Forbidden Colors

by Yukio Mishima

  Yuichi took it in his hand and looked at it. It was a tiny straw sandal, plaited of yellow stuff, with a red strap.

  “Is this your charm?”

  “Yes, a fellow gave it to me.”

  Yuichi looked at his watch, not hiding the fact. He said he had to go. They left the shop. At the Kanda Station the youth bought a ticket to Higashinakano, Yuichi one to S-Station. Their trains were on the same line. When the train approached S- and Yuichi was ready to get off, the youth, who supposed Yuichi had purchased the ticket to S-Station because of reticence about going to the same destination, was overcome with confusion. His hand gripped Yuichi’s hand. Yuichi thought of the hand of his suffering wife and shook it off brusquely. The youth’s pride was wounded. Wishing to take Yuichi’s impolite behavior as a joke, he forced a laugh.

  “Are you really getting off here?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right, I’ll go with you.”

  They got off together at the quiet, night-enshrouded station. “I’m going with you,” the youth insisted, exaggerating his drunkenness.

  Yuichi became angry. He suddenly remembered a visit he must make.

  “Where are you going to go when you leave me?”

  “You don’t know, do you?” said Yuichi coldly. “I have a wife.”

  The youth went white. He was unable to move. “Then you’ve been stringing me along!”

  He burst into tears as he stood there. Then he went over to a bench, sat down, clutched his brief case to his chest, and cried. Yuichi witnessed this comical end to matters and swiftly ran up the stairs to escape. He was not being followed, evidently. He left the station and almost flung himself into the rain. Before his eyes stretched the hospital buildings, reposing in silence.

  I wanted to come here, he thought soberly. When I saw the contents of that man’s bag fall on the floor, I suddenly wanted to come here.

  By all rights, it was time he went to his home, where his mother was waiting alone. He couldn’t stay over in the hospital. He felt, however, that if he didn’t go to the hospital he wouldn’t be able to sleep.

  At the gate the watchmen were still awake, playing Japanese chess. Their dim, yellow lamp was visible from afar. From the admitting window a dark face looked out. Fortunately the guard remembered Yuichi, who had made a reputation for himself as the man who had stayed by his wife while she delivered her baby. Yuichi knew his excuse didn’t make much sense, but he explained that he had left something valuable in his wife’s room.

  “She’s probably asleep,” said the guard. The expression on this uxorious young man’s face, however, touched his heart. Yuichi ascended the dim stairway to the third floor. The sound of his shoes reverberated harshly on the staircase.

  Yasuko wasn’t sleeping, but she heard the sound of the gauze-wrapped knob being turned as if it were a sound in her dream. She suddenly became frightened, sat up, and switched on the light on the stand. The human form standing out of range of the light was her husband. Before she could breathe a sigh of relief, a paroxysm of incredulous joy struck her breast. The manly white front of Yuichi’s polo shirt moved before her.

  The couple exchanged two or three casual words. Out of her native sagacity, Yasuko refrained from asking why he had come to see her so late at night. The young husband turned the lamp so that it shone toward Keiko’s basinet. Small, pure, half-transparent nostrils solemnly drew breath in sleep. Yuichi was enraptured by the conventionality of his emotions. These emotions, which had until now lain dormant within him, at his moment found a safe and sure path before them and were capable of intoxicating him. Yuichi bade a gentle good-bye to his wife. He had every good reason to sleep well tonight.

  On the morning after Yasuko returned home from the hospital, Yuichi got up and heard an apology from Kiyo. The mirror he had always used while tying his necktie had dropped and broken during housework. This small accident made him smile. It was perhaps a sign that the beautiful youth had been released from the legendary power of mirror. He was reminded of the small, jet black, ornamented mirror stand at the inn at K- last summer when his ears were first assaulted by Shunsuke’s praise of beauty and he entered so closely into that association with the all-seeing mirror. Before that, Yuichi, following the usual male predilection, had resolutely refrained from thinking of himself as beautiful. Now that the mirror was broken, would he not once more be governed by that taboo?

