Forbidden Colors

by Yukio Mishima

Yuichi smiled again. Then, squirming so that the chair squealed, like a rude schoolboy, he said: “Day before yesterday, and yesterday too?”

  “I called your home I don’t know how many times.” “That’s what the old girl says.”

  Kawada showed the reckless valor of one who had been beaten and cornered. Suddenly he changed the subject to Yuichi’s mother’s illness: “Are you having trouble meeting her hospital expenses?”

  “Not particularly,” the youth answered.

  “I won’t ask where you stayed last night. Ill just give you a gift for your mother in the hospital. All right? I’ll give you what you think you need. If you’re satisfied, just nod.” Kawada’s tone became all business.

  “And from now on, I want you to stay away from me altogether. You won’t hear any more from me. I beg of you from now on not to put me in any ridiculous predicament or interfere with my work.”

  He snatched a checkbook from his pocket and, wondering whether he should give Yuichi a few minutes’ time to think, sat irresolute, looking up stealthily at the youth’s face. Until this time it was, in fact, Kawada who had been looking down. The youth’s eyes were lifted. In this instant Kawada waited for the youth’s explanation, or apology, or appeal, and at the same time feared all of them. The youth, however, sat silent and proud, his back straight.

  The sound of a check being ripped from the book broke the silence. Yuichi looked at it; it was for 200,000 yen. He silently slid it back with his fingertips.

  Kawada tore up the check. He wrote a larger sum on another. He slid that toward Yuichi. Yuichi again refused it. This absolutely ridiculous and solemn game was repeated a number of times. When it rose to 400,000 yen, Yuichi thought of the 500,000 yen he had borrowed from Shun-suke. Kawada’s behavior excited only his disgust, and the youth had considered bidding Kawada up and then taking the check and tearing it to bits before his eyes and saying good-bye with a flourish. When the figure of 500,000 yen flickered in his mind, however, he came to his senses and waited for the next figure to be named.

  Yaichiro Kawada’s proud forehead was not bowed; a twitch ran like lightning down his right cheek. With the last check in tatters before him, he wrote another and handed it across the desk. It was for 500,000 yen.

  The youth held out his fingers, folded the check slowly, and put it in his breast pocket. He stood up, and with a smile that showed he bore no hard feelings, bowed.

  “I appreciate all you’ve done for me for so long a time. Sayonara.”

  Kawada did not have the power to get up from his chair. Finally he reached out his hand and said: “Sayonara” As they shook hands Yuichi noticed that Kawada’s hand shook severely. Yuichi did not allow compassion to get the better of him, which was lucky for Kawada, who would have died rather than be pitied. His natural emotions, nevertheless, were tinged with feelings of friendship. He preferred elevators, so he didn’t go down the stairs, but pressed the button in the marble pillar.

  His prospective employment with Kawada Motors had gone up in smoke, and his social ambitions were back where they had started. With the 500,000 yen, Kawada had bought back his right to look at the world with contempt.

  Yuichi’s ambition was made of extremely fanciful stuff, but the collapse of his dreams promised to interfere with his return to reality. Broken dreams, to a greater extent than dreams still in force, are apt to treat reality as an enemy. The possibility of filling the yawning gap between his dreams of his powers and his occasional sober estimates of his powers seemed blocked for the time being. Moreover, having learned to see, he recognized that it had been blocked from the beginning. For detestable modern society has a way of frustrating dreams; this is one of its chief powers.

  To be sure, Yuichi had learned to see. Without the interposition of a mirror, however, it was difficult to see youth in the very middle of youth. The fact that the negations of youth end in abstraction while the affirmations of youth have a sexual leaning seems to stem from this difficulty.

  Last night, on a sudden gamble, he had broken his appointments with both Matsumura and Kawada and spent a pure evening drinking with a school friend until morning. But this so-called purity was only physical.

