Forbidden Colors

by Yukio Mishima

  Yuichi was shocked that Mrs. Kaburagi had not looked at him once. He greeted the count. The count, whose eyes were fairly light for a Japanese, greeted Yuichi as if he were reviewing troops.

  The music began. There were not enough chairs at the table. Young people from the other tables had taken away all those not in use. Someone had to stand. Naturally Yuichi stood, sipping at the highball Kaburagi had ordered for him. The two women had crime de cacao.

  The music overflowed from the ballroom; like a mist it pervaded the hall and the lounge, restricting the conversation of the guests. The four said nothing for a time. Suddenly Mrs. Kaburagi stood up.

  “Oh, I’m sorry; there you are standing up alone. Shall we dance?”

  Count Kaburagi languidly shook his head. He was amazed that his wife could propose such a thing. They never danced at these dances.

  Her invitation was fairly clearly directed to her husband, but Yuichi noticed that her husband refused as a matter of course. He could only surmise that Mrs. Kaburagi must have anticipated that refusal. Must he not out of politeness immediately ask her himself? It was clear that she wished to dance with him. Perplexed, he looked toward Yasuko. Her decision was polite but childish: “That’s too bad. Let’s us dance.”

  Yasuko nodded to Mrs. Kaburagi, placed her bag on the chair and stood up. Yuichi turned his back to the chair beside which Mrs. Kaburagi was standing, and for no reason grasped the back of it with both hands. As Mrs. Kaburagi sat down again her back lightly pressed against his fingertips and held him thus for an instant against the back of the chair. Yasuko didn’t observe it.

  The two made their way through the crowd toward the dance floor.

  “Mrs. Kaburagi has changed lately. She has never been subdued like that,” Yasuko said. Yuichi remained silent.

  He knew that Mrs. Kaburagi was watching him without expression from a distance as he danced, almost as if escorting him, just as she had once done in the bar.

  Yuichi exercised great care not to crush the orchid, and they danced somewhat apart. Yasuko felt that she was to blame; Yuichi was grateful for the obstacle. When he thought, however, of the manly joy of crushing that high-priced flower with his chest, the ardor of that thought swiftly darkened his heart. When an act committed without passion cost so little, should he restrain himself out of the false consideration that people watching might consider him decorous and parsimonious? To crush that flower when he felt no passion—by what code was it wrong? While he pondered, the great, lovely flower stood proudly between them, and the brutish idea of destroying it grew into a sense of duty.

  The center of the dance floor was extremely crowded. Lovers in great numbers striving to bring their bodies close to one another gave themselves the pretext of doing so by huddling here in increasing masses. As a swimmer cuts the water with his chest, Yuichi cut through the top of Yasuko’s flower during the chasse. Yasuko moved nervously in order to spare the orchid. This natural womanly attitude of preferring to preserve her flower to dancing with her husband’s arms tight around her simplified things for Yuichi.

  If that was the way she was going to act, Yuichi was entirely willing to play the part of the passionate husband. The tempo of the music was fast, and so the young man, his head filled with his unhappy mad notion, feverishly pulled his wife hard against him. Yasuko had no time to resist. Mercilessly crushed, the orchid drooped.

  In many ways, however, Yuichi’s impulse had a good effect. Of course Yasuko felt happy about it after a time. She glared accusingly at her husband and, like a soldier displaying his medals, flaunted that broken flower and walked back to their table with the steps of a little girl. “Oh, your cattleya has been spoiled the first dance!” she hoped people would say.

  When they got back to the table, Mrs. Kaburagi was laughing and chatting with four or five friends around her. The count yawned and drank in silence. Mrs. Kaburagi, even though she surely noticed the crumpled flower, surprised Yasuko by saying nothing about it.

  She puffed at her long women’s cigarette and studied the crushed orchid dangling from Yasuko’s breast.

  As soon as he started dancing with Mrs. Kaburagi, Yuichi said, candidly and eagerly: “Thank you for the tickets. There was nothing in the letter, so I came with my wife. I hope that was all right.”

