Forbidden Colors

by Yukio Mishima

  “Was that cigarette case on the table all the time?” asked Shunsuke.

  “I didn’t notice,” Yuichi said.

  Back from Kyoto, Yuichi felt his heart riven with unhappiness whenever he thought of Kyoko. As Shunsuke had calculated, the proud youth called her up. She hemmed and hawed sulkily for a time, wondering whether she could and whether she couldn’t, but when Yuichi was about to hang up she hurriedly told him where and when she would meet him.

  Examinations were near at hand. Yuichi was cramming in the economics, but when he compared his present work with his performance in last year’s exam, he was amazed at his inability to absorb it. He had lost the pure rapturous joy he used to get when he plunged feverishly into differential calculus. This young man, learned in the techniques of being half in touch with reality and half in contempt of it, under the influence of Shunsuke preferred to find in all thought only pretense and in all life only the spell of custom that devoured it. The miseries he saw in the adult world since he had come to know Shunsuke were entirely unexpected. The men with position, fame, and money—the three-in-one on the marquee of the masculine world—of course did not wish to lose them; but it staggered the imagination to see how at times they seemed to despise them. Shunsuke’s behavior amazed Yuichi at first. He trampled on his own reputation as if he were a pagan treading on a tablet designed to detect Christians: without a care, or, worse, with a burst of sadistic laughter in the pleasure of it, the joy of it.

  On the appointed day, Yuichi arrived fifteen minutes late at the store where Kyoko was waiting. Kyoko was standing on the sidewalk in front of the store, fidgeting. She pinched Yuichi’s arm hard and complained about his lack of consideration. Her quite ordinary charm, it must be said, served somewhat to dampen Yuichi’s enthusiasm.

  It was a fair day in early spring, though cold. Even in the bustle of the street a certain limpid quality could be felt. The air was for all the world like transparent quartz against the skin. Under his navy-blue coat Yuichi wore his student uniform, so his high neckband and white collar stood out above his muffler. Kyoko looked at the neckband that formed a line with his shoulders as he walked beside her. She saw the white collar neat upon the soft shaven skin and caught the scent of early spring. Her dark-green overcoat was pinched in at the waist. Inside her turned-up collar a salmon-colored scarf protected her throat. Where it touched her neck, traces of flesh-colored powder clung. Her cold, red little mouth was amiable.

  This giddy woman had not said one word of complaint about Yuichi’s silence, and he was held captive by the uncomfortable sense that something was missing, like a boy whose mother is silent when he expects to be scolded. In spite of all the months and days that had gone by since their last rendezvous, she possessed no sense of rupture-evidence that her passion passed along a fixed, safe track, as from the beginning. Be it as it may, the light-hearted appearance of a woman like Kyoko served the purposes of concealment and self-control. It was always her way, actually, to be taken in by a frivolous exterior.

  They went to a nearby street corner, where a new Renault was parked. A man sitting in the driver’s seat smoking a cigarette indolently opened the door from the inside. When Yuichi paused, Kyoko invited him to get in and slid in beside him. She introduced them swiftly: “Cousin Keichan—Mr. Namiki.”

  Namiki, who seemed about thirty, turned in the driver’s seat and nodded. Yuichi was suddenly cloaked in the guise of a cousin, and without a by-your-leave his name had been changed, but Kyoko’s game, he knew, had not started here. Intuitively he perceived that Namiki was Kyoko’s rumored lover. His own position comforted him considerably. He almost forgot to be jealous.

  Yuichi did not ask where they were going, so Kyoko slipped her arm under his and quietly took his gloved fingers in hers. Then she spoke softly in his ear: “Don’t be angry. We’re going to Yokohama today to buy some dress material for me; on the way back we’ll stop somewhere and eat. There’s nothing to get upset about. Namiki, though, is mad because I wouldn’t sit in the front seat. I’m going to break it off with him. I brought you along on this trip as a demonstration.”

  “You’re demonstrating against me, too, I suppose.”

  “Silly. I’m the one who should have suspicions about you. Are you keeping busy in your work as private secretary?”

  Kyoko and Yuichi whispered together throughout the thirty-minute journey along the Keihin National Highway to Yokohama. Namiki said not a word. Indeed, Yuichi played well the part of the ardent rival for the love of a lady. . .

