Forbidden Colors

by Yukio Mishima

  “You’ll give me something for it, ma’am, won’t you?” the young man said, insolently bantering.

  “Not today,” she said.

  “How about tomorrow noon?”

  “No, that’s out, too.”

  “But only once in ten days! Have you found somebody else?”

  “Don’t talk so loud!”

  “Day after tomorrow?”

  “Day after tomorrow . .. ?”

  Shunsuke’s wife pronounced that “Day after tomorrow” as if she were coyly placing a piece of fragile china back on the shelf. “In the evening, though, my husband is going to a meeting. It will be okay to come then.”

  “Five o’clock?”

  “Five o’clock.”

  His wife opened the door, which had been shut. The young man made no move to leave. He struck the doorpost two or three times, softly.

  “How about now?”

  “What are you saying? My lord and master is upstairs. I hate people who don’t have any sense.”

  “Okay. Just a kiss.”

  “Not here. If somebody sees us we’ve had it.”

  “Just a kiss.”

  “You’re a nuisance. Just a kiss.”

  The young man closed the door behind him and stood in the entranceway to the kitchen. She stepped down to him in her rabbit-fur bedroom slippers.

  The two of them stood together, like a rose beside a pole. A wavelike undulation passed from time to time from her back to her hips down her black velvet gown. His hand groped out and loosened her belt. Shunsuke’s wife shook her head, resisting. They scuffled silently. Until this moment her back had been toward Shunsuke. Now it was the man’s back. Her open gown was toward him. She had nothing on underneath. The young man knelt down in the narrow entryway.

  Shunsuke had never seen anything so white as the naked body of his wife standing there in the gray dawn. It was not standing, that white embodiment; it was floating. Like the hand of a blind man, her hand moved, feeling for the hair of the kneeling young man.

  What could the eyes of his wife be looking at now, first gleaming, then clouding, then opening wide, then staring half-closed? At the enameled pans on the shelves? At the cupboard doors? At the view of the trees in the dawn through the window? At the glint of the sun bouncing off the doorpost? The intimate silence of that kitchen, like that of a sleeping barracks before the activity of the day, could surely conceive nothing within the eyes of his wife. Yet something was clear in those eyes, and it was somewhere in this curtain. And as if they were conscious of it, they never once met the eyes of Shunsuke.

  They are eyes that have been instructed from childhood never to look at one’s husband-—Shunsuke shuddered as this thought came over him. At the same time the wish to propel himself suddenly out there vanished. He was unable to utter a word and, what was more, knew no way to get revenge.

  After a time the young man slid open the door and departed. The garden was turning white. Silently Shunsuke retreated to the second floor.

  This writer, gentleman beyond measure, had only one way of getting rid of the resentments his life brought him. It was his French diary, in which on certain days he would write pages. (He had never been abroad, but he had mastered French. Three works of Huysmans—La Cathedrale, Le-bas, and En Route!—as well as Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-morte he had transmuted into splendid Japanese just to get his hand going.) Were this journal made public after his death, there would probably be much discussion as to whether it were more valuable than his works per se. All the important elements that his works were deficient in flourished in the pages of this diary, but transferring them verbatim into those works ran counter to the wishes of Shunsuke, who hated the naked truth. He held firmly to the belief that any part of one’s talent, be it what it may, which revealed itself spontaneously was a fraud. Not only that, at the root of the lack of objectivity in his works lay his creative attitude, his excessively stubborn adherence to subjectivity. He hated the naked truth to excess and made his works sculptures of the raw flesh of its naked body.

  As soon as he got back to his study he plunged into his diary, into the painful description of that assignation in the dawn. It was written in the wildest hand, almost as if he intended that he himself would not be able to read it when he came back to it a second time. As with the diaries of decades past piled on his shelf, the pages of this diary too were filled with curses directed against women. If the curses had no effect, it was in the last analysis because the one doing the cursing was not a woman but a man.

