Forbidden Colors

by Yukio Mishima

  Yuichi shuddered slightly. Revealed before his eyes was a certain pettiness, cheapness, in his exotic charm. It lacked a frame in real life.

  That was true enough. The world that gathered at Rudon's supported no more life than the torrid zone, a life like that of practically exiled colonial administrative employees. In short, there was nothing more than the bare essentials of sentiment, the violent discipline of sentiment in that world. And if this was the political fate of the tribe, who could resist it? There, plants of extraordinary tenacity grew; it was the jungle of sentiment.

  The man who lost his way in that jungle became affected by noxious exhalations and eventually turned into a kind of unsightly monster. No one has a right to laugh. The difference is only a matter of degree. In the world of homosexuality, no man has the power to resist the mysterious force that drags people down willy-nilly into the wallow of sentiment. A man might, for instance, resist by turning to a busy occupation, or intellectual pursuit, or art, and cling to the higher intellectual levels of the masculine world. No man, however, can withstand the flood of emotion that cascades into his life; no man has been able to forget the connection that somehow exists between his body and this morass. No man has been able to cut his hand away summarily from the damp familiarity he has with the creatures of his kind. There have been countless attempts. The outcome of each, however, has been only this damp handshake again, only this sticky winking come round once more. Men like this, who essentially are incapable of maintaining a home, can find something like a household fire only in the gloomy eyes that say: “You, too, are one of our kind.”

  One day Yuichi’s early morning lecture had ended, and in the interval before the next one began, he strolled around the fountain in the university garden. Paths stretched out in a grid pattern enclosing patches of lawn. The fountain stood out against a background of trees eloquent with the loneliness of autumn; as the wind changed, it drooped to leeward and wet the grass. Its fan, fluttering in the sky, at times seemed to have lost its pivot. Outside the gate, the superannuated intra-city trolleys sent the sound of their passing echoing off the mosaic walls of the lecture halls under the cloudy sky.

  He did not choose one friend above another, and as far as the world was concerned he had no need of anyone to relieve his constant loneliness other than a few incorruptible souls with whom he could exchange notes. Among these steadfast friends, Yuichi was envied for his lovely wife, and the question as to whether marriage would cure his philandering was seriously argued. It was an argument that seemed to know what it was driving at, and it arrived at the conclusion that Yuichi was a woman chaser.

  As a result, when he suddenly heard himself called by the name “Yuchan,” his pulse quickened like that of a fugitive.

  It was a student sitting on a stone bench caught up in ivy beside one of the paths where the sun now gently slanted. Bent over a large electrical engineering textbook open on his knees, the student had not been in Yuichi’s field of vision until he called.

  Yuichi stopped and regretted that he had done so. It would have been better to act as if it were not his name. Again the student called, “Yuchan,” and stood up. He slapped the dust from his trousers carefully. He had a cheerful, round face, an animated face. His pants looked as if they got their crease by being placed under his mattress nightly. They stood straight and stiff as if they had been cut and hung up. He pulled up his trousers at the waist, and as he adjusted his belt, he exposed the broad pleats of his bright, immaculate white shirt.

  “Are you speaking to me?” said Yuichi, pausing.

  “Yes. I met you at Rudon’s. My name is Suzuki.” Yuichi looked at the face again. He didn’t recall it.

  “I guess you’ve forgotten. There are a lot of kids that wink at Yuchan. Even kids who have come there with their gentlemen wink at him. I haven’t winked yet, though.” “What do you want?”

  “What do I want? Yuchan, of all people! Don’t be uncouth. How’d you like to play around now?”

  “Play around?”

  “You don’t understand, eh?”

  The two youths slowly drew closer.

  “But it’s still broad daylight.”

  “Even in the daylight there are loads of places to go.”

  “Yes, for a man and a woman.”

  “No, not that. I’ll show you.”

  “But... I don’t have anything on me.”

  “I do. And if Yuchan will come play around with me, it’s my pleasure.”

  Yuichi cut that afternoon’s lecture.

