Forbidden Colors

by Yukio Mishima

  “No, I’m not scared.”

  “You’re scared.”

  “What am I scared of?”

  “Plenty. If you’re not scared, stand by Yasuko during the delivery. That will show you what your fear consists of. But you can’t. Because, as everybody knows, you love your wife.”

  “What are you trying to tell me, sir?”

  “A year ago you got married, as I told you to. You now must gather the fruits of the fear you conquered back then. The oath you swore when you were married, the one about self-deception—are you keeping that now? Can you really torture Yasuko without torturing yourself? Aren’t you confusing Yasuko’s pain with that you have felt and seen in yourself all the time? Are you suffering under the delusion that that is married love?”

  “You know everything, don’t you? Have you forgotten that some time ago you were so good as to discuss an abortion with me?”

  “Have I forgotten it? I was dead set against it.”

  “Right. So I did what you told me to do.”

  The train drew into Ofuna. The two saw the nape of the neck of the tall, downward-looking statue of Kwannon between the mountains facing the station. It dominated the smoky green of the trees as it stood out against the slate-colored sky. The station was deserted.

  When the train started, Shunsuke spoke rapidly, as if he wished to get everything said in the short time it would take to get to Kamakura, two stations away.

  “You don’t think you would like to make sure of your innocence with your own eyes? You don’t think you would like to make sure with your own eyes that your uneasiness, your fear and your pain, whatever it is, are without basis? I don’t think you can do it. If you could, perhaps a new life would have to begin for you, and that would be too tough.”

  The youth laughed nasally: “New life, you say?” He carefully lifted the sharp creases in his trousers with one hand and crossed his legs.

  “How would I go about seeing with my own eyes?*1 “Just stay beside Yasuko during her delivery.”

  “How stupid!”

  “It’s too difficult for you.”

  Shunsuke had struck upon Yuichi’s repugnance. He stared intently, as if at prey wounded by an arrow. Around the youth’s lips a mock-sardonic, bewildered, unhappy smile of chagrin momentarily drifted.

  Whereas other people are embarrassed about their joy, in this marriage the repugnance was embarrassing. Shunsuke was always delighted to look at the young couple and find ever that relationship, ever the unloved existence of Yasuko.

  But Yuichi had to come face to face with that repugnance. Was not that very repugnance what he thought he had been savoring until this time? In Yasuko, in Count Kaburagi, in Mrs. Kaburagi, in Kyoko, in Kawada?

  Still, within the preceptorial kindness with which he pressed this delicious repugnance upon Yuichi, Shunsuke hid his never-to-be-requited love. Something had to come to an end. At the same time, something had to begin.

  Perhaps Yuichi would be cured of his repugnance. Shunsuke, too. ..

  “At any rate, I’ll do as I please. Nobody is going to give me orders.”

  “Fine. That’s fine.”

  The train approached Kamakura Station. When he got off the train Yuichi would go to where Kawada was. Shunsuke was struck by conflicting emotions. However, his words belied his feelings as he said coldly: “Just the same, you can’t do it.”

  Chapter 25 TURNABOUT

  SHUNSUKI’S WORDS rankled long in Yuichi’s heart. The more he tried to forget them, the more obstinately those words confronted him.

  The spring rains had not let up at all, and the time for Yasuko’s delivery was late. It was now four days after the expected date. She had made excellent early progress, but now the last stages of her pregnancy were showing symptoms that caused concern.

  Her blood pressure was over 150; a slight edema was visible in her legs. High blood pressure and edema in pregnancy are common prodromal symptoms of toxicity. In the afternoon of June thirtieth, the first labor pains started. In the middle of the night on July first, they came every fifteen minutes. Her blood pressure reached 190. To make matters worse, the doctor feared that the severe headache she complained of might be a symptom of eclampsia.

  The attending chairman of the gynecology department had had Yasuko admitted to the hospital of his own college several days earlier, but though the labor pains had been going on for two days, the delivery was not progressing, it seemed. They searched for the cause and discovered that the angle of Yasuko’s pubic bone was smaller than normal. Thus a forceps delivery was decided upon, to be performed by the chairman of the gynecology department himself.

