Forbidden Colors

by Yukio Mishima

  The old man shook his head slightly. Without doubt his thinking had become filled with sexual desire. His thinking gained power for the first time. Shunsuke had forgotten that he was dead—he loved!

  Shunsuke’s heart suddenly became humble. In his eyes the arrogant flame flickered out. He shrugged his Inverness-clad shoulders as if he were folding his wings. Once again he stared longingly at Yuichi’s streamlined brows. Youth pervaded the air around him.

  If I love this youth sexually, he thought, and if this impossible discovery is possible at my age, I cannot say that Yuichi cannot love Mrs. Kaburagi sexually. How do you like that?

  “Perhaps you do love Mrs. Kaburagi, for all I know. When I listen to your voice, I somehow get that impression.” Shunsuke did not realize how bitter was the feeling in his words. The thoughts he was expressing affected him as if he were stripping the skin off his body. He was jealous!

  As a teacher, Shunsuke was a little too honest. Thus he said what he did. Those who teach young men are completely aware of their youth and know that what the teacher says will be taken as if he had the opposite end in mind. Sure enough, Yuichi, having been spoken to thus directly, took the opposite tack. Without help from anyone, he somehow had the courage to look directly within himself.

  No, that isn’t so, he thought. I can’t love Mrs. Kaburagi, that’s sure. For all I know I was in love with a second me, a beautiful young man with a beauty beyond possibility in this world, whom Mrs. Kaburagi loves so much. That letter certainly had power enough. Anybody receiving a letter like that would have difficulty in thinking of himself as the subject of it. I am not Narcissus, he rationalized proudly. If I were in love with myself I might without difficulty see myself and the subject of that letter as the same thing. But I am not in love with myself. That is why I fell in love with Yuchan.

  Because of these reflections, Yuichi felt a somewhat confused affection for Shunsuke. The reason was that, in this moment, both Yuichi and Shunsuke loved the same person. You like me; I like me; let’s be friends—this is the axiom of egoistic affection. At the same time it is the one and only manifestation of mutual love.

  “No, that cannot be. I understand now. I do not love Mrs. Kaburagi,” Yuchan said.

  Shunsuke’s countenance overflowed with joy.

  That thing called love is very much like a fever, even with the long period of incubation. During the incubation period the various sensations of malaise await the onset of the illness, when for the first time the symptoms are plain. As a result, the person coming down with a disease believes that the underlying causes of all the problems of the world are explicable in terms of fever. War occurs: “That’s the fever,” he says with a gasp. A philosopher suffers to resolve the pains of the world: “That’s the fever,” he says, suffering under his high temperature.

  When Shunsuke Hinoki recognized that he desired Yuichi, he knew the cause of his sentimental pining, of the jealousy that pierced him from time to time, of the life which came to be worth living when there was the possibility that Yuichi would phone, of the mysterious pain of frustration, of the pain of Yuichi’s long silence that led him to plan the trip of Kyoto, of the joy of that trip to Kyoto. This was, however, an ominous discovery. If it was love, he thought, in the light of his past experience failure was inevitable. There was no hope. He must wait for his opportunity; he must hide his feelings as much as he could. These were the things this old man, so very deficient in confidence, told himself.

  Free of the fixed idea that had held him fast, Yuichi discovered again his happy confessor in Shunsuke. His conscience was slightly troubled, and he said: “A little while ago, you seemed to know about me and Mr. Kaburagi, sir. I didn’t want to tell you about that. How long have you known it? And how did you find out?”

  “Since the time he came looking for his cigarette case in the hotel in Kyoto.”

  “But that time?”

  “That’s all right. That’s all right. I’m not interested in hearing about it. It would be wiser to think about what to do about this letter. Here’s the way you’d better think about it. No matter whether she explains it a million times, if she really had any respect for you she would have committed suicide for your sake. You have to pay her back for that slight. Don’t answer her. If you become a plain ordinary third party, you’ll help them revert to what they were before.”

  “What about Mr. Kaburagi?”

