Forbidden Colors

by Yukio Mishima

  “Your glasses are shining. Unfortunately we can’t see your eyes,” Shunsuke said. Kawada took off his glasses and rolled his eyes upward. Shunsuke and Yuichi laughed at him.

  Cornelia was in truth a double memory. First, Kawada, playing the part in the memory, fooled Cornelia. After that, he became the person he himself had been in Cornelia’s memory and fooled others. So that he might create the legend about himself, Cornelia absolutely had to exist. The woman who existed by not being loved—consciousness of her was a phantasmagoric image in his heart. If he did not establish the reasons for his lifelong bondage to that image, it would disappear. She became the generic term for all the diversity of which his life had been capable, the incarnation of the negative power that would carry his real life through its course. Now Kawada himself could not believe that she was mean and ugly; he saw her as nothing less than an extraordinarily beautiful woman. When his father died, he resolutely burned his vulgar pictures of Cornelia.

  This story moved Yuichi. If it is wrong to say moved, let us say intoxicated: “Cornelia really exists!” Let it needlessly be added that the youth was thinking of Mrs. Kaburagi, who through absence had acquired a beauty unknown in the world.

  It was nine o’clock. Yaichiro Kawada untied his bib and glanced at his watch. Shunsuke felt himself shiver faintly.

  One should not think that Shunsuke had descended to the level of this worldly creature. His abysmal feeling of impotence had its source in Yuichi.

  “Well,” Kawada said, “this evening I’m going to Kamakura for the night. I’m going to stay at the Kofuen.”

  Yuichi felt that the die had been cast before his eyes. The roundabout formality of soliciting a man is quite different from that of approaching a woman. All the limitless twists and turns of the hypocritical joys of heterosexuality are closed to homosexuals. If Kawada desired Yuichi’s body this evening, politeness required that he ask for it. This Narcissus looked at the middle-aged man and the old man, neither of whom held for him so much as an infinitesimal amount of charm. They had completely forgotten their worldliness and were making a fuss over him alone. They were not concerned in the slightest about his mind. Only his body was of supreme concern, and he felt something different from the thrill of sensuality a woman would feel under these circumstances. It was as if his body had become independent of himself, and he himself was a second person admiring that independent body. His soul, while trampling upon and vilifying his first body, clung to that admired body and attempted to achieve a tenuous balance. He was finding a pleasure rare in the world!

  “I always speak my mind, and I hope you’ll forgive me if I say something that may trouble you, but Yuichi is not really your nephew, is he?”

  “Really? No, not a real nephew. But, after all, even though there might be such a thing as a real friend, I’m not sure that there is such a thing as a real nephew.” This was Shunsuke’s novelist’s way of giving a straight answer.

  “And if I may ask another question, are you and Yuichi only friends? Or—”

  “You’re wondering if we’re lovers, aren’t you? I’m not of the age for love.”

  The two men almost simultaneously looked over at the beautiful eyelashes of the youth sitting cross-legged beside them, holding a folded bib in his hand and looking away from them, calmly smoking. A roguish beauty had come to dwell upon Yuichi.

  “That’s all I wanted to ask, and I feel better,” Kawada said, deliberately not looking at Yuichi. As he said these words a tic ran down his cheek like a jagged underscoring drawn by a soft, broad-pointed pencil. “Well, I hate to break up the party, but we have talked about a lot of things, and I've really enjoyed it. From now on I’d like very much to have a secret meeting with the same people at least once a month. I’ll look around to see if I can find a better place. When it comes to the mob that congregates at Rudon’s, they’re not really worth talking to, and I never have any opportunities to chat like this. At the bars of that kind in Berlin, now, first-class nobility, industrialists, poets, novelists, and actors used to appear.” It was typical that he should list them in that order. In short, in this unconscious grouping, he obviously displayed the German Burger thinking which he had convinced himself was all a pretense.

  In the darkness before the gate of the restaurant two automobiles were parked on the not very wide, sloping street. One was Kawada’s Cadillac 62. The other was a hired cab.

