Forbidden Colors

by Yukio Mishima

  Yuichi finished reading the letter. The mocking smile was gone from the comer of his mouth. Quite unexpectedly, he was moved.

  He had received the letter when he came home at three in the afternoon. After he read it, he reread the important passages. The blood rose to his face. His hand shook involuntarily from time to time.

  First and foremost—and most unfortunately—he was moved by his own sensitivity. He was moved by the realization of how little volition there was in his feelings. His heart had jumped like that of a sick man who has recovered from a serious illness: “I am sensitive!”

  He pressed his beautiful, burning face against the letter. In this mad paroxysm, he found ecstasy. Drunker than if he had drunk sake, he was drunk on intoxication. At the same time he began to feel that within him an emotion that he had not yet discovered was forming. He was like a philosopher who, before writing a treatise, happily smokes a cigarette; he took pleasure in deliberately putting off the discovery of this emotion.

  On his desk sat the clock left by his father, clutched by its bronze lion. He strained to hear the interplay of his heartbeats and the sound of the clockwork. He had an unfortunate habit of looking at the clock whenever he encountered a new feeling. He would wonder how long it would last, and no matter how joyful a sensation it was, when it passed before five minutes had gone by, he would feel strangely relieved.

  His eyes closed in terror. Mrs. Kaburagi’s face hovered before him. It was a truly clear vision, every line etched: the eyes, the nose, the lips—every feature was distinct. Was he not still the same Yuichi who, in the train with Yasuko on the way to their honeymoon, had been so reluctant to sketch her face in his mind as she sat by him? The clarity of his recollection was mostly caused by the desire awakening within him. Mrs. Kaburagi’s face as he recalled it was truly beautiful. He felt as if he had never in his life seen such a beautiful woman.

  His eyes opened wide. The late afternoon sun was shining on the camellia tree in full bloom in the garden. The blossoms of the eightfold camellia gleamed. To that emotion that he had deliberately discovered so late, Yuichi, in full control of his senses, gave a name. As if thinking it was not enough, he whispered it: “I love her. That at least is sure.”

  Certain emotions turn false as soon as one articulates them, Yuichi had learned from bitter experience. He was subjecting his new emotion to the acid test.

  “I love her. I can’t believe that is not true. With all my power, I cannot deny this emotion. / am in love with a woman*'

  He did not try to analyze his emotions. He was raptly confusing imagination with desire, memory with hope. His joy had gone mad. He was going to take his “penchant for analysis,” his “consciousness,” his “fixed idea,” his “destiny,” his “innate understanding of truth,” put them all together, curse them and bury them. Of course, these are what we commonly refer to as the symptoms of the disease of modernity.

  Was it an accident that in the midst of this tempest of emotions Yuichi should have remembered the name of Shunsuke?

  “That’s it; I must see Mr. Hinoki right away. That old man is just the person for me to confess the joy of my love to. Why? Because if I make this confession to him so abruptly he will sympathize with my joy, and at the same time the old fellow will have the terrible revenge he has been plotting so diabolically.”

  He hurried into the hall to the telephone. On the way he met Yasuko, coming from the kitchen.

  “What’s the hurry? You certainly look happy,” she said.

  “How can you tell?” said Yuichi in the best of spirits, with a cruel magnanimity he had never displayed till now. He loved Mrs. Kaburagi and did not love Yasuko! His emotions could not possibly be more natural or more honest.

  Shunsuke was at home. They agreed to meet at Rudon’s.

  He waited for the streetcar, hands in his coat pockets like a cutpurse watching, awaiting his chance, kicking the stones, stamping his feet. He whistled shrilly but cheerfully at a bicycle rider who whizzed by.

  The slow pace and the sideward motion of the old-fashioned trolley was well suited to this visionary passenger. Yuichi leaned by a window; thus he could look out at the rows of houses darkening in early spring and dream.

  He felt his imagination spinning swiftly, like a top. If a top does not keep spinning, though, it will fall. And can one reach out one’s hand and whip up its flagging revolutions as it spins? When the power that propelled it spent itself, that was the end, was it not? Thus he had misgivings about having only one reason for his joy.