  With what he got from working somewhere or other, the younger student treated to cab fare. The cab went through a dreary, burned-out mansion district of Takagicho, in Aoyama. Inside a gate of which only the stone wall had not burned down, before a house bearing the name “Kusaka” and a barely visible new temporary roof, Suzuki ordered the cab to stop. There was a wicket gate in the entrance and an old-fashioned door that was shut tight. Suzuki rang the bell, and for no apparent reason unhooked the neckband of his student uniform. He turned to Yuichi and smiled.

  In a short time the sound of garden geta moving with short, quick steps approached the entrance. A voice that was either a man’s or a woman’s—one could not tell which—asked who was there.

  “It’s Suzuki; open up,” the student said. The door opened. A middle-aged man in a bright red jacket greeted the two youths. The garden was strange to look at. It was possible to go to the outbuildings, connected with the main house by a covered way, on a path of steppingstones. The garden trees, however, were practically all gone. The spring had dried up. As if part of a wilderness in microcosm, fall plants were flourishing luxuriously everywhere and anywhere. Among the plants, foundation stones— remnants of a fire—gleamed whitely. The two students stepped up into a new four-and-a-half-mat outbuilding that still smelled of lumber.

  “Shall I heat your bath?”

  “No, thank you,” Suzuki said.

  “Would you like a drink?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Well,” the man said, grinning sagely, “I’ll lay out the bed. Young people are always in a hurry to get in bed.”

  The two waited in the adjoining two-mat room until the futon was laid out. They said nothing. Suzuki offered Yuichi a cigarette. He accepted. With that, Suzuki put two cigarettes in his mouth, lit them, and gave Yuichi one with a smile. In the exaggerated composure of this student, Yuichi could not help but think there were traces of a childish innocence.

  There was a sound as of distant thunder—the storm doors in the other room were being closed even though it was daytime.

  They were called into the bedroom. A light was burning in the lamp by the bed. From the other side of the sliding doors, the man said, “Rest well.” His retreating footsteps sounded from the covered passageway. It was a daytime sound—the creaking of the boards in the passageway—yet they made one think a feeble sun was shining. , Suzuki undid a breast button and lay down on the quilts. Propped on one elbow, he smoked his cigarette. As the sound of footsteps faded, he jumped up like a young hunting dog. He was somewhat shorter than Yuichi. He sprang to embrace Yuichi around the neck and kiss him. The two students kissed for something like four or five minutes. Yuichi slipped his hand inside the other boy’s tunic, under the button that was loose. The heartbeat he felt was violent. The two separated, turned from each other and hastily tore off their clothing.

  As the two naked youths embraced each other, the sound of the trolley cars and the crow of roosters, inappropriate at this time, came to them as if it were the middle of the night.

  Through a gap in the storm doors, however, a ray of the westering sun made the dust dance. Spots of coagulated resin in the center of the knots in the wood were turned by the sun’s rays into the color of blood. A thin ray of light glinted off the muddy water that filled the vase in the alcove. Yuichi sank his face into Suzuki’s hair. His hair was slicked down by lotion instead of oil and the smell was agreeable. Suzuki buried his face in Yuichi’s breast. In the
outer comers of his closed eyes, traces of tears glistened faintly.

  The sound of a fire siren came dreamily into Yuichi’s ears. As it faded in the distance it was followed by a second. Finally he heard a third, heading somewhere in the distance.

  Another fire ... He pursued the slippery train of thought. Like the first day I went to the park. In a big city, there are always fires somewhere. And there are always crimes somewhere, too. God, despairing of burning away crime with fire, perhaps distributed crime and fire in equal quantities. Thus crime is never consumed by fire, while innocence can be burnt up. That’s why insurance companies prosper. My guilt, however—in order that it might become a pure thing immune to fire, must not my innocence first pass through the fire? My complete innocence where Yasuko is concerned. . . . Didn’t I once ask to be born again for Yasuko’s sake? And now?

  At four o’clock in the afternoon the two students shook hands in front of Shibuya Station and separated. Neither had the feeling he had conquered the Other.

