Forbidden Colors

by Yukio Mishima

  Yasuko’s hand tugged strongly again at the hand of her husband. It seemed to be calling his attention to something. He instantly noticed the radiant bright gleams from the scalpel a nurse had just handed to the doctor. Yasuko’s lower body moved like the mouth of a person vomiting. Onto the cloth applied to it, which looked like the canvas of a sail, oozed urine from the catheter and dripping mercurochrome.

  That sailcloth, applied to a fissure painted red with mercurochrome, resounded as a fierce flow struck it. First local anesthetic was applied; then the fissure was enlarged with scalpel and shears. Yasuko’s complicated, crimson interior came clearly into the view of her young husband, who was drained of all cruelty. Looking here at the insides of his wife, the skin stripped from them, Yuichi was surprised that this flesh which he had felt to be so much irrelevant pottery was something he could no longer treat as inanimate.

  “I must look. No matter what, I must look,” he told himself, attempting to control his nausea. “That system of countless, gleaming, wet red jewels; those soft things under the skin, soaked in blood; those squirming things— a surgeon must soon grow accustomed to things like that:

  I should be able to become accustomed to being a surgeon. Since my wife’s body is no more than pottery to me sexually, there is no reason that the inside of her body should be any more than that.”

  All the honesty of his consciousness soon betrayed his bluff. The fearful contents of his wife’s body turned inside out were more than pottery. It was as if his feeling for humanity compelled him, even more deeply than the sympathy he felt with his wife’s pain, to see, as he confronted this wordless scarlet flesh and looked at the wet surface of it, his own inimitable self. Pain does not transcend the body. It is alone, the youth thought. But this naked, scarlet flesh was not alone. It was related to the red flesh that indubitably existed within Yuichi; even the consciousness of one who merely looked at it had to be instantly affected by it.

  Yuichi saw another, purely gleaming, mirror-like, cruel machine being passed into the doctor’s hand. It was a large scissors device, disjoined at the fulcrum. Where the blades should have been, there was a pair of large, curved spoons. One side was inserted deep inside Yasuko. After the other side was crossed over and inserted, the fulcrum was engaged for the first time. It was the forceps.

  There at the utmost extremity of his wife’s body, touching her hand, the young husband keenly perceived the gropings of that instrument, roughly invading with the intent of grasping something in its metal talons. He saw his wife’s white front teeth biting her lower lip. In all this suffering, he recognized that her tender, tender faith in him never left her face, but he dared not kiss her. For the youth did not have the confidence demanded by even so natural an action as that gentle kiss.

  In a morass of flesh, the forceps sought out the soft head of the infant and grasped it. Two nurses, one on each side, pressed against Yasuko’s white abdomen.

  Yuichi earnestly believed in his own innocence; perhaps it would be more appropriate to say that he prayed for it.

  At this time, however, Yuichi’s heart, pondering his wife’s face at the pinnacle of suffering, and the burning coloration in that part of her that had been the source of his loathing, went through a process of transformation. Yuichi’s beauty, that had been given over for the admiration of man and woman alike, that had seemed to have existence only to be seen, for the first time had its faculties restored and seemed now to exist only to see. Narcissus had forgotten his own face. His eyes had another object than the mirror. Looking at this awful ugliness had become the same as looking at himself.

  Until now Yuichi had been incapable of feeling he existed unless he “was seen” in toto. His consciousness of existing, in short, was a consciousness of being seen. The youth now reveled in a new sense of existence, an indubitable existence in which he was not looked at. In short, he himself was seeing.

  How transparent, how airy, this existence in its true form! This Narcissus who had forgotten his face could even consider that his face did not exist. If, beside herself with pain, his wife had turned her face and opened her eyes, she would certainly have had no trouble seeing there the expression of one who lived in the same world as she.

  Yuichi let go his wife’s hand. He brought both his perspiring hands to his forehead, as if to touch this new self. He took out a handkerchief and wiped it. Then he saw his wife’s hand, left behind there in the air, still clasping the impression of his hand, and, as if thrusting his hand into a mold of itself, he took her hand once more.