  It is easier to quote fragments, such as the following one, from this memorandum filled more with jottings and aphorisms than entries in dairy form. Here is the record of one day of his youth:

  Women can bring nothing into the world but children. Men can father all kinds of things besides children. Creation, reproduction, and propagation are all male capabilities. Feminine pregnancy is but a part of child rearing. This is an old truth. [Incidentally Shun-suke had no children. It was half a matter of principle.]

  Woman’s jealousy is simply jealousy of creativity.

  A woman who bears a son and brings him up tastes the honeyed joy of revenge against creativity. When she stands in the way of creation she feels she has something to live for. The craving for luxury and spending is a destructive craving. Everywhere you look, feminine instincts win out. Originally capitalism was a^male theory, a reproductive theory. Then feminine thinking ate away at it. Capitalism changed into a theory of extravagance. Thanks to this Helen, war finally came into being. In the far distant future, communism too will be destroyed by woman.

  Woman survives everywhere and rules like the night. Her nature is on the highest pinnacle of baseness. She drags all values down into the slough of sentiment. She is entirely incapable of comprehending doctrine: “—istic,” she can understand; “—ism,” she cannot fathom. Lacking in originality she can’t even comprehend the atmosphere. All she can figure out is the smell. She smells as a pig does. Perfume is a masculine invention designed to improve woman’s sense of smell. Thanks to it, man escapes being sniffed out by woman.

  Woman’s sexual charm, her coquettish instincts, all the powers of her sexual attraction, prove that woman is a useless creature. Something useful would have no need of coquetries. What a waste it is that man insists on being attracted by woman! What disgrace it brings down upon man’s spiritual powers! Woman has no soul; she can only feel. What is called majestic feeling is the most laughable of paradoxes, a selfmade tapeworm. The majesty of motherhood that once in a while develops and shocks people has in truth no relation to spirit. It is no more than a physiological phenomenon, essentially no different from the self-sacrificing mother love seen in animals. In short, spirit must be viewed as the special characteristic that differentiates man from the animals. It is the only essential difference.

  Essential difference (it might be better to call it the peculiarly human capability of fictional creation) ... it might be discovered upon the features in the picture of the twenty-five-year-old Shunsuke that was inserted in the diary. They were ugly features, yet there was in their aspect a certain man-made ugliness, the ugliness of a man who strove day by day to believe himself ugly.

  In that year’s diary, carefully written in French, might be found various random, outrageous doodles. There were two or three rude sketches of the vagina, roughly scratched over with a canceling X. He was cursing the vagina.

  Shunsuke did not marry a thief and a madwoman because no other brides were available. There were enough “spiritual women” who could find this promising young man interesting. But the creature that was the “spiritual woman” was a monster and not really a woman. The only women who could be unfaithful to Shunsuke were the ones who refused to understand his lone strong point, his one beautiful feature, his soul. These indeed were the original, the true, the genuine women. Shunsuke could only love these beautiful Messalinas, sure of their beauty, who did not require spirit to round out their charms.

  The lovely face
of his third wife, three years dead, floated into Shunsuke’s mind. At fifty, she and her lover not half her age had committed suicide. Shunsuke knew why she had taken her life. She feared the prospect of an ugly old age spent in his company.

  Their dead bodies were thrown up together on Inubo Point, deposited by the waves high on the rocks. It was no easy task to get them off. Fishermen fastened ropes to them and passed them from rock to rock in the white spume thrown up by the booming surf.

  Nor was it easy to separate their corpses. They had melted together like wet tissue paper, their skin seemingly shared in common. The remains of Shunsuke’s wife, forcibly pried loose, were sent to Tokyo for cremation, according to her husband’s wishes.

  It was a magnificent funeral; the ceremony was over, and the time had come to start the procession. The aged husband took his leave of the deceased, who had been carried into another room. No one else entered, as he instructed. Above her tremendously swollen face, buried with lilies and pinks, the roots of her hair seemed to glisten in blue striations out of a semitransparent hairline. Without apprehension Shunsuke stared at this ugliest of all faces. Then he sensed the malice in that face. It could cause her husband no more pain; her face no longer had to be beautiful. Was not this the reason it was ugly?