  The night wind was still cold, the sky cloudy. In this section there were a good many houses that had been built after the fire bombings, and there was a strangely brand-new board fence built in continuation of a stone wall with a ruined corner repaired with zinc-covered boards. The color of the fresh white lumber was vivid, almost lurid under the faint gleam of the street lights.

  Only Shunsuke hesitated, putting on his gloves. In front of this old man solemnly pulling on his leather gloves, Kawada covertly touched Yuichi’s finger with his bare hand and toyed with it. Then the time came when it had to be decided which of the three would be left alone in one of the cars. Kawada said good night and in a perfectly natural way put his hand on Yuichi’s shoulder and led him to his own car. Shunsuke dared not follow. He still had hope, however. When Yuichi, propelled by Kawada, had one shoe on the running board of the Cadillac, he turned and said in a cheerful voice: “Oh, sir, I’m going along with Mr. Kawada; would you be so kind as to call my wife?”

  “Tell her he is staying over at your house,” said Kawada.

  The hostess who was seeing them off said: “My, the awful problems men do have.”

  And thus Shunsuke became the single passenger in the cab.

  That was only a matter of a few seconds. Although the inevitability of this developing course of events was clear, watching it one could not escape the impression that it had resolved itself quite suddenly. Of what Yuichi was thinking, with what feelings he had followed Kawada, Shunsuke knew nothing. For all he knew, Yuichi, with the attitude of a child, simply wanted to take the drive to Kamakura. The only thing clear was that he, Shunsuke, had again been ousted.

  The car passed through the deteriorating shopping section of the old city. He felt the rows of street lights slipping by at the edges of his vision. When he thought so intently about Yuichi, he was pushed down to the realm of beauty alone. Perhaps deeper. There, behavior became lost; everything became resolved into spirit, into nothing but shadows, nothing but metaphors. He was spirit itself—namely, a metaphor of the body. When would he be able to arise from this metaphor? Not only that, should he be content with his destiny? Should he puncture the conviction that held that since he was of this world he must die? At any rate, the heart of this aged Chuta almost reached the point of anguish.

  Chapter 22 THE SEDUCER

  WHEN HE GOT HOME, Shunsuke immediately dashed off a letter to Yuichi. The passion that had gone with writing in the old French diary revived, and the brush with which he wrote the letter dripped oaths, gushed hatred. Naturally he was incapable of directing that animus toward Yuichi. Shunsuke took the anger of the present and used it to inflate all the more his unyielding resentment against the vagina.

  As he cooled down a little in the process of writing, he recognized that his tedious, emotional letter was not very persuasive. It was not a love letter. It was an order. He rewrote it, slipped it in an envelope, and ran his tongue along the glued flap. The hard Western paper cut his lip. He stood in front of the mirror, pressed a handkerchief against the cut, and mumbled: “Yuichi will do as I say. He will do just what it says in the letter. That much is clear. The orders in the letter will not go against his desires. The parts of it that he doesn’t like will still be under my control.”

  He walked about the room in the deep night. If he stood still for a moment he could not keep from seeing Yuichi’s form in that Kamakura inn. He closed his eyes and crouched before the three-way mirror. In the mirror, which he could not see, flashed a vision of a naked Yuichi lying supine on a white sheet, his lovely, strong head and shoulders fallen away from the pi
llow and slumped down on the tatami. His throat, held back as it was, appeared faintly white, perhaps because of the moonlight falling upon it. The old author lifted his bloodshot eyes and looked at the mirror. The sleeping form of Endymion had vanished.

  Yuichi’s spring vacation was over. The last year of his student life was about to begin. His class was the last under the old system.

  On the edge of the thick wood that ringed the college pond, numerous grassy hummocks formed a rolling landscape toward the sports field. The green of the grass was still pale. Though the sky was clear, the wind was cold. At such times as the lunch hour, however, students could be seen here and roundabout on the lawn. The season when lunch could be eaten out of doors had arrived.