  Yuichi looked at his own position. Once he had smashed his way out of the cage of the mirror and forgotten his own face and come to regard it as something that did not exist, then for the first time he had begun searching for the position of the seeing person. He had been set free from the childish ambition of dreaming that society might supply him with some kind of image that would be a substitute for the image that the mirror had reflected. Seeking this in the very middle of youth, now, he was impatient to complete the difficult operation of basing an existence on something he couldn’t see. A decade ago, his body could have accomplished this operation with the greatest of ease.

  Yuichi felt Shunsuke’s spell. He must first return the 500,000 yen to Shunsuke. Everything else had to come after that.

  A few days later, on a cool autumn evening, the beautiful youth visited Shunsuke’s home without any previous notice. It happened that the old man was at work on a manuscript he had been carrying about with him for several weeks. This autobiographical essay Shunsuk6 Hinoki had titled “On Shunsuk6 Hinoki.” He had not realized that Yuichi would be visiting him, and he was reading over the unfinished manuscript under the desk lamp. He was marking it here and there with a red pencil.

  Chapter 32 GRAND FINALE

  THAT MORNING, Yuichi had done nothing of consequence. His employment examination for Yasuko’s father’s department store was a week away. Thanks to his father-in-law’s good offices, his job was already assured. As a matter of form, however, he had to take the test. By way of preparation, it was important that he pay a visit to his father-in-law, as a matter of business courtesy. It would have been well to do it sooner, but his mother’s worsening health provided a useful excuse for postponement.

  Yuichi was not in the mood to visit his father-in-law today. He had in his wallet the check for 500,000 yen. Yuichi set out for the Ginza alone.

  The city trolley stopped at the Sukiyabashi Station and seemed not to be going any farther. The passengers flowed out onto the street and hurried in the direction of Owari Cho. Into the clear autumn sky, black smoke mounted in thick clouds.

  Yuichi got off the trolley and mingled with the crowd, hurrying with them. The Owari Cho crossroads was already filled with people. Three red fire engines had stopped in the middle of the throng. They threw long streams of water where the black smoke was mounting.

  A big cabaret was on fire. From this side the view was cut off by the two-story building near at hand, but every now and then rising spires of flame flashed in the black smoke. If it had been night, the smoke, enclosing innumerable sparks which would then have been visible, would have been a shapeless black. The fire had already moved to the surrounding stores. The second floor of the two-story building nearby was already burning. Only the outer walls seemed to remain.

  The eggshell paint of the outer walls, however, was still its vivid and clear everyday color. The crowd shouted praises for the courage of one of the firemen, who had climbed to the roof half surrounded by flame and with his fire axe was breaking down the roof. The sight of these little black human figures gambling against death seemed to strike the hearts of the crowd with pleasure—a pleasure not unlike that lewd one.

  A building under renovation near the fire was surrounded with scaffolding. A number of people were on the scaffolds guarding against the spread of the fire.

  The fire unexpectedly made little sound. Explosions— the sound of the ridgepole burning and falling, and the like—could not be heard here. There was a dull, buzzing sound, but that was from a newspaper’s red, single-engined airplane circling overhead.

  Yuichi felt something like fog playing about his cheek and took cover. An old, rotten hose belonging to one of the fire trucks, which was conducting water from one of the hydrants at the curb, was sending up a spray of water out of a hole that had been rep
aired. It cascaded down on the street like rain. The spray wet the window of a drygoods store. It made it difficult to see the employees inside the store as they crouched among their personal effects and the portable safe they had brought out, worrying about the spread of the fire.

  The water from the hoses ceased every once in a while. The streams in the sky visibly withdrew and drooped downward. In those intervals the black smoke kept drifting off at an angle, seemingly without end.

  “The National Guard! The National Guard!” the crowd shouted.

  A truck pushed in upon the crowd and stopped. From its rear a contingent of white-helmeted guardsmen descended. It was only a unit of policemen brought to control traffic, but the fear it excited among the crowd was laughable. Perhaps the crowd felt stirring within itself seditious leanings that might have brought out the National Guard. Before the advancing phalanx of guardsmen, their clubs at their sides, the people surged in retreat.