  Today Kyoko seemed like a woman whose giddiness would always prevent her from falling in love. She chatted about useless things; she left out the essentials. The only saving merit of this shallowness was that she failed to convince Yuichi of all the happiness that was hers. The world is in error when it refers to unconscious concealment of this kind, practiced by an unsophisticated woman, as coquetry. With Kyoko flightiness was like a fever; only in the midst of her ravings could the truth be heard. Among the coquettes of the metropolis, there were many who had become coquettes out of shyness. Kyoko was one of them.

  Since she had last seen Yuichi, Kyoko had slipped back into frivolous thoughtlessness. Her shallowness was limitless; her life was absolutely rudderless. Her friends loved to come by and watch the life she led, but no one had the wit to notice that her frantic activity at this time was like the frivolity of men dancing barefoot on red-hot iron. She didn’t think about anything. She couldn’t read a novel all the way through, but after reading one third would skip to the last page. There was something disorganized about the things she said. When she sat down, she would soon cross her legs. Even then, her leg would tremble as if she were bored. When she happened to write a letter, the ink would stick to her finger or her dress.

  Since Kyoko did not know what love was, she mistook it for boredom. She passed the months and days she did not see Yuichi wondering why she was so bored. As ink stuck to her dress or her fingers, ennui clung to her everywhere.

  They passed Tsurumi, and when the sea became visible between the yellow warehouses of a refrigeration plant, Kyoko squealed like a child: “Oh, the ocean!” An old steam engine in the harbor passed between the warehouses pulling freight cars and blocked the sea from view. By the time the men looked again, there was nothing to exclaim about. The port sky in early spring was smirched by soot and smoke and a forest of masts.

  Kyoko was sure that the two men riding with her were in love with her—it was her unshakable conviction. Or was it only an illusion?

  Yuichi, observing the passion of a woman with the feelings of a stone, his body incapable of responding to her, had become involved in the paradoxical process of thinking that since he could not make any woman who loved him happy, the only thing he could do for Kyoko, the only spiritual gift he could give her, was to make her unhappy. As a result, he felt not the slightest moral compunction about the purposeless revenge he held in store for Kyoko.

  The three got out of the car in front of a little store that sold women’s dress material, on a corner of Yokohama’s Chinatown. Here, imported goods could be bought cheaply, so Kyoko had come to select her spring fabrics. She draped stuffs she liked over her shoulder one after the other and went to look in the mirror. After that she came over to Namiki and Yuichi and asked: “How does it look?” The two offered not very useful comments. They teased her by saying things like: “If you go out of here with that red material over your shoulder, you’ll drive the bulls wild.”

  Kyoko looked over twenty fabrics, but she didn’t like any and left without buying a thing. They went to the second floor of the Bankaro, a restaurant serving Peking specialities, and the three ordered an early dinner. While they talked, Kyoko asked for the plate in front of Yuichi: “Cousin Yuchan, would you be so kind as to—?” He could not help seeing the expression on Namiki’s face as she unexpectedly said these words.

  That flashily dressed youth twisted the comers of his mouth slightly; a smile of mature cynicism passed over his dark f
ace. Then he looked from Kyoko to Yuichi and skillfully changed the subject. He spoke about a football game concerning Yuichi’s college, when he had participated during his college days.

  It was clear that he was aware of Kyoko’s lie about Yuichi—or Keichan—and had been aware of her ruse from the beginning. Moreover, he had simply forgiven the two of them. Kyoko’s expression at that time was something laughable. Not only that, there was the tension in the words: “Cousin Yuchan, would you be so kind as to . . .?” It betrayed the fact that the slip had been deliberate. The earnestness of her expression, so like that of a woman scorned, was almost pitiful.

  Nobody in this world loves Kyoko, Yuichi thought. Then the cold heart of this youth who could not love women justified the fact that no one loved this woman—justified also his own lack of feeling for her as well as his desire to make her miserable. In addition, he couldn’t help regretting that she was already unhappy without his help.

  After dancing at the Cliff side Dance Hall by the harbor, they took the same seats they had before and drove back on the Keihin National Highway to Tokyo. Kyoko made another trite remark. “Don’t be angry about today. Mr. Namiki is really only a friend.”