  The amniotic fluid flowed out. The head of the baby, eyes closed, was already visible. The work going on around the lower half of Yasuko’s body was of a kind with the back-breaking exertions of a ship’s crew bucking a gale. It was a common enough power; human power was bringing forth life. Yuichi could see the muscles straining even in the wrinkles of the white coat of the chairman of the gynecology department.

  Released of its fetters, the child slipped forth. It was a white, faintly purple, half-dead lump of flesh. A murmuring kind of sound welled forth. Then that lump of flesh began to cry. With each cry it grew a little redder.

  The umbilical cord was cut. The infant was cradled in a nurse’s arms and shown to Yasuko.

  “It’s a girl!”

  Yasuko did not seem to understand. .

  “It’s a girl.” She heard and nodded faintly.

  She lay silently with eyes open. Her eyes did not seem to see her husband or the child that had been brought forth. If she saw them, she did not smile. This impassive expression, properly an animal’s expression, was one that human beings are rarely able to achieve. Compared with that expression, thought the man in Yuichi, all human expressions of tragicomic pathos were little more than masks.

  Chapter 26 SOBERING SUMMER

  THEY CALLED THE child Keiko; the family’s joy was unbounded. This was true despite the fact that a girl was not what Yasuko had set her heart on. In the week after the delivery, there in the hospital, Yasuko’s heart was full enough, but from time to time she immersed herself in the useless preoccupation with why it was a girl and not a boy. Could she have been mistaken in praying for a boy? she wondered. Could it have been only an empty illusion from the first—her joy that she held captive a beautiful child the very image of her husband? It was still hard to tell which parent the baby favored, but at present she seemed to have more of her father’s features.

  Every day Keiko gained weight. A scale was placed beside the mother’s bed, and every day the rapidly recuperating Yasuko would record the increased weight on her graph. At first, Yasuko thought that the child she had brought into the world was some kind of monstrous object that had not yet attained human form, but after the first stab-like pains of suckling and the almost immoral delight that followed, she found her love for this offspring with its strangely pouting face something she could not drive from her heart. Besides, visitors and those around her treated this shape that was not yet humanly all one might desire as if it was perforce a human being, plying it with words that it could not reasonably be expected to understand.

  Yasuko attempted to compare the fearful physical pain she had gone, through two or three days earlier with the long period of mental torture Yuichi had brought her. In the peace of her heart, now that the first was over, strangely she found hope in the thought that the pangs of the second would last much longer and require much more time for convalescence.

  First to note Yuichi’s transformation was not Yasuko but his mother. This meek, uncomplicated soul in all the simplicity of its nature perceived immediately the transformation of her son. As soon as she heard about the safe, delivery, she left Kiyo to mind the house and set out for the hospital in a cab. She opened the door of the hospital room. Yuichi was standing by Yasuko’s pillow; he ran over and embraced his mother.

  “Be careful; you’ll knock me down”—she struggled and struck a small fist against Yuichi’s chest. “Don’t forget that I’m sick. Why, how red your eyes are! Hav
e you been crying?”

  “I’m pretty tired. It was pretty tense. I stayed through the delivery.”

  “You stayed through?”

  “That’s right,” Yasuko’s mother said. “I tried to stop him, but he wouldn’t listen. Yasuko for her part wouldn’t let go of his hand.”

  Yuichi’s mother looked at Yasuko, the picture of motherhood. Yasuko was smiling weakly, but her face showed no sign of embarrassment. The mother looked at her son again. Her eyes said: “What a strange child! Now that you have witnessed such a terrible thing, for the first time you and Yasuko look like a real couple. You wear the expression of people sharing a sweet secret.”

  Yuichi feared his mother’s intuitions of this kind more than anything. Yasuko did not fear them in the least. Now that her pain was over, she was amazed that she felt no embarrassment over having asked Yuichi to stand by her during the delivery. Perhaps Yasuko vaguely believed that only through something like that would she be able to make Yuichi believe the pain she was going through.