  They lay sprawled about at their ease, careless of how they looked, sat cross-legged, chewed on fine, bright-green wicks of grass they picked, and watched the athletes busily moving about the field. One of the athletes pranced near. When his shadow, small at noon, stood for a solitary moment on the sand, he seemed bewildered, embarrassed, deserted, ready to turn to the supreme naked body in the sky and shout: “Hey! Hurry back, please! Hurry back and dominate me! I’m dying of embarrassment! Soon! Now!” The athlete jumped back upon his shadow. His heels adhered to the darker heels beneath them. The sun shone abroad; there were no clouds.

  Yuichi, wearing a suit, sat on the grass. A literature student engrossed in Greek language studies told him the plot of Euripides’ Hippolytus in reply to his questions.

  “Hippolytus came to a tragic end. He was chaste, stainlessly pure and innocent, and he died under a curse, believing in his own innocence. Hippolytus’ ambitions, however, were really quite small; his wishes were something that could be granted to anyone.”

  The young pedant in spectacles recited a speech of Hippolytus in Greek. When Yuichi asked what it meant, he translated: “ I would like to conquer all the men of Greece in the games and become the champion. However, I would not mind taking second place in the city if I could live happily with virtuous friends. Indeed, there lies the true happiness. And since, thus, freedom from danger will give me joy greater than that of a king . . .’”

  His hopes were something that could be granted to anyone, were they? Perhaps not, Yuichi thought. Beyond that, however, his thoughts did not go. As for Shunsuke, here’s how he would think: this ever so small wish of Hippolytus could never be granted. Thus his wish was the symbol of pure human desire, a brilliant, resplendent thing.

  Yuichi thought about the contents of the letter he had received from Shunsuke. The letter had its charm. It was an order to act, no matter how artificial the action. Moreover—and this took for granted faith in Shunsuke—such action had a safety valve in complete, cynical blasphemy. None of his plans were tedious, that much could be said for him.

  “Of course; now I remember,” the young man said to himself. “I remember my telling him once that I wanted to give myself to something, even something false—even something purposeless. He must have remembered that and cooked up this plan. Mr. Hinoki is a bit of a scoundrel.” He smiled. At that very moment left-wing students were parading in twos and threes at the edge of the grassy elevation. It occurred to him that they, too, were moved by the same impulse as he.

  It was one o’clock. The bell in the clock tower sounded. The students got to their feet. They brushed away-the dirt and the grass stems that clung to their uniforms. Yuichi’s coat, too, held the light dust of spring, dried grass, and and lawn-clippings. The friend who brushed him was struck again with admiration at the tailoring of the coat he wore so casually.

  His friends went to their classrooms. Yuichi, who had a date with Kyoko, left them and walked alone in the direction of the main gate. There he was surprised to see Jackie, dressed like a student, getting off the trolley along with four or five others. This so astonished him that he failed to get aboard.

  They shook hands. Yuichi said nothing as he looked Jackie full in the face. To an onlooker, surely these two would have seemed to be nothing more than two carefree classmates. Under the bright noontime sun, Jackie was hiding at least twenty years of time, age, and experience.

  After a while Jackie, laughing loudly at Yuichi’s amazement, led him into the shade of the trees along the street, to the side of the school fence festooned with political posters of all shapes and colors. There he explained in detail the reasons for his disguise. He could pick out a youth of his persuasion at a glance, but as a result his palate had become jaded with adventures of that sort. For the same seductive purposes, however, he had come to wish that he could fool another completely—one who would be much more at ease if his lover were a classmate.

  There would be mutual esteem, an absence of inhibition, and a pleasant aftertaste. Jackie had a student uniform copied for him, and with great deliberation came hunting from Oiso to this harem of young men.

  Jackie looked quite content with Yuichi’s loud praise of his youthfulness. He asked in a somewhat hurt tone why Yuichi did not come to enjoy himself at Oiso. He braced himself against a tree with one hand, crossed his legs gracefully, and with a look that said “I don’t care,” drummed with his fingers on the posters on the fence. “Huh, they’ve been making the same statements for twenty years,” the ageless youth muttered.

  The trolley came. Yuichi left Jackie and rode away.