  Now that I think about it, I have loved Mrs. Kaburagi from the beginning, surely, he thought. It so, why did I avoid her there in the Rakuyo Hotel? That reflection was enough to send cold shivers down his spine. Of course, fear, cowardice itself, was to blame, Yuichi rationalized. He had fled from Mrs. Kaburagi in the Rakuyo Hotel all because of cowardice.

  Shunsuke had not yet arrived at Rudon’s.

  Yuichi had never waited for Shunsuke with such impatience. Again and again he felt for the letter in his inside pocket. When he touched it, it had the effect of a charm; he felt that when Shunsuke arrived his passion would not have abated at all.

  There was something majestic in the way in which Shunsuke pushed open the door of Rudon’s this evening; perhaps Yuichi’s impatience had something to do with it. He was wearing an Inverness, over a kimono. Even that was a variation from the flashiness he had been affecting recently. Yuichi was surprised to see him exchange bows with boys at the tables here and there before he took the chair beside him. There was not a boy among those present this evening who had not been entertained by Shunsuke.

  “Well, it has been a long time.” Shunsuke thrust out his hand with youthful vigor. Yuichi kept himself in check, and Shunsuke calmly started the conversation: “I hear Mrs. Kaburagi has left home.”

  “Then you know?”

  “Kaburagi’s been foaming at the mouth; he came over, and we had a heart-to-heart talk. He seems to consider me a mystic finder of lost persons.”

  “Did Mr. Kaburagi—” Yuichi began, and then smiled a dissimulating smile. It was a smile of pure craft, like that of a boy playing a practical joke; it ran counter to his chief concern. “Did he tell you the reason?”

  “He was keeping mum; he didn’t say. But it must have been because his wife saw you and him in a love scene.”

  “Exactly!” said Yuichi, dumfounded.

  “As I look at things, that had to happen.” In his selfsatisfaction, Shunsuke broke into a fit of coughing. Yuichi rubbed his back and did what he could to help him.

  When the coughing stopped, Shunsuke turned his ruddy face and brimming eyes toward Yuichi again and asked: “Well—what’s up?”

  Without a word, Yuichi handed him the letter.

  Shunsuke put on his glasses and swiftly counted the sheets. “Fifteen pages,” he said, almost angrily. Then he settled himself noisily in his chair as the Inverness and the kimono beneath it rubbed against each other, and began to read.

  Although it was not his own letter, Yuichi felt as if he sat before a professor during the examination of his paper. He had lost his confidence; doubt gnawed at him. The sooner this period of penance was over the better he would like it. Yuichi observed that the passages that he had read with so much emotion brought no change of expression in Shunsuke’s face. Yuichi felt more and more uneasy about the correctness of his feeling.

  “A nice letter.” Shunsuke took off his glasses and idly toyed with them. “It is certainly true that women don’t have any brains, yet this is good evidence that at certain times and in certain circumstances they have something that will serve in place of brains. In short, spite.”

  “I didn’t bring you here, sir, to hear your criticisms.”

  “I didn’t criticize it! I couldn’t criticize anything so marvelously contrived. Do you criticize a marvelous bald head? A marvelous case of appendicitis? A marvelous Nerima radish?”

  “But I was moved,” the youth said, pleading.

  “Yo
u were moved? That surprises me. When you write a New Year’s card you try to move the other fellow somewhat. If, however, by some error something has moved you, and that something was in a letter, that is in the worst form possible.”

  “You’re wrong. I understood. I understood that I love Mrs. Kaburagi.”

  Shunsuke began to laugh—a long sticky laugh from which he didn’t seem able to extricate himself. The men at the nearby tables turned to watch as he struggled. He drank water, choked, and went on laughing. The peals of laughter, it seemed, would never stop coming.

  Chapter 20 CALAMITY TO JANE IS CALAMITY TO JOHN

  IN SHUNSUKE’S IDIOTIC LAUGHTER, there was no ridicule, not even good humor, not the slightest hint of feeling. It was an outright guffaw. It might be called the only act of which the old novelist was now capable. It was different from a coughing spasm or neuralgia; this explosive laughter was not forced.