  One might well say that, except for supplementary lectures on a few subjects. Yuichi’s summer vacation started at the beginning of July. His routine, however, consisted of passing the day at the hospital and running around town in the evening. On evenings when he did not see Kawada he gladly went back to his old habits, in company with those whom Shunsuke called his “dangerous associations.”

  At a number of bars for the initiated, as well as at Rudon’s, Yuichi had become a familiar figure. One of them was ninety per cent foreign in patronage. Among the guests was a counterintelligence man who liked to wear women’s clothing. He wore a stole on his shoulders and sidled about flirting with the customers, he did not care who.

  At the Elysee Bar, a number of male prostitutes greeted Yuichi. He returned their greetings and laughed to himself: “Are these dangerous associations? Associations with such weak, effeminate fellows as these?”

  The rains had been falling again since the day after Keiko’s birth, Yuichi was in a bar at the end of a muddy lane. Most of the guests were already pretty drunk; they came and went, showing splashes on their trousers they did not bother to brush off. At times water flowed in a corner of the dirt floor. On the rough plaster wall a number of umbrellas dripped, deepening the flow.

  Yuichi sat silently facing some nondescript hors d’oeuvres, a pitcher filled with sake that was not of the best, and a sake cup. The sake was barely contained by the thin lip of the cup. It trembled at the brim, a transparent, pale yellow. Yuichi looked at the cup. It was a cup into which no kind of vision could enter. It was, simply, a cup. Ergo, it was nothing else.

  Four or five persons were present. Even now Yuichi never returned to one of the bars of the clan without getting involved in one or two adventures. Older men approached him, spinning sweet phrases. Younger boys flirted with him. Even this evening there was at Yuichi’s side a pleasant youth of about his own age constantly pouring him sake. One could tell from the look in his eyes, as he studied Yuichi’s profile from time to time, that he was in love with him.

  The youth was good to look at. His smile was clean. What did that mean? It meant that he wished to be loved. It was not a wish based on any particular ignorance of himself. In order to make his worth known, he went on and on with stories about how he had been pursued by any number of men. It was more or less a bother, but such self-introductions are typical of the gay people. He wasn’t carrying it to any point worth complaining about. He dressed well. He was not badly formed. His nails were nicely manicured. The line of the white undershirt visible at his belt was tidy. But what did that mean?

  Yuichi raised His dark glance to the pictures of boxers pasted on the wall of the bar. Vice that had lost its glitter was a hundred times more boring than virtue that had lost its glitter. Perhaps the reason vice is called crime lies in this boredom brought about by repetition, which does not permit one to steal a second of self-satisfaction. Devils must be bored by nothing else but the glut of eternally seeking out original evil deeds.

  Yuichi knew all the developments. If he smiled in assent to the youth, they would go on until late at night calmly drinking together. When the bar closed up, they would go out. Feigning drunkenness, they would stand in front of a hotel entrance. In Japan, as a rule, there is nothing strange about men friends spending the night in the same hotel room. They would turn the key of a room on the second floor within earshot of the whistle of the midnight freight train close by. A kiss instead of a salutation, disrobing, the neon signs nullifying the effect of the extinguished lamp, the double bed with its superannuated spring squealing piteously, impatient hugs and kisses, the first cold contact of the skin of their naked bodies after the sweat had dried, the smell of flesh and pomade, endless groping for satisfaction filled with impatience for the same bodies, little screams belying masculine vanity, hands wet with hair oil . . . Then the pitiable facsimile of physical satisfaction, the evaporation of all that perspiration, the groping under pillows for cigarettes and matches, the faintly shining whites of eyes. Then the endless conversation surging as over a broken dam, and the descent to the childish play of nothing more than two men friends with their desire for a time satisfied, tests of strength in the dark night, stabs at wrestling, various other inanities. . . .