  July second was one of those harbingers of midsummer that come once in a while during the rainy season. Early in the morning, Yasuko’s mother came by in a car to pick Yuichi up in accordance with his wish to be at the hospital on the day of the delivery. The two mothers greeted each other ceremoniously. Yuichi’s mother wanted to go along too, but she had decided not to, she explained, because in her illness she would be a bother to the others. Yasuko’s mother was fat, healthy, and middle-aged. Even after they got into the car, she continued with her usual heavy-handed teasing of Yuichi.

  “According to Yasuko, you’re an ideal husband, but just the same I’m not blind. If I were young I wouldn’t leave you alone whether you had a wife or not. How they must make a fuss about you! But let me ask one thing. Please be clever in your deception of Yasuko. Where there is clumsy deception there is no true affection. Since of course I can keep my mouth shut, tell the truth only to me. Has anything interesting happened lately?”

  “It won’t work. You can’t trap me that way.”

  Supposing he did tell the truth to this woman who was like a cow basking in the sun. A terrible vision of the reaction he would excite suddenly flashed through his mind. At that moment, however, the youth was astonished to feel the woman’s hand reach out to touch the hair that fell over his forehead.

  “Oh! I thought your hair was getting white. It was only shining.”

  “Really!”

  “It surprised me, too.”

  Yuichi saw that the sun was glaring outside. In some corner of this morning street Yasuko was still suffering from labor pains. As he thought of her, those pains appeared graphically before his eyes. He felt as if he could gauge the weight of them in the palm of his hand.

  “She’ll be all right, won’t she?” the son-in-law said. As if in disdain of his uneasiness, his mother-in-law answered: “She’ll be all right.” She knew that the best way to calm a young, inexperienced husband was to show confidence and optimism in these matters that were entirely of womanly concern.

  When the car stopped at a crossroads they heard the sound of a siren. Pell-mell down the sooty, gray street came a bright-red fire engine, shimmering like a picture in a child’s storybook. The truck was almost prancing, its wheels touching the ground lightly. It seemed to make the neighborhood rumble as it hurtled past. Yuichi and Yasuko’s mother watched it graze the car in which they were riding and then looked out of the car window to see where the fire was.

  “Stupid, isn’t it? A fire at this time,” said Yasuko’s mother. In all this bright sunlight she would not have been able to see a fire even if it were burning right beside her. There was, however, certainly a fire somewhere.

  As Yuichi came into the sickroom and wiped the perspiration from Yasuko’s suffering brow, he found it strange that he should be coming here so soon before the impending delivery. Something like a joy that courted danger lured him and forced him on. Since there was nowhere he could go to be spared thinking about Yasuko’s pain, a desire to be close to her pain held him to her side. The Yuichi who ordinarily hated to go home came to Yasuko’s pillow as if returning home.

  The room was very warm. The sliding door to the balcony was standing open. White curtains shielded the rays of the sun, but the curtains were seldom touched by a breeze. The rain and cold had continued until yesterday, so no fans had been installed; but as soo
n as the mother walked into the room she grasped the problem and phoned to have a fan sent from her home. The nurses were busy elsewhere. Yuichi and Yasuko were alone. The young husband wiped the perspiration from her forehead. Yasuko gave a deep sigh and opened her eyes. She relaxed her tight, sweaty grip on Yuichi’s hand.

  “I feel better now. I feel fine now. It will be all right for ten minutes or so.”

  She looked around her as if noticing things for the first time: “My, it’s hot!”

  Yuichi was frightened by Yasuko’s relief. In her relieved expression he recalled a fragment of the daily life he feared most. The young wife asked her husband for a mirror. She combed her hair, in disarray from the pain. In her pale, swollen face, with no makeup, there was an ugliness in which she herself could not divine the sublime qualities of pain.