  He took his treasured No mask representing young womanhood and placed it over her face. Harder and harder he pressed against it, so that the face of the drowned woman buckled under the mask like so much ripe fruit. (No one would know what Shunsuke had done; in an hour or so all traces of it would be consumed in flame.)

  In pain and indignation, Shunsuke went through the period of mourning. When he recalled that dawning day that marked the beginning of his pain, his response was so fresh that he found it hard to believe his wife was not still alive. He had had more rivals than he had fingers, and their youthful arrogance, their hateful good looks ....

  Shunsuke had taken a stick to one of them, and his wife had threatened to leave him. So he apologized to his wife and bought the boy a suit of clothes. Later the fellow was killed fighting in North China. Drunk with joy, Shunsuke wrote a long passage in his diary; then, like one possessed, he went for a walk down the street.

  It was jammed with soldiers departing for the front, with all their well-wishers. He joined a crowd of people around a soldier saying good-bye to a lovely girl, obviously his fiancee. Somehow Shunsuke found himself joyfully waving a paper flag. A cameraman happened to be passing at the moment and caught him, so Shunsuke’s picture appeared prominently in the newspapers, waving the flag. Who could have known? Here was this eccentric author waving a flag, sending off a soldier to die on the battlefield —the very battlefield on which had recently died the detested young soldier whose death he was really celebrating!

  These were the thoughts passing through the mind of Shunsuke Hinoki during the hour-and-a-half bus trip that was the last leg of his journey to the shore where Yasuko was.

  Then the war ended, he thought. She committed suicide the second year afterward. The newspapers were polite; they called it a heart attack. Only a small number of my friends knew the real facts.

  After my mourning period was over, I fell in love with the wife of a former count. My life of ten-plus love affairs was fulfilled, it seemed, with this love. At a critical moment, her husband appeared demanding 300,000 yen. The former count had a sideline, with his wife as a partner: blackmail.

  The memory made him laugh. The blackmail episode was funny, though the humor made him uneasy.

  I wonder whether I am still capable of hating women as fiercely as when I was young.

  He thought of Yasuko, this nineteen-year-old girl who had come to see him several times since they met in Hakone in May. The old writer’s breast heaved.

  In the middle of May, when Shunsuke was working at Nakagora, a girl staying in the same hotel asked, through the maid, for his autograph. He met the girl eventually near the garden. She was on her way to meet him, one of his works under her arm. It was a lovely evening; he had been out for a walk and met her on the way back, as he climbed the stone steps.

  “Is it you?” Shunsuke asked.

  “Yes. My last name is Segawa,” she said. “How do you do?”

  She was wearing a pink dress, the kind a child would wear. Her arms and legs were long and graceful, perhaps too long. The skin of her thighs were tight, like that of a fresh-water fish. It was white skin, with gamboge depths, gleaming out from under the hem of her short skirt. Shunsuke guessed she was seventeen or eighteen. From the expression around her eyes, though, one would guess her to be twenty or twenty-one. She was wearing get a, revealing her trim heels—small, modest, firm, birdlike.

  “Where is your room?”

  “Way back there.”

  “That’s why I haven’t seen you. Are you alone?”

  “Yes—today, that is.”

  She was convalescing from a bout with pneumonia. It pleased Shunsuke that she was a girl who was only able to read novels “for the story.” Her companion, an elderly woman, had gone back to Tokyo for a day or two on business. He could have gone back to his room with Yasuko, autographed her book, and returned it to her at once, but he wanted to arrange to meet for the book the following day, so they sat down on one of the ugly benches by the garden. There they talked about this and that—there really was no topic that could speed intimacy between this shy old man and this proper young woman. “When did you come?” “What’s your family like?” “Do you feel better now?” Things like that Shunsuke asked, and she answered with a quiet smile.