  Yuichi was silent. Kyoko was sad; she felt he still didn’t believe her.

  Chapter 18 SIGHTSEER’S MISFORTUNE

  YUICHI’S EXAMS were over. It was already spring by the calendar. On an afternoon when the gusty wind sent the dust dancing and the street seemed to be wrapped in yellow mist, Yuichi dropped by at the Kaburagi home on the way home from school, as Nobutaka had directed him to do the previous day.

  To get to the Kaburagi home, he had to leave the train at a station not far from the college. It was not really out of his way. Today Mrs. Kaburagi was to go to the office of an important foreign “friend” to pick up some licensing documents required in a new venture by her husband’s corporation. It had been arranged that when she came home Yuichi, who would be waiting there, would take them to her husband’s office. The documents were readily available thanks to the exertions of Mrs. Kaburagi. Only the hour when she would pick them up was not clear, so Yuichi had to wait until she arrived home.

  When he got there, Mrs. Kaburagi was still home. Her appointment was for three p.m. It was still only one o’clock.

  The Kaburagi home was in the steward’s house of the old family mansion, which had survived the fires. There were many nobles of the highest rank who did not have a traditional mansion in Tokyo. The father of the present Kaburagi household had made a fortune in electrical enterprises during the Meiji era. He bought one of the lesser mansions of a daimyo and moved into it, something quite exceptional. After the war, Nobutaka disposed of this in order to pay his estate tax. He evicted the man who had succeeded to the steward’s house and settled him in a rented dwelling. Then he planted a new hedge as a barrier between himself and the alienated main house, and set up a gate at the end of a little lane that turned off the street.

  An inn was opened in the main house. The Kaburagis had to get used to party music every once in a while. Through the gate that Nobutaka long ago passed under when brought home from school by the family tutor—to whom he had entrusted the heavy knapsack he had carried—now limousines passed, carrying geisha from long distances away, circling the drive, depositing their fair passengers at the impressive porch entrance. The carvings that Nobutaka had made in the pillars of his study room were gone. The map of Treasure Island that he had hidden under one of the stones in the garden thirty years ago and forgotten had undoubtedly rotted away, though it had been drawn in colored pencil on veneer.

  The steward’s house had seven rooms. Only the room above the western entranceway was over eight mats in size. That western room served both as Nobutaka’s den and guest room. From the windows of the room, one could look squarely into what had been the serving room in the second floor rear of the main house; but that serving room had been made into a guest room, and a blind installed in the windows facing Nobutaka’s den.

  One day while they were renovating the main house he watched them tearing out the serving shelf. In the old days when they held functions in the grand hall on the second floor, the shining black serving shelf had seen much activity. Gold-lacquered bowls stood in rows; maids came and went busily, trailing kimonos. The sound of that shelf being destroyed came to him like the echoes of countless eventful banquets. It was a sound of some deeply buried memory being uprooted.

  Nobutaka, who had not so much as an atom of sentimentality, slid down in his chair, put his feet on the desk, and cheered: “Rip it apart! And again!” Every inch of that mansion had tortured him in his youth. Upon the secret that he loved men that moral mansion always rested with an unbearable weight. He did not know how many times he had wished for the death of his father and mother and the destruction of the house by fire, but it now struck Nobutaka’s fancy to see the mansion undergo the blasphemous alteration of having drunken geisha sing popular songs in the hall in which his father used to sit with a glum look, rather than have it burned in an air raid.

  After they moved into the steward’s house, the couple renovated the whole house in Western style. In the alcove they put up bookcases; they took out the sliding partitions and hung thick damask curtains. They moved all the Western furnishings out of the main house and placed the rococo chairs and tables on rugs spread over the tatami floors. With these changes, the Kaburagi home came to look like a consulate in the Edo era or the apartment of a foreigner’s concubine.

  When Yuichi arrived, Mrs. Kaburagi was wearing slacks and a lemon-colored sweater, over which she had draped a black cardigan. She was sitting beside the stove in the sitting room, which was raised a few steps. With her red-nailed fingertips she cut a deck of Viennese cards. The queen bore the letter D; the jack, B.