  Kyoko was to meet Yuichi in the clubhouse of the international tennis club in the Imperial Palace grounds. She played tennis until noon. She changed her clothes. She ate. She chatted with her tennis companions. After they left, she remained alone in a tennis chair.

  The scent of her Black Satin perfume mingled with faint perspiration rose from her flushed cheeks like a vague anxiety undermining her sweet after-exercise fatigue in the dry, windless air of high noon. She wondered if she had put on too much. She took a hand mirror out of her navy-blue handbag and looked in it. The mirror couldn’t reflect the smell of perfume, but it satisfied her and she put it away.

  She didn’t wear light-colored coats in spring; the navy-blue coat she had chosen so deliberately was spread over the white chair. It protected her tender back from the rough frame of the chair. Her bag and shoes were of the same blue; her suit and gloves were salmon pink, her favorite shade.

  It would be well to say that Kyoko Hodaka did not love Yuichi in the slightest. Her frivolous heart was exceedingly pliant. In the lightness of her feelings there was an elegance that fell short of any standard purity. Once in the depth of her heart a fairly sincere yearning for self-deception had suddenly flared up and then gone out, without any awareness on her part. Kyoko had one resolve, one self-imposed, indispensable, easily fulfilled duty: never to keep watch over her own heart. “I haven’t seen him for a month and a half,” she said. “That seems like a day. In that time I haven’t thought of that man once.”

  One and a half months! What in the world did Kyoko do with herself? Countless dances. Countless movies. Tennis. Shopping. All kinds of Foreign Office parties she had to attend with her husband. The beauty parlor. Drives. A fantastic number of useless arguments about various loves and infidelities. Countless notions and whims encountered in the course of keeping house.

  The oil landscape painting, for instance, that graced the wall of the stairway landing had been moved during that time to the wall of the entranceway. Then it was taken to the guest room. Then she changed her mind and hung it again on the landing where it had been originally. She rearranged the kitchen and found fifty-three empty bottles. She sold them to the junkman and with the money, supplemented by some of her pocket money, bought a table lamp made from a Curasao bottle. She soon decided she didn’t like that and gave it to a friend, receiving in exchange a bottle of Cointreau. Then the shepherd dog she was raising got distemper. He frothed at the mouth, trembled in all four legs, and without making a sound died with what looked like a smile on his face. Kyoko cried for three hours; the next day she had forgotten it.

  Her life was filled with immeasurable amounts of stylish rubbish. It had bee
n like that since her girlhood, when she was infected with a bug for collecting safety pins, and filled lacquer boxes with safety pins large and small. The same kind of fever that is referred to in poor women as being “the fever of their existence” motivated the life of Kyoko. But if hers was an earnest existence, it was marked by an earnestness which did not in the least stand in the way of her frivolousness. An earnest existence that knows no distress is apt to have trouble finding an outlet.

  Like a butterfly that flits into a room and flutters madly about when it can find no open windows, Kyoko, too, lived her restless inner life. Not even the zaniest butterfly, however, is apt to believe that the room into which is has flown is its own. Sometimes, indeed, exhausted butterflies collide with forests on painted landscapes and fall unconscious.

  No one saw clearly the state of stupefaction into which Kyoko, like that butterfly, would sometimes fall—a wide eyed, confused absence of mind. Her husband would think to himself only: It’s started again. Her friends and her cousins would think nothing more than: She’s in love again —for a half day, no more.

  The phone rang in the club. It was the guard at the front gate asking if he could give a man named Minami an entrance pass. Before long Kyoko saw Yuichi walking through the pine trees on the other side of the opening in the great stone wall.

  In all her punctilious self-respect, she was content that the youth had come on time to this deliberately conceived, out-of-the-way meeting place. It gave her ample pretext to forgive him for his neglect of her. However, she didn’t venture to rise; she bowed to him while holding five brightly painted fingernails before her smiling face.

  “It’s only been a short time since I’ve seen you, but somehow you’ve changed,” she said, partly as an excuse for looking him full in the face.

  “How?”

  “Hm-m. Something a little as if a wild animal has developed.”