  One evening they were having a going-away party for a foreigner at Jackie’s house. Yuichi was invited through an intermediary. His presence would be important during the evening’s festivities. Jackie would rise in the estimation of the many guests if Yuichi came. On hearing this, Yuichi vacillated, but he finally decided to accept.

  Everything was the same as the gay party last Christmas. All the young men who had been invited were waiting at Rudon’s. All wore aloha shirts, which were really very becoming to them. Eichan, the Oasis Kimichan, and others were among them just as the year before. The foreign contingent was different, making the gathering fine and fresh of feature. There, were also new faces in the group. A young man named Kenchan was one; Katchan was another. The former was the son of the owner of a large eel shop in Asakusa. The father of the other was the manager of a branch bank, noted for reliability.

  Everyone grumbled about the rainy mugginess as they sat waiting for the foreigner’s car. They told silly stories over their cold drinks. Kimichan had an interesting story to tell. The former proprietor of a fruit store in Shinjuku had moved a barracks building after the war, and when he was preparing to have it made into a two-story permanent building, he took part, as the head of the firm, in a ground-breaking ceremony. With a smug face he offered the sacred tree to God. Then it became the special duty of a beautiful young employee to offer the sacred tree. The other people didn’t know it, but this altogether ordinary ceremony was a secret wedding performed before the eyes of the populace. The two men, lovers for a long time, would set up housekeeping together the evening after the ground-breaking ceremony—the boss had secured a divorce from his wife a month before.

  The young men in their colorful aloha shirts, arms bare, sat variously posed in the chairs of this habitual hangout. Their necks were all cleanly shaven, their hair gave off a strong perfume, their shoes all shone like new. One leaned his elbows far forward on the bar, crooned a popular hit, and kept throwing dice from a frayed leather dice cup; affecting grown-up weariness, he toyed with the black dice, which had red and green spots.

  How worthy of attention their futures! A limited number of the boys who entered this world, hounded by lonely impulses or seized by guiltless temptations, would make the lucky toss that would bring them a prize of study abroad, unattainable in the ordinary course of events. The overwhelming majority, after a time, for the excesses of youth, would probably be cast with shocking suddenness into the lot of ugly age. Already in their youthful faces, addiction to curiosity and ceaseless craving for stimulation had left its traces. The gin drunk at seventeen, the taste of proffered foreign cigarettes, those dissipations that wore the mask of fearless innocence—dissipations of a kind that never left even the fruits of remorse—all the tips forced upon them by adults and the secret expenditures of them, the effortlessly instilled desire for indulgence, the awakening of the instinct for bodily adornment—theirs was a flaunted degradation, without concealment, no matter what form it took. Their youth was self-sufficient, and nowhere could they flee the innocence of their flesh. If one asked why, it was because their youth, which felt no sense of completeness, could gain no sense of having lost anything at all, though it is customary to feel a kind of completeness in the loss of innocence.

  “Screwy Kimichan,” said Katchan.

  “Bats Katchan,” said Kimichan.

  “Usurer Eichan,” said Kenchan.

  “Moron!” said Eichan.

  This primitive repartee was like the frolicking of puppies in the glass-walled kennels of a pet shop.

  It was very warm. The fan wafted a breeze like
tepid water. All were already finding this evening’s journey tedious, but the foreigners* two cars that came to pick them up just then—convertible sedans with the tops rolled back—revived their spirits considerably. Thanks to this, they were able to enjoy their conversation, sitting in the wind heavy with suspended rain during the two-hour trip to Oiso.

  “Yuchan! Glad you could come!” Jackie embraced Yuchi with wholehearted friendly affection.

  The host, clad in an aloha shirt with a sea, sail, shark, and palm-tree pattern, had instincts sharper than a woman’s, and when he conducted Yuichi into the hall in which the sea breeze swirled, he immediately whispered in the youth’s ear: “Yuchan! Has something happened?”

  “My wife had a baby.”

  “Yours?”

  “Mine.”

  “Wonderful!”