  When he got home, Yasuko said: “You’re home unusually early. Are you going to stay home all evening?” Yuichi said he would, but that evening he and his wife went to the movies. The seats were narrow. Yasuko leaned against his shoulder. Suddenly she pulled her head away. Her eyes narrowed wisely, like the ears of a dog coming to a point.

  “You smell good. You put on hair lotion, didn’t you?” Yuichi started to deny it, but he caught himself and said she was right. Yasuko, however, seemed to realize that it was not her husband’s scent. And what if she did? It was not really a woman’s scent either.

  Chapter 9 JEALOUSY

  “/ HAVE MADE a. terrific find,” Shunsuke wrote in his diary. “To have found such a perfect living doll as this! Yuichi is truly exquisite. Not only that, he is morally frigid. He isn’t addicted to circumspection, of which other youths smell like incense. He doesn’t take responsibility for his actions in the slightest. The morality of this youth says, in short, ‘Don’t do anything.' Thus, once he starts to do something he rules out morality. This youth decays like radioactive material. He is truly the thing I had long wearied of searching for. Yuichi does not believe in the modern distress.”

  A few days after the Charity Ball, Shunsuke laid plans to have Kyoko and Yuichi meet accidentally. He heard the story of Rudon’s from Yuichi. It was his suggestion that they meet there in the evening.

  That afternoon Shunsuke Hinoki delivered a speech, which he hated to do. He was reduced to it by the necessity of promoting his Complete Works. It was an afternoon in which the coolness of early autumn was noticeable. The gloomy figure of the old writer in his Western suit lined with silk floss intimidated the people assisting with the lecture. He stood at the rostrum still wearing his cashmere gloves. He had no reason for doing so. The impudent young man running the lecture had been careful to inform Shunsuke that he had forgotten to take off his gloves, so he went ahead with them on, just to annoy.

  The audience that filled the hall numbered about two thousand. Shunsuke looked at lecture audiences with contempt. Among the members of lecture audiences, there are the same fads that are current on modern photography.

  There is the watch-for-a-chance method, the unguarded-moment method, the reverence for naturalness, the faith in the unvarnished truth, the over-valuation of daily life, the interest in anecdote—all crazes that take into account only men put together of such worn-out materials. The photographers say: “Relax,” or “Keep talking,” or “Smile, please.” The audience asks the same things. They are addicted to earnestness and the unpainted face. Shunsuke hated the preoccupation with modern psychology that judged his casual, offhand remarks or his daily actions as betraying his identity or ideas with better clarity than did his highly polished sentences.

  To countless curious eyes, he exposed his familiar face. Before this throng, convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that individuality was better than beauty, he felt not the slightest sense of inferiority. Shunsuke indifferently smoothed the creases out of his thin note paper and placed the cut-glass water pitcher on them by way of a paperweight. The moisture ran into the ink and turned the notes to a lovely indigo. It made him think of the ocean. With that, somehow he had the feeling that in that jet-black audience of two thousand, Yuichi, Yasuko, Kyoko, and Mrs. Kaburagi were buried from sight. Shunsuke loved them, because they were not people who would come out to a lecture or anything of the kind.

  “True beauty makes men dumb,” began the old man, in spiritless tones. “In the days when this faith had not yet been destroyed, criticism was a profession unto itself. Criticism strove to imitate beauty.” With his cashmere glove, Shunsuke stroked the air and gestured with his fingers. “In short, criticism, like beauty, sought above all to strike men dumb. We can’t call this an objective so much as an anti-objective. Criticism’s method was to evoke silence without calling on beauty. It depended on the power of logic. The logic that is criticism’s method, with beauty’s coercive power, must impose silence forcibly. This silence must depend for its effectiveness, as the end product of criticism, on creating the delusion that here beauty exists. A vacuum must be given shape as a surrogate for beauty. In this way only, criticism succeeded in being of use in the process of creation.