  Mrs. Kaburagi avoided the question. “Wife, indeed. How shocking! That’s not the proper word yet. Why don’t you say ‘Yasuko’?” .

  He was shocked that she used his wife’s given name, but did not know what to make of it.

  Mrs. Kaburagi discovered once more that not only was Yuichi’s dancing skillful, it was also light-footed and without frills. Was it a vision—the youthful haughtiness she found so beautiful each instant? Or his candor, was it a kind of abandon?

  The usual men of the world, she thought, attract a woman with the text of a page. This young man attracts with its margins. I wonder where he learned the technique.

  After a time Yuichi asked the reason for the blank sheets in the letter. The unsuspecting innocence of his query now caused her embarrassment.

  “That was nothing. I was just too lazy to write. Actually there were at the time twelve or thirteen pages of things I wanted to say to you.”

  Yuichi felt that her nonchalant reply was an evasion.

  What bothered him really was that the letter came on the eighth day. The one-week limit Shunsuke had mentioned was to be regarded as the mark of success or failure in this test. At the end of the seventh day, when nothing had happened, his self-respect was considerably wounded. The self-confidence he had acquired through Shunsuke’s encouragement was gone. Although it was certain that he did not love her, he had never before wanted someone to love him so much. That day he almost suspected that he was in love with Mrs. Kaburagi.

  The blank letter made him wonder. The two tickets she had enclosed because somehow she feared his reaction if she asked him without also asking Yasuko made him wonder all the more. When he phoned Shunsuke, whose curiosity would carry him to the limits of self-sacrifice, he promised that he would go to the ball, though not to dance.

  Had Shunsuke arrived?

  When they returned to their seats, bus boys were already bringing a number of chairs, and ten or more men and women were gathered around Shunsuke. He saw Yuichi and smiled. It was the smile of a friend.

  Mrs. Kaburagi was amazed at seeing Shunsuke, but those who knew him, besides being amazed, were soon exchanging all kinds of rumors. This was the first time Shunsuke Hinoki had ever appeared at the Monthly Ball. Who had the power to get him to invade this strange place? Only one who did not know what was going on could ask that question. Sensitivity to out-of-the-way places is a talent essential to the novelist, though the intrusion of his talent into the center of activity was something Shunsuke avoided.

  Yasuko, heady with wine, to which she was not accustomed, innocently babbled something about Yuichu. “Yuchan has been getting to be pretty vain lately. He bought a comb and he keeps it in his inside pocket. I don’t know how many times he combs his hair. I’m afraid he’ll soon be bald.”

  Everyone commented agreeably on Yasuko’s influence on him, but Yuichi, laughing good-naturedly, pondered on the implication of her words. His purchase of the comb, indeed, was associated with a habit he had acquired without realizing it. Even during boring college lectures, he would at times unconsciously take out his comb and groom his hair. Now, before all these people, Yasuko’s words made him aware for the first time that he had changed to the extent of carrying a comb concealed in his inside pocket. He saw that as a dog carries a bone from another house to his own, so this insignificant comb was the first thing he had carried home from that alien world.

  Nevertheless, it was natural that Yasuko would think the metamorphosis of her husband so soon after the wedding was related entirely to herself. There is a game in which one adds thirty or forty strokes to a picture and changes the meaning of the picture until gradually a quite different image emerges; if one happens to look at it aft
er adding only the first three or four strokes he will see only a meaningless triangle or rectangle. No one can say that Yasuko was a fool.

  Shunsuke could not ignore Yuichi’s absent-mindedness. “What’s wrong?” he asked softly. “You have the appearance of one troubled by love.”

  Yuichi arose and went out in the hall. Shunsuke followed him casually. “Have you noticed the faraway look in Mrs. Kaburagi’s eyes?” he said. “What surprised me is that she has turned spiritual. Perhaps this is the first time in her life she has ever been connected with anything spiritual. It might be said further that with you there has appeared another of the mysterious side effects of love, a reaction produced by your very lack of spirit. It has gradually occurred to me that although you think you can love women spiritually, that is not true. Human beings have no such facility. You can’t love women spiritually or physically. Just as natural beauty reigns over mankind, by the same process you rule over women in the complete absence of spirituality.”