  Suppose I go out with this youth, Yuichi thought, looking at his sake cup. It will be nothing new; I know that the demands of originality will be no more satisfied than before. Why is the love of men so irresolute as this? And yet is not the very stuff of homosexuality that simple state of pure friendship that comes after the act? That lonely state of returning, lust appeased, mutually to the state of being simply members of the same sex—had not their lust been granted for the very purpose of building to such a state? Those of this ilk love each other because they are men, they like to think, but is it not the cruel truth that by loving they recognize for the first time that they are men? Before loving, something extremely subtle inhabits the consciousness of these people. Their desire is closer to metaphysics than to sexuality. And what is that?

  Nevertheless, everywhere he looked he found only the wish to get away. Saikaku’s homosexual lovers had found no way out save the priesthood or love suicide.

  “Are you leaving already?” said the youth to Yuichi, who had asked for his check.

  “Yes.”

  “From Kanda Station?”

  “Kanda. Right.”

  “Good, I’ll walk you to the station.”

  They made their way out of the muddy hole and walked slowly through the jumbled alley of drinking places under the elevated tracks toward the station. It was ten p.m. Activity was at its height in the alley.

  The rain started again. It was extremely muggy. Yuichi wore a white polo shirt; the youth wore a blue one and carried a brief case by the handle. The street was narrow; they got under a single umbrella. The youth suggested they get something cold to drink. Yuichi assented, and they went into a little tea shop in front of the station.

  The youth talked happily—of his parents, of his cute little sister, of his family business in a fairly big shoe store in Higashinakano, of his father’s hopes for him, of his own small bank account. Yuichi watched the youth’s rather beautiful peasant’s face and listened. This was a man indeed born for conventional happiness. His circumstances were just about perfect for the maintenance of such happiness. There was just one secret, guiltless defect, known to nobody. That flaw brought everything down. Ironically, it gave to the face of this conventional youth a kind of metaphysical shading he was not aware of. It made him look as it worn out by the exertions of higher metaphysical speculation. He was the kind of man who seemed certainly to have been brought up, were that defect not present, to become attached at the age of twenty to his first woman and thereafter to be filled with satisfaction like that of a man of forty, over which he would ruminate until the day he died.

  Over their heads the fan whirled sluggishly. The ice in their iced coffee melted quickly. Yuichi ran out of cigarettes and
was given one by the youth. He found it amusing to imagine what would happen if the two became lovers and lived together. Men friends refusing to clean up, the house untidied, a life spent doing nothing all day but loving and smoking—the ash trays would certainly get full in a hurry!

  The youth yawned—a great, dark, glossy spreading of his oral cavity, bordered by nicely even teeth.

  “Excuse me. It’s not that I’m tired. Just the same, I never stop thinking I’d like to get the dust of this company off my feet.” (This did not mean he wanted to break away from gay things; Yuichi understood it to mean that he wished to enter into a settled life quickly with a chosen companion.) “I have a charm here. Let me show it to you.”

  Forgetting that he was not wearing a jacket, he moved his hand toward his breast pocket and had to explain that he had put his treasure in a brief case when he decided not to put on a jacket. Beside his thigh his bulky brief case lay, the leather peeling off its sides. Its flustered owner opened the clasp too quickly; the bag turned upside down, its contents spilling to the floor with a clatter. The youth bent over excitedly and picked them up. Yuichi did not help him, but scrutinized the objects the youth picked up as they shone under the fluorescent light. There was cream. There was lotion. There was pomade. There was a comb. There was eau de cologne. There was another bottle of cream of some kind. Looking forward to sleeping out, he had brought these things along for his morning toilet.

  Yuichi could not help feeling repelled by these cosmetics carried about by a man who was not an actor. Unconscious of Yuichi’s revulsion, the youth held the bottle of eau de cologne up to the light to see whether it was broken. When Yuichi saw that only about a third of the eau de cologne was left, his revulsion doubled.

  The youth finished putting the fallen articles back into the bag. Then he looked at Yuichi, puzzled that he had not moved to help him. He remembered why he had picked up the bag and bent down again, his face red to the ears from stooping. From the compartment meant for small articles he took something tiny and yellow and waved it at the end of a red silk thread before Yuichi’s eyes.