed on something else. The professional discernm
ent of the novelist led him, however, to ponder the first impression the couple had given him: This is the first time I’ve ever seen this pair so close. It makes you feel they’ve got their heads together in some plot.

  In fact, the Kaburagis had been pretty close lately. Perhaps from contrition over the fact that each was using the other to gain something from Yuichi, or perhaps from gratitude, the couple were treating each other with much more consideration than ever before. Theirs was a marvelous meeting of minds. This calm and collected couple would face each other across the kotatsu and read newspapers and magazines far into the night. Should there be a sound in the direction of the ceiling, they would look up at the same time; their eyes would meet, and they would smile.

  “You’re pretty jumpy lately.”

  “So* are you.”

  After that they would sit for a time, unable to control the inexplicable surgings in their hearts.

  Another unbelievable change was Mrs. Kaburagi’s transformation into a housewife. She stayed home so that when Yuichi had to come to the house on company business she could feast him on cakes of her own making. She was even knitting him a pair of socks.

  To Nobutaka, his wife’s knitting was an utter absurdity. Fascinated by it, he bought a great quantity of imported wool and, knowing that she would sooner or later use it to make Yuichi a sweater, he played the part of the doting husband and held the skeins while his wife rolled the yam. The calm satisfaction he felt in this task was incomparable.

  Although Mrs. Kaburagi’s love was thus becoming so obvious, when it occurred to her that she had as yet received not a single reward from it, she remained serene. There was something unnatural about this relationship between her and her husband, but she felt that even though her love had not been consummated, her husband was not looking down on her because of it.

  At first Nobutaka had been offended by his wife’s stolid composure. He had felt that she and Yuichi were probably intimate. After a time he realized that these fears were imaginary. Her unwonted action in hiding this love from her husband—something she did intuitively for no other reason than that it was true love—sprang from the sister of Nobutaka’s emotion, which had to be carefully hidden because of its forbidding aspects. Nobutaka was sometimes perilously tempted by it to talk about Yuichi with his wife. Yet when she praised Yuichi’s beauty too highly, he would be struck again by anxiety over what Yuichi was up to each day, and he would end up maligning Yuichi like a normal husband jealous of his wife’s lover. When they heard of his going off on a trip, they were brought even closer together.