  Shunsuke at this time was not conscious of the fact that he was looking at Yuichi as no more than a spiritual puppet of Shunsuke himself. That was, nevertheless, in the way of being the highest esthetic praise.

  “People always love best those for whom they are no match. That’s particularly true of women. Today’s Mrs. Kaburagi, thanks to love, looks as if she has completely forgotten her physical charm. This was something that, until yesterday, she found harder to forget than any man you can name.”

  “But the interval of one week has expired, hasn’t it?”

  “An exceptional favor. The first exception I’ve seen. In the first place, she can’t hide her love. Did you notice before, when you two returned to your seats, how she picked up the Saga brocade opera bag—embroidered with peacocks, no less—from the chair where she had left it and placed it on the table? She looked at the table top carefully and meticulously put it down. And she coolly set it right in the middle of a puddle of beer! Anybody who says this woman usually gets excited at a dance is mistaken.”

  Shunsuke offered Yuichi a cigarette and went on: “This business will take a long time, I think. For the time being you can rest easy; your charms have had their effect and now you can relax, no matter what. First, you have the usual protection you get from being married, and newly married at that. But really I have no wish to protect you. Wait a minute. There’s someone else I want you to meet.” Shunsuke glanced around. He was looking for Kyoko Hodaka, who had thrown him over, just as Yasuko had, and married more than ten years ago.

  Yuichi suddenly looked at Shunsuke as if he didn’t know him. Here in the middle of this young and splendid world, Shunsuke looked like a dead man standing in search of something.

  Shunsuke’s cheeks were leaden-colored. His eyes had become dull, and between his black lips the chalkiness of his too-even false teeth gleamed unnaturally, like the white wall of a ruined castle. Yuichi’s emotions, however, belonged to Shunsuke. Shunsuke knew what he was doing, for when he saw Yuichi he decided to crawl, very much alive, into his coffin. When he was involved in creation the world seemed clear, and men’s affairs transparent, because in such moments he was undoubtedly dead. Shunsuke’s many foolish actions were nothing more than the products of the clumsy efforts of a dead man trying again and again to return to the mainstream of life. As he did in his works, he was taking Yuichi’s body and populating it with his spirit, and with it he had decided to cure all his gloomy jealousies and grudges. He sought perfect rehabilitation. In short, he wished to be reborn in the world as a corpse.

  When one looks at the world with a dead man’s eyes, with what clarity the sublunary world bares its activities! With what accuracy one can see through the loves of one’s fellows! In this unprejudiced free condition, how the world becomes transformed into a little glass mechanism.

  Within this dead man ugly with age, however, certain nagging things were in motion, battering at his self-imposed restraints. At the time he heard that Yuichi had nothing to report after seven days, within his fear of failure and in his confusion over missing the mark he took a certain slight joy. It had the same root as the unhappy pain that seized his heart when at that earlier time Mrs. Kaburagi’s face displayed the unmistakable signs of love.

  Shunsuke got a glimpse of Kyoko. A publisher and his wife approached him, however, and their polite effusions prevented him from reaching Kyoko’s side.

  Kyoko was the beautiful woman in Chinese dress beside a desk heaped with raffle prizes to be given out during the entertainment. She was engaged in a lively, indeed effervescent, conversation with an elderly white-haired foreigner. Whenever she laughed, her lips softly swelled and contracted like waves around her white teeth.

  Her Chinese dress was satin, with a dragon pattern embossed on a white background. The collar clasp and buttons were gold; the dancing slippers under the trailing skirt were gold also. Her jade earrings trembled, each a flash of green.

  When Shunsuke tried to approach her, another middle-aged woman in evening gown detained him. She kept bringing up artistic topics, but Shunsuke extricated himself without so much as paying her the courtesy of being impolite. As she walked off, Shunsuke’s gaze followed her retreating figure. On her plain, naked back, the unhealthy hue of a grindstone, her shoulder blades protruded gray under a plaster of white powder. Why, Shunsuke wondered, do those people always talk about art just to cover up their ugliness and their offenses against the world?