  The maidservant announced Yuichi’s arrival. Mrs. Ka-buragi’s fingers went numb; the cards stuck together as if they had paste between them. Lately she was not able to stand up to greet Yuichi when he came. When he came in she would turn her back. When he went around and stood in front of her, she would finally have the strength to lift her eyes. Yuichi would meet her unwilling, sleepily raised eyes. The youth always had to hold himself back from asking if she was ill.

  “My appointment is for three o’clock. There’s still plenty of time. Have you eaten?” she asked. Yuichi said he had.

  There was a short silence. The glassed door to the veranda rattled annoyingly in the wind. The dust accumulated on all the mullions was visible from within. Even the sunlight streaking across the veranda seemed dustladen.

  “I hate to go out on a day like this. When I get back I know I’ll have to wash my hair.” She suddenly ran her fingers through Yuichi’s hair.

  “My, that dust! That’s what you get for putting on too much pomade.”

  The fault-finding that entered into her words as she said this confused Yuichi. Every time she looked at Yuichi she wanted to flee; she felt almost no joy in meeting him. She could not imagine what it was that kept them apart, what it was that kept them from coming together. Chastity? Don’t make me laugh! The lady’s purity? Make room between the jokes to allow for laughter! Then Yuichi’s purity? He already had a wife.

  No matter how hard she tried, with all her womanly faculties, Mrs. Kaburagi could not come to grips with the cruel truths in the situation. She certainly did not love Yuichi so completely because he was beautiful. It was because he did not love her, nothing more.

  Men whom Mrs. Kaburagi had gotten rid of within a week had at least loved her with body or soul, if not both. With all their various and sundry endowments, they were alike in at least this respect. But in Yuichi, this lover in the abstract, she could not find anywhere a quality she had seen before. She could do nothing but grope in the dark. When she thought she had cornered him, he turned out to be over there; when she thought she was far away, he was close. She was like one tracking down echoes, like one trying to take in hand the image of the moon reflected in the water.

  It w
as not that there never were times when circumstances conspired suddenly to make her think Yuichi loved her. There were times when, her heart filled with happiness, she knew well that what she was looking for was not happiness, or anything like it.

  Even the horrendous farce of that night in the Rakuyo Hotel was rather easier for her to explain by the theory that Yuichi had taken part at Shunsuke’s instigation than the theory that, as he explained it, Shunsuke had done it all out of jealousy. Her heart, intimidated by happiness, began to lean toward loving only evil portents. Whenever she met Yuichi, she prayed that his eyes would reflect loathing, hatred, or superiority; but instead she was cast down to see in those eyes a clarity that knew no cloud.

  Pregnant with dust, the wind deposited its burdens on the strange little garden consisting only of rocks and pines and cycads, and rattled the glass door. Mrs. Kaburagi looked fixedly through the vibrating glass, her eyes feverish.

  “The sky is yellow, isn’t it?” said Yuichi.

  “I can’t stand the wind in early spring,” she said, her voice a little high. “Nothing is clear.”

  The desserts she had prepared for Yuichi were brought in by the maid. It helped her somewhat to watch Yuichi’s childlike consumption of the hot plum pudding. The familiarity of that young little bird eating the bait from her hand! The joyful pain of having that hard little bill peck her palm! How good it would be if what he was eating like that were the flesh of her thigh!

  “Delicious,” Yuichi said. He knew that open guilelessness helped his charm. To ingratiate himself with her, he took up both her hands and started to kiss them, an act that could only be interpreted as an expression of gratitude for the dessert.

  She crinkled her eyes; she made a terrible face; her body stiffened and trembled. She said: “No. No. It hurts me. No.”

  If the Mrs. Kaburagi of a decade earlier had seen the kind of game she was now playing, surely she would have laughed her habitual dry, high-pitched laugh. She had never dreamed that just one kiss could provide so much nourishment for emotion, that it could be filled with such deadly poison, that she could wish almost instinctively to avoid it. To make matters worse, this cold lover was observing the earnest expression on the face of this impure woman desperately fighting off a casual kiss as if he were watching through a glass barrier the ridiculously agonized expressions of a woman drowning in a tank.