  “Show him this letter,” said Shunsuke, trying to make this disgusting part of the conversation brief. “Then you’d better let him know you’re breaking things off. The count will be put out, and when he has nowhere else to turn he’ll go to Kyoto, probably. That way Mrs. Kaburagi’s pain will be complete, too.”

  “I was just thinking that’s what I should do,” said Yuichi, finding his urge to do mischief stimulated. “But there’s one little problem. Kaburagi is having financial trouble, and if I throw him over—”

  “Oh, are you concerned about something like that?” Shunsuke said, looking with pleasure at this youth over whom he seemed to be regaining his power. Then he went on, happily and strongly: “If it were true that you let him do as he pleased with you because of his money, that’s another matter, but if that’s not true, it’s no concern of yours whether he has money or not. At any rate, you’ll probably not get any salary from now on.”

  “To tell you the truth I barely got last month’s salary the other day.”

  “See what I mean? Just the same, you’re not sweet on Kaburagi, are you?”

  “Cut it out!” He almost shouted it; his pride had been wounded. “I only let him have my body.”

  This reply, so lacking in psychological clarity, suddenly oppressed Shunsuke. He thought of the 500,000 yen he had given Yuichi, and at the same time of the youth’s docility in the matter. It frightened him to think that, while they had this financial arrangement. Yuichi might not find it hard to let him have his body. Again Yuichi was a riddle.

  Not only that, when he thought over the scheme he had just laid out and recalled Yuichi’s agreement with it, Shunsuke was uncomfortable. Some parts of the scheme were superfluous. There was the superfluity provided by Shunsuke’s self-interest, which he permitted himself for the first time: I’m carrying on like a jealous woman. ... He enjoyed reflections like this that made him seem even more disagreeable.

  At this moment an elegant gentleman entered Rudon’s.

  He was about fifty, clean-shaven, with rimless glasses, and had a mole beside his nose. He had a square, arrogant, handsome face, like a German’s. He kept his chin pulled in tight; the gleam in his eye was frigid. The sharp cleft under his nose accentuated the impression of coldness. His entire face was so formed that it did not need to look down very much. It took into account the laws of perspective; the willful forehead stood ruggedly in the background. There was only one fault; and that was the slight facial neuralgia on the lower right side. When he stood just inside the restaurant and looked around him, a tic ran like lightning from his eye to his jawbone. When that moment passed, his entire face immediately looked as if nothing had happened.

  His eyes met Shunsuke’s. As he did so an ever so slight shadow of bewilderment passed over him. He could not act as if they did not know each other. He smiled in a friendly fashion and said, “Oh, it’s you, sir.” His human goodness came out on his face. It was something he showed only to his most intimate friends.

  Shunsuke indicated the chair beside him. The man sat down. He talked with Shunsuke; but once he became conscious of Yuichi, his eyes somehow never left the youth’s face. Yuichi was not a little amazed by that face, and cheek on which the lightning ran every ten or twenty seconds. Shunsuke realized he should introduce them.

  “This is Mr. Kawada, president of Kawada Motors, an old friend. This is my nephew, Yuichi Minami.”

  Yaichiro Kawada was born in Satsuma, in Kyushu, and was the eldest son of the Yaichiro Kawada who started Japan’s first domestic auto industry. He was not a credit to his father as a child, and wanted
to be a novelist.

  He entered the preparatory course of K- University and took Shunsuke’s course in French literature. Shunsuke was asked to read his early flights in fiction. He did not seem to have any talent, and was discouraged. His father took advantage of this opportunity and sent him to Princeton University, in America, to major in economics. After he graduated he was sent to Germany for practical instruction in the motor industry. When he came home Yaichiro was completely changed. He had become a practical man.

  He remained in obscurity until after the war, when his father was purged. Then he became president of the firm. After his father died he demonstrated ability that surpassed the old man’s. When the construction of large-size automobiles was prohibited, he changed over to the construction of small cars and concentrated on exports to Asian countries. He also organized a subsidiary in Yokosuka, through his own initiative took up the repair of jeeps, and reaped tremendous profits. After he became president, a certain incident served to rekindle his old association with Shunsuke. He was the organizer of Shunsuke’s lavish sixty-first birthday party.