  Perhaps Yuichi, listening, considered him mad; but Shunsuke Hinoki felt that, thanks to this laughter, he now had within him a sense of kinship with the world.

  Laugh it off! Laugh and pass it by! Thus, for the first time, the world stood before him. Jealousy and hatred, his traditional responses, even with the aid of Yuichi’s vicarious anguish, had only served to spur him on to create works of art. Such was the power of this laugh that it held within it a kind of connection between his existence and the world, an ability through which he could see with his own eyes the blue sky on the other side of the globe.

  Long ago he had taken a trip to Kutsukake and encountered an eruption of the Asama volcano. Late at night, the glass in the windows rattled thinly and woke him from a light slumber into which he had fallen, frazzled by work. A series of explosions was occurring at thirty-second intervals. He got up and looked toward the crater. There was no sound there to speak of. A faint rumble came from the mountaintop, and after it a scarlet burst of flame. It was like the ocean surf, Shunsuke thought. The dancing spray of flame collapsed softly; but then half of it revivified into a circle of fire, half of it played about in the sky in the form of dark red smoke. It was like watching the last rays of sunset.

  This volcanic laughter in Rudon’s had in it a faint, distant rumbling. Shunsuke, however, felt that an emotion that came to him only rarely was hidden symbolically within his volcanic laughter.

  This emotional link, which had kept him going several times during his humiliating youth, was a feeling of sympathy for the world. It visited him only at rare instances late at night, as now, or when he was about to descend from a high peak, alone in the dawn. At such times he felt himself to be an artist. His soul regarded the feeling as one of the extra emoluments of his office, a comic respite that gave him faith in the immeasurable height of his soul’s station. It was an emotion as delicious as the taste of fresh air. As mountain climbers are shocked by their own gigantic shadows, so he was shocked by this gigantic emotion granted him by his soul.

  What could he have called this emotion? Shunsuke didn’t call it anything; he merely laughed. Certainly, respect was missing from that laugh—even respect for himself.

  So in those moments when his laughter tied him to the world, that connecting bond of sympathy brought his heart close to the supreme love, that superlatively perfidious thing we call love of man.

  At last Shunsuke stopped laughing. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped away his tears. His aged lower lids folded in tear-soaked wrinkles.

  “You felt! You love!” he said, exaggerating. “That’s outright nonsense! This thing called feeling, like a beautiful wife, is something that goes wrong easily. For that reason it can only excite men who don’t amount to very much.

  “Don’t be angry, Yuchan. I didn’t say you were a man who didn’t amount to much. It’s just that, unfortunately, you have been yearning for emotion. Into the utter purity of your heart the thirst for emotion has happened to enter. It’s simply a case of illness. Just as boys who arrive at adolescence fall in love with love, you were moved by being moved; that’s all. When you’re recovered from this fixed idea, your emotion will vanish like the mist, surely. You, too, must already know that—that outside of sexual feeling there is no feeling. No matter what the notion or the conception, if it has nothing of sex in it, it cannot make man feel. Men, moved by the secret elements of thought, like coxcombs spread the word that they have been moved by thought itself. It would be better if we stopped using vague words like ‘emotion.’

  “I know I’m being picky, but I’ll try to analyze your testimony. First, you testified, ‘I felt.’ Then you testified, ‘I love Mrs. Kaburagi.’ What do these two things have to do with each other? Briefly, you know very well that there is no such thing as emotion that is unconnected with sexual attraction. So you immediately added the word ‘love* as a postscript. In doing so, you used the word ‘love’ as a synonym for animal desire. Perhaps you have no objection to that point. Mrs. Kaburagi’s gone off to Kyoto. As far as animal passion is concerned you can be completely at ease. And so for the first time you have allowed yourself to love a woman. Isn’t that right?”