  Their blind power was awesome. Individuals one by one lost their will; they had been taken over by the agencies of a power outside themselves. The pressure to mount back on the sidewalk pushed the people standing in front of the stores back against the display windows.

  At one store, a youthful group standing in front of a large, expensive, single-pane store window, spread their arms out wide and shouted: “Watch the glass! Watch the glass!”

  Like moths around a flame, most of the crowd was impervious to the dangers of the glass.

  As he was being pushed about, Yuichi heard a sound like firecrackers. The crowd had trampled on some balloons that had been tom from the hand of a child. Then Yuichi noticed, under the stampede of feet, a blue wooden sandal that was being sloshed about like a bit of flotsam.

  When finally Yuichi managed to free himself from the mob, he found himself facing in a strange direction. He redid his disarranged necktie and walked away. He didn’t look again in the direction of the fire. The extraordinary energy of the mob scene, however, had stirred in him an inexplicable excitement.

  Since he had no place to go, Yuichi walked for a time and finally went into a theater that was showing a movie he did not especially want to see.

  ... Shunsuke laid down his red pencil.

  His shoulder was very stiff. He stood up and, striking the shoulder, moved to the large library next to the study. About a month earlier, Shunsuke had disposed of about half of his collection. As he got older his books had come to seem useless to him. He kept only those that he particularly liked, took down the empty shelves, and had a window cut through in the wall that had so long blocked off the light. In the north window, so close to the foliage of the magnolia tree, he had two clear panes of glass installed. The cot he had kept in the study for naps he moved into the library. There, Shunsuke would make himself comfortable and riffle through the pages of the books lined up on a small table.

  Shunsuke entered the study and looked for something on the shelf of original works in French literature, which was up fairly high. He soon found the book he was looking for. It was a special edition with rice-paper pages of Musa Paidica in French translation. Musa Paidica is a collection of poems by the Roman poet Straton, of the time of Hadrian. He followed in the steps of the Emperor Hadrian, who loved Antinous, and he wrote poems only about beautiful boys:

  Let the cheek be fair Or dipped in honey shades, Of flaxen hue the hair Or black with every grace;

  Let the eyes be brown Or let me disappear Into those flashing pools Of deepest black.

  He of the honey-colored skin, the black hair, and the jet-black eyes must have been born in Asia Minor, as was the famous Eastern slave Antinous. The ideal youthful beauty dreamed of by second-century Romans was Asian in nature.

  Shunsuke again took Keats’s Endymion from the shelf. His eyes moved over the verses he had almost committed to memory.

  Just a little more, the old author thought.

  Already nothing is missing of the material that visions are made of; in just a little while it will be complete. The image of adamantine youth will be ready. It’s been a long time since I felt palpitations like this or such reasonless fears just before completing a work. In the moment of completion, that final supreme moment, what will appear?

  Shunsuke stretched himself diagonally across the bed and idly turned the pages of the book. He listened to the sounds about him. All over the garden the insects of autumn were chorusing.

  In a comer of the bookstacks the Complete Works of Shunsuke Hinoki, just brought out last month, stood, all twenty volumes in a row. The stamped-gold characters shone forth in dull, monochromatic brilliance. Twenty volumes of repetition of the same sneer of boredom. As a man might, purely out of politeness, chuck the chin of an ugly child, the old author idly cupped his hand and caressed the rows of characters on the spines of his collected works.

  On the two or three small tables around the bed, a number of books were scattered—seemingly open to the page last read—their white pages open like so many dead wings.

  There was a collection of the poems of Ton-a of the Nijo school, a Taiheiki opened to the pages dealing with the Great Priest of the Shiga Temple, a copy of Okagami handed down from the Retired Emperor Kazan, a collection of the poems of the Shogun Yoshihisa Ashikaga, who died young, and a sumptuously bound combined edition of the Kojiki and the Nihonshoki. In those last two works the theme is endlessly repeated that so many young and beautiful princes have had their lives cut off in the flower of their youth, with the exposure of some foul love affair or insurrection or plot, or have ended their lives themselves. Prince Karu was one. Prince Otsu was another. Shunsuke loved the blighted youth of ancient times.