  Yuichi approached uncomfortably. Shunsuke noticed that Kyoko continued talking with the foreigner, so he motioned Yuichi over with his eyes and spoke to him softly.

  “That woman. She’s a pretty, cheerful, and ostentatiously virtuous wife, but lately she and her husband have not been hitting it off too well. Someone told me that they came here separately. I’m going to introduce you to her as having come alone, too, without your wife. Now you must dance five numbers in a row with her. No more, no less.

  When you’ve finished those and leave, tell her apologetically that your wife actually came but that you lied to her because you thought if you told the truth she wouldn’t have danced all this time with you. Put all the sentiment you can into it.

  “She’ll forgive you. The impression you make is a miracle, surely. Also, it’s wise to flatter her a little. The most effective flattery is to tell her she has a beautiful smile. When she got out of girls’ school, her gums used to show when she smiled. It was pretty funny. About ten years after that, though—years filled with practice—she had trained herself so that no matter how she laughed she never showed her gums. Praise her jade earrings. She thinks they set off the white skin on the nape of her neck.

  “Don’t pay her erotic compliments. She likes clean men. And when it comes to that, it’s because her breasts are small. That lovely bosom is a contrivance. It’s made of fine sponge. Deceiving men’s eyes seems to be good form among beautiful things, isn’t it?”

  The foreign gentleman engaged himself in conversation with a group of other foreigners, so Shunsuke came forward and presented Yuichi to her.

  “This is Minami. He asked me to introduce him to you long ago but I never had the opportunity. He’s still a student. What’s more he’s married—unfortunately.”

  “Really? And so young? Everybody’s getting married early these days.”

  Shunsuke went on in that vein. “He asked me for an introduction to you before he got married, and now Minami is pretty upset with me about it; but he told me that he saw you for the first time at the earliest party of the fall season.”

  “If so”—Yuichi watched Shunsuke’s face while Kyoko hesitated over her words—“if so, he’s only been married three weeks. That party was held on a hot day, isn’t that so?”

  “That’s when he saw you for the first time,” Shunsuke said, in a peremptory tone, “and that’s when this man was seized with a childish whim. Before he got married he wanted to dance five numbers in a row with you. That’s right, with you! Don’t blush. If he could accomplish that, he felt he could get marrie
d without regret. Finally he married his fiancee without fulfilling his ambition. But he has never got over it, and so he has been after me now.

  He has been saying I have forgotten I know you. Today, you see, he has come here alone, without his wife. Won’t you grant him his wish? If you dance five numbers in succession with him he’ll be content.”

  ‘That’s an easy request,” Kyoko said, consenting magnanimously in a tone that concealed the riot of her emotions, “but I hope you haven’t chosen the wrong partner.”

  “All right, Yuichi, dance!” Shunsuke urged, conscious of the people in the lounge. The couple walked into the dimness of the ballroom.

  At a table in a comer of the lounge Shunsuke was stopped by a friend and his family. There he sat in a chair that offered a direct view of Mrs. Kaburagi, three or four tables off. Just then he saw Mrs. Kaburagi return to her table from the ballroom, escorted by a foreigner. She nodded to Yasuko and sat down facing her. The picture these two unhappy women made, when seen from a distance, had all the elegance of an old tale. There was now no cattleya on Yasuko’s breast. The woman in the black dress and the woman in ivory, with nothing to do, exchanged silent glances.

  The unhappiness of other people when viewed through a window is more beautiful than when viewed from within. This is because unhappiness seldom crosses the window frame and springs upon us.

  The despotism of music reached out to the gathered throng; its discipline worked. The music, like a deep-seated sense of fatigue, moved them indefatigably. In the flow of this music there was a kind of vacuum that the music could not infringe upon. Through the window of that vacuum Shunsuke now felt, he watched Yasuko and Mrs. Kaburagi.