  Yuichi did not submit to this claptrap the way he had formerly. His deep, sad eyes watched closely Shunsuke’s excited movements. He had learned to strip each word bare, seeking out ways to test them.

  “Just the same, how?” the youth said. “When you speak of animal desire, you are talking about something much colder than what people mean when they speak of reason. The emotion I felt when I read that letter was much warmer than the animal desire you refer to. Is it true that all feeling in this world other than sexual desire is a lie? If so, is not sexual desire also a lie? If only the deficient state in which one desires another is the real thing, all the states of momentary fulfillment are illusions. I certainly can’t see that. It is an existence like that of a beggar who, in order that people will later throw more alms into his receptacle, always hides his alms before the receptacle is full. It seems awfully mean to me.

  “I sometimes think I would like to involve myself wholeheartedly in something. If it is done on behalf of some lie, that’s all right. If it has no object, fine. In high school, I did a great deal of high jumping and diving. It was great to throw my body into the air. ‘Now, now, now, I have stopped dead in the air!* I told myself. The green of the field, the green of the pool water—they were always around me. Now, I have nothing green around me. If what I want to do is being done on behalf of a lie, good. For instance, is the action of a man who enlists in the service and distinguishes himself less distinguished because he did it out of self-deception?”

  “My goodness, you’re getting highfalutin, aren’t you? You used to be in agony because you found it hard to believe in the existence of your own emotions; there wasn’t a thing I could do with you. So I showed you the joy of being without feeling. Now you want to be unhappy again, eh? As your beauty is perfect so must your unhappiness be. I have never said it outright before, but the power that you have to make women and men unhappy one after the other is not derived only from the power of your beauty; it also comes from your gift of being more unhappy than anybody.”

  “You’re right. At last you’ve said it, sir. With that, sir, your instruction has become quite ordinary. All you’ve taught me is that I must see my own unhappiness and live with it, and that there is no way by which I can escape it. Tell me truly, sir, has there never been one time when you have felt something?”

  “Other than sexual desire, no.”

  The youth went on with a half-bantering smile: “Well, what about the first time I saw you, on the shore last summer?”

  Shunsuke marveled. He recalled the fierce sunlight of summer: the deep blue of that sea, a single eddy of water, the sea breeze striking his ears. Then he recalled the Greek vision that moved him so keenly, the vision of a bronze sculpture of the Peloponnesus school.

  Was there no sexual desire in that? It not, then a presentiment of sex? At that time Shunsuke, who had passed his life far away from thought, for the first time came to
embrace thought. Was that thinking really filled with sexual desire? Until today his undying misgivings had revolved around that question. Yuichi’s words had caught Shunsuke off guard.

  The music from Rudon’s record player stopped just then. The place was quiet; the proprietor had gone off somewhere. Only the horns of passing automobiles echoed noisily in the room. Neon signs were coming on in town; an ordinary night was commencing.

  For no reason at all Shunsuke thought of a scene from a novel he had written long ago:

  He loitered a while and looked at the cryptomeria tree. It was a tall tree; its age, too, was very great. There was a rift in one comer of the cloudy heavens, and through it one shaft of sunlight came down like a waterfall and lit up the tree. It lit it up, but it could not by any means penetrate inside the cryptomeria.

  In vain it reached the periphery of the tree, falling on the moss-covered earth. He was oddly conscious of the will of the tree he was raising, its will to rise to heaven all the while stubbornly holding off the penetrating light. It was as if he had been given the mission of communicating to heaven the exact image of that life’s dark will.

  He was reminded of a passage from Mrs. Kaburagi’s letter that he had just read: “Thou wert a wall—to barbarian armies a fortress ten thousand miles long. Thou wert a lover who would never love me. Therefore I adored thee. I still adore thee, even now.”

  Shunsuke looked at the rows of white teeth, like that long fortress, between Yuichi’s slightly parted lips.

  Do I not feel sexual desire for this beautiful youth? he thought to himself with a cold shiver. If not, there would be no reason for my feeling this heart-rending emotion. It is as if before I was aware I started feeling desire. It’s impossible! I love the flesh of this young man.