  “At some time, however, the faith that beauty must strike dumb became a thing of the past. Beauty has not only failed to silence people, it has gotten so even when it passes through the middle of a banquet people don’t stop talking. Those of you who have gone to Kyoto do not fail to go to the Stone Garden at the Ryoanji Temple. That garden, though, is never a problem; it is beauty, pure and simple. It is a garden to strike man dumb. The amusing thing, though, is that the fine people who are so kind as to fare forth to view this august garden are not satisfied simply to be silent. Saying that it would not do not to say a word, they screw up their faces trying to squeeze out a haiku.

  “Beauty has become a stimulus to garrulity. It has gotten so that on confronting the beautiful one feels duty-bound to say something in a great hurry. It has gotten so we feel we must convert beauty right away. If we don’t convert it, it’s dangerous. Like explosives, beauty has become a difficult thing to own. The power of possessing beauty through silence, this majestic power for which one would lay down his life, has been lost.

  “With this the age of criticism began. Criticism came to function not as the imitator of beauty, but as the converter of it. Criticism marshaled its forces in the direction opposite to that of beauty. Critics who earlier were followers of beauty now became the stockbrokers of beauty, the process servers of beauty. To wit, as the belief that beauty would strike men dumb went into decline, criticism had to flaunt its sad sovereignty as surrogate, standing in for beauty. Beauty itself struck no man dumb; much less so did criticism. Thus today’s evil times of talk begetting talk, of ears being deafened by it, began. Beauty makes men everywhere chatter. In the end, thanks to this loquaciousness, beauty is artificially [What a strange way to express it!] propagated. The mass production of beauty has begun. Thus criticism, turning to these numberless imitation beauties—born from essentially the same place as itself—has heaped vile oaths upon them....”

  After the meeting was over, and Shunsuke entered Rudon’s at nightfall to meet Yuichi, the guests who observed the entrance of this fidgety, lonely old man took one look and averted their eyes. Just as when Yuichi entered, everyone was silent, but here it was not beauty but lack of concern that struck men dumb. It was, however, not a forced silence.

  As if he knew him well, the old man bowed to Yuichi, who sat in a comer talking to the young men; he found a place at the somewhat isolated table to which he had invited Yuichi. Every eye showed unusual interest.

  Yuichi joined Shunsuke, exchanged a few words, then excused himself for a moment. When he returned to Shunsuke he said: “It seems that everybody thinks I’m your boy friend. They asked me if that was so; I told them it was. That way you’ll have no trouble coming around here. Since you’re a novelist you must surely find much of in
terest in a place like this.”

  Shunsuke was shocked, but because he preferred to let matters in this place take their course he did not reprove him for his rashness.

  “If you are my boy friend, how am I supposed to act toward you?”

  “That’s a problem, isn’t it? If you just look quietly happy, it will be fine.”

  “Me, happy?”

  It was uncanny—Shunsuke, the dead man, portraying happiness! He was perplexed by this strange role he had been pressed into by this unexpectedly forceful director.

  Taking the opposite tack, he tried to make a wry face. That was difficult, however. Thinking he was making a fool of himself, he gave up trying to act anything. He was unaware that now an expression of happiness radiated his countenance.

  Since he could think of no proper explanation for his lightness of heart, Shunsuke assumed it was from his customary professional curiosity. Long deprived of his literary powers, he was embarrassed by his false fervor. For ten years now, how many times the impulse to create had flooded over him like a tide, but when he took brush in hand, the brush would not write so much as a line. The artistic impulse that in his young days nagged at him like an illness in everything he did now was only a barren half-starved curiosity.

  How beautiful Yuichi is! the old author thought, watching him from a distance when he left his seat again. Among these four or five beautiful boys, he alone stands out. Beauty is something that burns the hand when you touch it. Thanks to him there must surely be a lot of burned homosexuals.

  Now, before his eyes, a rather tense scene began.

  Yuichi had been called over to the table of two foreigners. The table happened to be separated from Shunsuke’s 110

  table by a water tank in which fresh-water fish were swimming. It served as a screen. In the tank green lights had been placed that gleamed through the clumps of seaweed. Set off by the lights, the ripples threw patterns on the face of the bald-headed foreigner. His companion was a much younger foreigner who seemed to be his secretary. The older man spoke no Japanese, and the secretary interpreted everything he said to Yuichi.