  Jackie laughed heartily. They clinked their glasses together and drank to Yuichi’s daughter. There was, however, something in this action that brought home to them the distance between the two worlds they inhabited. As always, Jackie was a tenant of the mirror room, the domain of the men being looked at. He would perhaps dwell there until the day he died. If a child were born to him, it would probably have to live on the other side of the mirror, separated from its father. All human concerns, as he saw it, were devoid of urgency.

  The orchestra struck up a popular song. The men danced, perspiring. Yuichi looked down out of the window and gaped. Here and there in the_ grassy garden were clumps of bushes and shrubbery. In each of the shadows thrown by them, there was a shadow locked in embrace. In the shadows points of fire were spotted about. Now and then a match was struck, revealing clearly part of the prominent nose of some foreigner.

  Yuichi saw in the shadow of an azalea on the garden’s edge a T-shirt with horizontal stripes, of the kind worn by seamen, detach itself from another’s body. The companion wore a plain yellow shirt. Two men, supple as cats, gave each other a light kiss and departed in different directions. After a time Yuichi noticed the one in the striped T-shirt leaning by one of the windows as if he had been there for quite a while. He had a small, fierce face, impassive eyes, a mouth like a pouting child’s, and the complexion of Cape jasmine.

  Jackie got up, went to his side, and asked him casually: “Where did you go, Jack?”

  “Ridgeman had a headache, so I went off to the drugstore to get him some pills.”

  This young man, with his cruel white teeth, his lips so suited to the lie he was telling—deliberately and obviously a lie just to torture the other person—Yuichi recognized as Jackie’s current lover. He had heard rumors about the youth and only needed to hear the alias to know him. Jackie heard his excuse and came back to Yuichi holding in both hands a whiskey glass filled with crushed ice. .

  He said in Yuichi’s ear: “Did you see what that liar was up to in the garden?”

  Yuichi said nothing.

  “You saw it, didn’t you? Anywhere, even in my own backyard, he does things like that.”

  Yuichi saw the pain on Jackie’s brow.

  “You’re awfully big about it,” said Yuichi.

  “Those who love are always magnanimous; those who are loved are the cruel ones. I, Yuchan, have been crueler than he to men who loved me.” With that he told boastful stories of how he, even at his age, was made much of by older foreigners.

  “What makes a man cruel is the consciousness that he is loved. The cruelty of men who are not loved is not worth talking about. For instance, Yuchan, those men known as humanists just had to be ugly men.”

  Yuichi had wished to treat the distress of Jackie with due respect. Jackie, however, had anticipated him and was himself administering to his pain the white talcum powder of vanity. He ended by making a kind of incomplete obscure grotesquery of it. The two stood there for a time and talked of the recent affairs of Count Kaburagi, in Kyoto. Even now, it seemed, the count showed his face occasionally at one of the “in” bars in the Shichijo-Naihama neighborhood.

  Jackie’s portrait, as ever, was attended by a pair of candles. Above the mantel it projected its delicately olive-colored nakedness. At the comers of the mouth of this young Bacchus with a necktie sloppily tied on his naked neck, there was an expression that seemed to speak of the imperishability of joy or the immutability of pleasure. The champagne glass he held in his right hand was never empty.

  That evening Yuichi forgot Jackie’s disappointment and, ignoring the enticing hands held out to him by the many foreign guests, went to bed with a boy who pleased him. The boy’s eyes were round; his round cheeks—with beard not yet developed—were white as peeled fruit. After the act was over, Yuichi yearned to return home. It was one o’clock in the morning. One of the foreigners, who also had to be back in Tokyo that night, offered to drive Yuichi back in his car. Yuichi was very grateful for the offer.

  Out of natural courtesy, he sat in the seat next to the foreigner, who was driving. The middle-aged, ruddy-complexioned foreigner was an American of German ancestry.

  He treated Yuichi politely and spoke of his home in Philadelphia. He explained the origin of the name, from a town of Asia Minor of the time of ancient Greece. The “Phil” was the Greek word phileo, meaning “love”; “adelphia” was from adelphos, meaning “brother.” “In short, my home town is the country of brotherly love,” he said. Then, still speeding along on the deserted highway, he took one hand off the wheel and gripped Yuichi’s hand.