  This chance meeting in Rudon’s was nothing less than an unspoken confession. The two men never touched on the self-evident subject. Kawada asked Shunsuke to dinner. After he invited him, he took out his notebook, flipped his glasses up on his forehead and looked for gaps in his calendar. It was for all the world like searching a tremendous dictionary for the place where a forgotten flower lay pressed.

  At last he found it: “Next Friday at nine. That’s all. The meeting set for that day has been postponed. I hope you can make it.” Still, this busy man had had the time to leave his automobile at a comer a block away to come stealthily to Rudon’s. Shunsuke accepted. Kawada added an unexpected request: “How about the Kurohane, in Imai Cho? They have Takajo cuisine. Of course, your nephew is invited. Is that all right?”

  “Yeah,” Shunsuke grunted ambiguously.

  “I’ll make reservations for three people. I’ll call you again so you won’t forget.” He looked at his watch as if pressed for time. “Oh, excuse me. I’d like to stay here and talk, but I can’t. I’ll be looking forward to seeing you again.”

  The big shot departed in leisurely enough fashion, but the impression he left on the two men quickly evaporated.

  Shunsuke, out of sorts, said nothing. He felt as if in one short instant of time Yuichi had been reviled before his eyes. He talked about Kawada’s career without being asked; then, with a rustle of his Inverness, he arose.

  “Where are you going, sir?”

  Shunsuke wanted to be alone. Besides, he had to be at a banquet of the Fellows of the Academy in an hour.

  “I have a meeting. That’s why I came out. Come to my house before five next Friday; Kawada will undoubtedly send a car over to my house for us.”

  Yuichi realized" that Shunsuke had extended his hand from the voluminous sleeve of the Inverness. That wasted hand with its prominent veins, extended from the shelter of the heavy cloth, was filled with humiliation. If Yuichi were a little more ill-tempered, he could easily have overlooked that miserable hand. However, he took it. The hand trembled ever so slightly.

  “Well, sayonara ”

  “Thank you very much, sir, for today.”

  ‘Thank me? Don’t thank me for anything.”

  When Shunsuke had departed, the youth called up Nobutaka Kaburagi to find out whether he was free.

  “What’s that? You got a letter from her?” he asked, with a rising inflection in his voice. “No, don’t come over. I’ll meet you. Have you had supper yet?” He gave the name of a restaurant.

  While they waited for their food, Nobutaka read his wife’s letter hungrily. When the soup came, he still had not finished. By then, the swollen bits of alphabet macaroni, impossible to decipher, had become sodden at the bottom of the bowl.

  Nobutaka did not look at Yuichi. He looked in another direction and sucked up his soup. Yuichi looked with more than a little curiosity at this unfortunate man who wanted sympathy but had no one to turn to, thinking that surely, at the expense of good manners, he would spill the soup in his lap. His soup was soon gone, though, without spilling.

  “Poor thing,” Nobutaka soliloquized, putting down his spoon. “Poor thing ... no woman was ever so unfortunate.”

  There was a reason that Nobutaka’s way of exaggerating his feelings should now have an exasperating effect on Yuichi. It was Yuichi’s moral concern for Mrs. Kaburagi.

  Nobutaka said over and over: “That poor woman. That poor woman.” Then, using his wife as a pretext, he tried indirectly to excite sympathy for himself. But Yuichi’s expression never altered, and Nobutaka at last lost patience and said: “I was the bad one all the time. Nobody is to blame.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yuchan, how can you be so cruel? Yes, be cold to me. But my wife, who was not to blame—”

  “I wasn’t to blame either.”

  The count carefully picked the small bones from the fish on his plate and placed them on the edge of his dish. He said nothing. After a time he said, almost weeping: “You’re right. I’m finished.”

  This was more than Yuichi could stand. This hard-shelled, middle-aged homosexual was amazingly deficient in candor. The unseemly behavior which he now displayed was ten times worse than candid unseemliness. He was trying to make it look noble.