  He heard a sound at the door of the study. It was ten p.m. There was no reason for the caller to come this late. It must be the old housekeeper bringing up tea. Shunsuke answered without looking up. It wasn’t the old servant who entered. It was Yuichi.

  “Are you working?” he asked. “I headed up here so quickly the housekeeper was too surprised to do anything to stop me.”

  Shunsuke came out of the library and looked at Yuichi standing in the middle of the study. The beautiful young man’s arrival had been so sudden that it seemed as if he had appeared out of all the books Shunsuke had been poring over.

  The two exchanged the salutations appropriate to the great length of time since they had last seen each other. Shunsuke conducted Yuichi to an easy chair and went to get the wine bottle he kept for company in the library cupboard.

  Yuichi heard a cricket chirping in a comer of the study. The room was just as he had first seen it. On the knick-knack shelves surrounding the window on three sides were the many pieces of ancient pottery; their position had not been changed in the slightest. The beautiful totem doll of ancient crafting was where it had been originally. Nowhere were flowers of the season visible. The black marble mantel clock was still gloomily carrying the time. If the old maidservant neglected to wind it, her old master, who had very little to do with everyday affairs, would not touch it either, and in a few days the clock would run down.

  Yuichi now took a look around him. This study, he felt, had a mysterious history. After he had known his first joy, he had visited this house; in this room he had been read a passage from the Anointment of the Catamite by Shunsuke. He had come into this room stricken with the fear of life and consulted with Shunsuke on the abortion for Yasuko. Now he was here, captive of neither the joys of the past nor the troubles of the past, serene and undisturbed. After a time, surely, he would return the 500,000 yen to Shunsuke. He would be relieved of a heavy burden, freed of all control over his person. He would leave this room, surely, without ever having to come back.

  Shunsuke brought a bottle of white wine and glasses on a silver tray and placed them before his guest. He sat down on the window seat fitted with the Ryukyu-patterned cushions and filled Yuichi’s glass. His hand shook visibly, spilling some wine, forcibly reminding Yuichi of Kawada’s hand a few days before.

  This old man is in seventh heaven, I’v
e come on him so quickly, Yuichi thought. There’s no need to bring up the business of the money right away.

  The old man and the youth drank a toast. Shunsuke lifted his eyes for the first time and looked at the face of this beautiful young man he had not been able to look at until now. He said: “Well, how are things? How is reality? Has it pleased you?”

  Yuichi smiled ambiguously. His youthful lips twisted with the cynicism he had learned.

  Shunsuke went on without waiting for an answer: “There might be anything. Things I can’t express, unhappy things, shocking things, wonderful things there might be. But, after all, they’re not worth a thing. That’s written on your face. You’ve changed inside, I suppose. But to outer appearances, you haven’t changed a bit since the first time I saw you. Your exterior is not affected at all. Reality couldn’t leave a single chisel mark on your cheek. You have the gift of youth. That will never be conquered by something of the likes of reality.”

  “I’ve broken with Kawada,” the young man said.

  “That’s good. That man has been eaten up by his own idealism. He was worried about your influence on him.”

  “I had an influence?”

  “That’s right. You can never be influenced by reality, but you constantly exert an influence on reality. You have turned that man’s reality into a fearful idea.”

  Kawada’s name had been mentioned, but Yuichi quickly lost the opportunity to mention the 500,000 yen in the lecture that name provoked.

  Who is this old man talking to? To me? Yuichi wondered. If I didn’t know better I’d be breaking my head trying to figure out Hinoki’s crazy theories. Does he think he’s talking to me, when I’m not the least excited about these artificial things that get him all wrought up?

  Unconsciously, Yuichi’s eyes moved to a dark corner of the room. The old author seemed to be talking to another person behind Yuichi.

  It was a quiet night. Other than the voices of insects there was no sound. The gurgle of wine being poured from the bottle rang clear, with the smooth weight of jewels. The cut-glass goblet shone.