  He put his hand back on the wheel and suddenly swung it hard to the left. The car veered into a small, little-used road, then turned right and stopped under a grove of trees rustling in the night wind. The foreigner grasped Yuichi’s hands. The two looked at each other for a time and struggled. It was the foreigner’s heavy arms covered with golden hair against the youth’s arms, tight and smooth. The giant’s strength was amazing; Yuichi was no match for him.

  In the lampless interior of the car the two fell in a heap. Yuichi was the first to right himself. He reached out his hand to cover himself with the pale blue aloha shirt and the white undershirt that had just been torn away from his body. Then the youth’s bare shoulder was held in the power of the lips of the other, again overcome by passion. Avidly, giant canine teeth, accustomed to meat, sank voraciously into the glowing flesh of the shoulder. Yuichi yelled. Blood ran across the young man’s breast.

  He twisted his body and rose to his feet. The roof of the car, however, was low. Besides, the front glass at his back sloped downward. He could not stand upright. He pressed one hand against his wound. White with humiliation and his own helplessness, he stood in a half slouch, simply glaring at the man.

  The foreigner’s eyes recovered from their passion. He suddenly turned obsequious. Seeing the evidence of his behavior, he was struck with horror. His whole body shook, and finally he cried. Even more stupidly, he kissed a little silver cross that hung from a chain on his chest. Then, still half-dressed, he leaned against the steering wheel and prayed. After that he begged Yuichi again and again to forgive him, explaining tearfully that his virtues and his upbringing were powerless against obsessions of this kind. There was a ridiculous self-righteousness in his entreaties. When he attacked Yuichi with overwhelming force, Yuichi’s momentary physical weakness had brought a salutary change in the spiritual weakness of his adversary—or so he wished to say.

  Yuichi hastened to adjust his shirt. The foreigner soon became conscious of his own nakedness and covered himself. It had taken him time to recognize his nakedness, just as it had taken him time to recognize his weakness.

  Owing to this mad incident, it was morning before Yuichi got home.

  The wound in his shoulder did not take long to heal. When Kawada saw the scar, he was filled with jealousy and schemed for a way that he too might be privileged to inflict such a wound without incurring Yuichi’s wrath.

  Yuichi was frightened by the difficulties of associating with Kawada, who made a sharp distinction between his social dignities and the joy he felt in the humiliations of love. His treatment th
rew the young man, not yet schooled in the realities of society, into confusion. Even though Kawada did not mind kissing the soles of the feet of the one he loved, he would not permit that person to touch his social position with so much as one finger. In this regard he was the exact opposite of Shunsuke.

  The bitterness of understanding . . . Yuichi had a happy natural gift for bearing the bewilderment with which understanding attacks youth. With Shunsuke’s guidance he had come to all the ready-made understandings: the emptiness of wealth and fame and position; the hopeless ignorance and stupidity of mankind, particularly the worthless existence of women; and the way life’s tedium gives substance to all its passions. The sensual urges that even in his boyhood years had discovered for him human life and all its ugliness had accustomed him to bearing any ugliness of vanity whatever as self-evident. Thanks to his calm innocence, therefore, his understanding was spared from bitterness. The horrors of the life that he had seen, the eye-popping sensations that some dark, deep pit of life was opening beneath his feet, were so many healthy preparatory exercises for his role as a spectator at Yasuko’s delivery—nothing more than clean physical training for a track man under a clear, blue sky.

  Now Yuichi’s social ambitions were good-tempered and childish, what one would expect in a youth. His financial capacities were acknowledged. At the urging of Kawada, he was thinking of going into industry.

  As Yuichi saw it, economics was an extremely human subject. To the extent that it was connected directly and deeply with human desires, the activity of its organization was strengthened. At one time, in the developing years of free enterprise economics, it exhibited autonomous faculties, thanks to a close connection with the desires— the self-interest—of the rapidly rising bourgeoisie. Today, however, it was in a period of decline, owing to the fact that its organization had been separated from desire and mechanized, thus bringing about the attenuation of desire. A new system of economics had to find new desire.