  Thus it was surprising how soon the garden seemed to become wrapped in twilight. In front of them, the soft shapes of Myojo Peak and Tateyama to the right of it grew darker and quietly sidled their way into the thoughts of those watching them. Between the two mountains sank the Odawara Sea. The flashing of the lighthouse glimmered like the evening star somewhere in the area where the twilight sky and the narrow seascape dimly merged. The maid came to announce dinner, and they parted.

  The next day, Yasuko and her elderly companion came to Shunsuke’s room, bringing with them some sweets from Tokyo. He brought out the two volumes, which had already been signed. The old woman did all the talking, affording Yasuko and Shunsuke the luxury of silence. After Yasuko and the woman left, Shunsuke took it into his head to take a long walk. He panted as he scrambled irritably up the hill.

  “It doesn’t matter how far; I can do it. I’m still not tired. See how I can walk,” he told himself.

  Finally he came to a grassy spot shaded by a tree. There he stretched out, as if unconscious. Suddenly a huge pheasant launched out of a bush at one side. Shunsuke started. Then he felt his heart leaping with a restless joy born of overexertion.

  It’s been a long time since I had this feeling. How many years? Shunsuke thought to himself.

  He chose to forget that “this feeling” was for the most part of his own making, that in order to create “this feeling” he had designedly taken this unusually vigorous hike. Surely such forgetfulness, such willfullness, could be attributed to his advanced age.

  The bus route from the nearest railroad station to the town where Yasuko was staying passed close to the sea at several points. From the top of the cliffs one got a bird’s-eye view of the flashing summer sea. A transparent and therefore barely visible incandescent glow lit up the surface of the sea.

  It was still long before noon. The two or three passengers in the bus were local people, but they spread out side dishes wrapped in bamboo sheaths and started eating their balled rice. Shunsuke barely knew what it was like to be conscious that his stomach was empty. When he was thinking, he would eat and then forget he had eaten, then wonder why his stomach was full. His viscera as well as his mind were oblivious to the vicissitudes of daily life. .

  The K-Park stop was two stations away from the terminal point, K-Town Hall. Nobody got off there.

  The bus route sliced through the center of this great park, which covered about a thousand hectares bet
ween the mountains and the sea. One side had the mountains as its focal point; the other side had the sea. Through the thick shrubbery, noisy in the wind, Shunsuke caught glimpses of the deserted, silent playground, and of the sea, its blue enamel expanse broken here and there in the distance, and of sundry park swings that threw motionless shadows on the shining sand. For no reason that he could fathom, that great park, silent in the misdummer morning, intrigued him.

  The bus stopped at a corner of the jumbled little town. Around the town hall there were no signs of life. Through the open windows the white tops of the desks, on which nothing was piled, threw out gleams of light. The welcoming party from the hotel bowed.

  Shunsuke gave them his baggage and slowly climbed the stone staircase they had pointed out beside the shrine. Thanks to the wind off the sea, the heat was barely noticeable. The voices of the cicadas came down from overhead languidly—warm sounds wrapped in wool. Halfway up the stairs, Shunsuke took off his hat and rested awhile. Below him in the little harbor a little green steamer rested; it let off steam noisily, as if prompted. Then it stopped. As it did so, the all-too-simple curve of the still harbor seemed all at once filled with a doleful sound as of countless wings, like the buzzing of a persistent fly; no matter how often one chases it, it will not be driven off.

  “What a fine view!”

  Shunsuke said that as if to get the idea out of his mind. It was certainly not a fine view.

  “The view from the hotel is better, sir.”

  “Is that so?”

  The old author’s dignity stemmed from the fact that he was too lazy to take the trouble to indulge in teasing and ridicule. It wearied him to break his composure even for a moment.

  They had given him the finest room in the hotel, where he asked the maid the questions he had prepared on the way and found so difficult to phrase with requisite casualness. (To make matters worse, he feared he had lost all casualness.)