  “I’m a mess. Please excuse me,” she said pathetically, in a voice that would not have been heard in one not ill. “In a jiffy I’ll be pretty again.”

  Yuichi looked directly down on that face like a child’s, prostrated by pain. How was it to be explained, he wondered? This unsightliness and pain was immersing him in human emotion here in close proximity to his wife. When his wife was untroubled and beautiful in a way that it was natural to love, however, he was oddly driven away from human feeling and reminded only of her soul, which he could not love. How could that be explained? But Yuichi’s error lay in his stubborn refusal to believe that within his present tenderness was mingled the tenderness of a common, ordinary husband.

  Yasuko’s mother came back with the nurse. Yuichi left his wife in the hands of the two women and went out on the balcony. The third-floor balcony overlooked the courtyard. His eyes were met by the multitude of hospital windows across the courtyard and the glass wall of the stairwell. He could see the white uniform of a nurse descending the stairway. Upon the glass of the stairs bold parallel lines were etched. The morning sun coming from the opposite direction cut diagonally across those parallel lines.

  In the fierce glare, Yuichi smelled the odor of disinfectant and recalled Shunsuke’s words: “Don’t you think you would like to make sure of your innocence with your own eyes?”

  That old man’s words always have a poisonous power over me. From an absolutely despised object, I shall see my own child born, he told me. He divined that I shall be able to do it. There was in his cruel sweet goading a triumphant self-confidence.

  He rested his hand on the iron railing of the balcony. As he did so, the tepid feel of the rusty iron warmed by the heat of the sun suddenly reminded him of his honeymoon, when he had whipped the railing of the hotel balcony with his necktie.

  In Yuichi’s heart an unnamable impulse arose. The repugnance that Shunsuke had built up inside him, which called up with a vivid pain, placed the youth under its spell. To resist it, or to retaliate against it, was just about the same thing as abandoning himself to it. It was difficult for him to distinguish between his passion for determining the source of the repugnance and a desire, motivated by appetite and lust for the flesh, to seek out the fountainhead of pleasure. When he thought about it, Yuichi’s heart palpitated.

  The door to Yasuko’s room slid open.

  Preceded by the white-suited chairman of the gynecology department, two nurses came into the room pushing a wheeled stretcher. At that moment the labor pains attacked Yasuko again. She called the name of her husband as if she were calling someone far away. He ran over and took her hand.

  The chairman of the gynecology department smiled a sweet smile. Then he said: “Just be patient a little while longer. Just a little while.”

  There was something about his beautiful white hair that led people to trust him at first glance. Yuichi conceived a violent antipathy toward that white hair, that venerability, all the good intentions of that open-and-above-board great physician. All anxieties, all concerns about this pregnancy, about this delivery fraught with more or less unusual difficulties, about the child to be born, fell away from Yuichi. The only thing he thought of was his wish to see that.

  The suffering Yasuko kept her eyes closed even while they moved her to the mobile stretcher. The perspiration ran in torrents on her forehead. Her supple hand sought for Yuichi’s in the air. As the youth’s hand grasped hers, her bloodless lips turned toward his bent head.

  “Stay with me. If you don’t stay by my side, I won’t be able to go through with it.”

  Was there ever so moving, so naked a confession? It was almost as if his wife had read the wish within the innermost depths of his mind and was struck by the wild fancy that she could help him. Even the bystanders perceived an extraordinary intensity in the emotions he displayed on seeing this selfless devotion in his wife.

  “What's that?” the doctor said.

  “My wife asked me to go with her all the way.”

  The doctor grasped the arm of this demure, inexperienced husband. In a low, yet powerful voice he said: “We have young wives who say things like that once in a while. Don’t take her seriously. If you do, both your wife and you will regret it surely.”

  “But my wife said if I’m not there—”

  “I understand the way your wife feels, but she has had during her pregnancy all the encouragement she needs just to become a mother. If you are present . . . for you, her husband, to be present, would be a terrible mistake. Even though you feel this way now, you will certainly regret it later.”