  Yuichi looked around him at the other diners. A very prim young American couple ate their supper facing each other. They said little. They smiled almost not at all. The woman gave a little sneeze and hurriedly covered her mouth and said, “Excuse me.” Elsewhere a group of Japanese, related to one another, who seemed to have come from a memorial service, sat at a big round table. They were exchanging slander about the deceased and laughing loudly. The voice of a woman of about fifty—evidently the widow—dressed in blue-gray mourning clothes and wearing rings on every finger, spoke shrilly: “My husband bought me seven diamond rings altogether. I sold four of them without his knowing it and substituted glass stones. When the war came, along with the jewelry-donation drive, I lied and said I had donated the four I sold. I kept the three genuine ones as my share. Here they are.” She spread out her hand so they all were visible. “My husband congratulated me for not reporting them all to the government! ‘Your dishonesty amazes me!’ he said.”

  “Ha, ha! The only one who didn’t know was your husband.”

  The table where Yuichi and Nobutaka sat seemed cut off from the rest. The metal furnishings—flower vase, knives and spoons—glittered coldly. Yuichi suspected that the distaste he felt for Nobutaka probably originated from the fact that they were members of the special fraternity. “Will you go to Kyoto for me?” Nobutaka said abruptly. “Why?”

  “Why? You’re the only one who can bring her back.” “Are you using me?”

  “Using you?” A pained smile lifted Pope’s proud lips. “Don’t be so distant, Yuchan.”

  “It won’t work. Even if I went, your wife would never come back to Tokyo.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “Because I know your wife.”

  “This amazes me. I’ve been married to her for twenty years.”

  “I haven’t known her for even half a year, but I fancy I know your wife well.”

  “You’re setting yourself up as a rival in love, eh?”

  “Yes. Maybe.”

  “You don’t say, Yuchan—”

  “Don’t worry. I can’t stand women. But you, sir, have you decided lately to be a husband to his woman?”

  “Yuchan,” he said, in a horrible, sticky voice, “let’s not quarrel. Please!”

  After that the two ate in silence. Yuichi had miscalculated somewhat. He was acting like an attending surgeon scolding his patient in order to encourage him; before he broached the subject of separation, he wished to destroy the other’s affection for him. If he was kind enough to wish to do it with as little pain as possible, however, the cold treatment he had been using was certainly wrong. He should have
humored Nobutaka in a kindly and cooperative spirit, even though he didn’t mean it. For what Pope had fallen in love with was his spiritual cruelty. To the extent he showed that, he would stimulate Pope’s imagination agreeably and deepen his illusions even more.

  When they left the restaurant, Pope gently linked his arm in Yuichi’s. Yuichi let him do it—out of disdain. The young lovers passing by were also walking arm-in-arm. He heard a youth who looked like a student murmur in a girl’s ear: “Look, there; they must be homosexuals.”

  “Oh, how awful!”

  Yuichi’s face reddened in humiliation and anger. He pulled his arm away and put his hands in his pockets. Nobutaka suspected nothing. He was accustomed to treatment like this.

  “Them! Them!” Yuichi ground his teeth. “They who pay three hundred and fifty yen for a lunch hour together in a hotel bed, and have their great love affair in the sight of heaven. They who, if all goes well, build their rat’s-nest love nests. They who, sleepy-eyed, diligently who scheme out one or two stingy infidelities in their children to clearance sales at the department stores. They who scheme out one of two stingy infidelities in their lifetimes. They who always show off their healthy homes, their healthy morality, their common sense, their selfsatisfaction.”

  Victory, however, is always on the side of the commonplace. Yuichi knew that all the scorn he could muster could not combat their natural scorn.

  It was still too early to go to the nightclub to which Nobutaka had invited Yuichi in orderxto celebrate his wife’s return from the dead. They went to a movie to kill time.

  It was a film of the American West. Up in the yellow-brown mountains a rider is pursued by a band of villains. The hero takes a short cut and from a crevice in the rocks at the top of the mountain snipes at his pursuers. A villain who has been shot falls headlong down the slope. Yonder, at the horizon ’overgrown with cactus, the tragic clouds shine. . . . With mouths slightly open, the two men looked aghast at this world of undeniable action.