  “I shall never regret it.”

  “But all the fathers I’ve seen would have nothing to do with this. I've never seen one like you.”

  “Doctor, I implore you!”

  The instincts of the actor were leading Yuichi at this time to portray the stubborn, unshakable distraction of a young husband who has lost all sense of judgment out of anxiety for his wife. The doctor nodded curtly. Yasuko’s mother, listening to their conversation, was shocked. “It’s mad,” she said; “please leave me out. And do stop! You’ll surely regret it. Worst of all, do you have to be so mean as to leave me all alone in the waiting room?”

  Yasuko did not let go of Yuichi's hand. He felt as if her hand were pulling him with a suddenly augmented power, but it was the two nurses pushing the stretcher. The nurse on duty in that room opened the door and ushered them out into the hall.

  Yasuko’s stretcher, with its entourage, took the elevator to the fourth floor. It moved quietly across the cool reflections of the corridor. As the wheels of the stretcher clicked slightly over the joints in the floor, Yasuko’s soft white chin bounced flaccidly back and forth. The double doors of the delivery room swung open. Only Yasuko’s mother remained outside as they swung shut. As they left her, Yasuko’s mother said: “Really, Yuichi, you’ll be sorry. If it gets too horrible, please come out. I’ll be sitting in a chair in the hall.”

  The smile with which Yuichi replied to her was like that of a man going into danger. This gentle young man knew his own fears.

  The stretcher was pushed to the side of another stretcher, fitted out with equipment. Yasuko was moved to it. When she had been moved, a curtain was drawn by a nurse between two posts that were fixed to opposite sides of the new stretcher. This curtain, drawn above the chest of the woman in labor, shielded her eyes from the glare of the equipment and the cruel knives.

  Yuichi grasped Yasuko’s hand and stood above that curtain. There he could see the two halves of Yasuko—her upper half, and the lower half separated from her by the curtain she could not see over.

  The windows faced south, and the breeze blew through softly. The necktie, of the young husband, in shirtsleeves as he was, flapped and fluttered and clung to his shoulder. He stuffed the end of it into the breast pocket of his shirt. He carried out this action swiftly, as if interrupting a most engrossing enterprise. Nevertheless, all he was doing was helplessly holding the hand of his perspiring wife. Between this suffering body and this nonsuffering body there was a distance across which no action taken by either could be linked.

  “Just be patient a little longer. It will be d
one soon,” said the head nurse into Yasuko’s ear again. Her eyes remained tight shut. Yuichi felt freer because of the fact that his wife could not see him.

  The chairman of the gynecology department appeared, his hands scrubbed, his sleeves rolled up, followed by two assistants. He did not so much as glance in Yuichi’s direction. He signaled to the head nurse. Two nurses removed the lower half of the table on which Yasuko was lying. Her legs were stretched out in conformity with two strange hornlike projections sticking up in the air on each side of the bottom edge of the half table on which she lay.

  The low curtain on top of her chest was designed to keep her from seeing he pitiless transformation of the lower half of her body into a thing, an object. Regardless, the pain of the top half of Yasuko had become a pure, spiritual pain that knew nothing about how she had been so transformed, that had nothing to do with the incident involving her lower half. The prehensile power with which she grasped Yuichi’s hand was not a woman’s power. It was the arrogant power of flourishing pain, capable of plucking out Yasuko’s existence.

  Yasuko groaned. In the swelter of the room between gusts of wind, the groans hovered like the sound of wings of countless flies. She tried continually to raise her abdomen and, frustrated, would drop back on the hard bed; her face, with eyes closed, moved from side to side in tiny tremors. Yuichi remembered. Last autumn, when he was with that passing student in the daytime in that inn in Takagicho, he had heard fire-engine sirens in his dream. Then he thought: In order that my guilt 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?

  He rested his eyes by looking at the scene outside the window. The summer sun burned down on the woods in the big park on the other side of the government railway line. The oval of the track was like a pool of radiance. No human shape was visible there.