Forbidden Colors

by Yukio Mishima

  The widow Minami’s pain was probably not based on moral considerations. She merely felt a confusion of spirit from the reversal of all her ordinary thought processes and ideas about the world, through which her natural gentleness could not penetrate. Only revulsion and fear now filled her heart.

  She closed her eyes and saw again the scenes of hell she had encountered in the past two days. In them were phenomena she was unprepared for, except for one clumsy letter. In them were phenomena of indescribably bad taste, horror, disgust, ugliness, blood-curdling unpleasantness, an anguish to make one writhe, all that excited revulsion. And what made for a truly unpleasant contrast was the fact that the employees and patrons of the place never altered their ordinary human expressions, the sangfroid with which they met their daily rounds.

  Those men act as if they consider themselves proper, she reflected irritably. How ugly is an upside-down world! Whatever those perverts think or do, my way is the proper way. My eyes have not gone mad.

  If she had never been so shaken as she was then, she had also never had her self-confidence so bolstered in all her life. That conclusion is not strange. In the fearful and yet uproariously funny phrase, “sexual perversion,” everything was explained. That this hairy caterpillar of a phrase, which no well-bred young woman would utter, pertained to her own son, the wretched mother pretended to forget.

  When she had seen the male lovers kissing, the widow had become violently ill and turned her eyes away.

  “If they had any upbringing, they wouldn’t do such things!” As the word “upbringing,” not less funny than “sexual perversion,” floated through the widow’s mind, a pride that had long been dormant awoke in her.

  Her upbringing had been in “the very best of families.” Her father, affiliated with the rising classes of the Meiji era, loved refinement almost as much as he did medals. In her house all was refined, even the dogs. When her family sat down in their own dining room, even with no guests present, they would say, “Would you be so kind as to . . .” when they wanted the gravy passed. The time in which the widow had been brought up was not necessarily a tranquil time, but it was a great time. Soon after she was born it saw victory in the Sino-Japanese War. When she was eleven, it met victory in the Russo-Japanese War. Until she became a member of the Minami family at nineteen, her parents required nothing for the protection of this rather sensitive girl but the highly stable moral dignity of the time and culture in which they lived.

  When, fifteen years after she had become a bride, she had had no child, she could not appear before her mother-in-law, still living, without humiliation. When Yuichi was born, she breathed a sigh of relief. By this time changes had occurred within the center of the dignified atmosphere she venerated. Yuichi’s father, who had been a great woman-chaser since his high school days, for these fifteen years since his marriage still lived a wild life. The tremendous relief of the time of Yuichi’s birth came from the confirmation that the Minami family register would not show that her husband’s seed had been sown in questionable soil.

  The first thing she had run into was humanity of this kind, but her heart, with its inexhaustible love and esteem for her husband, and her natural pride easily came to terms. Forgiveness replaced resignation, and tolerance replaced humiliation, and taught her a new way to love. This was indeed a love with dignity. She felt that there was not a thing in this world she could not forgive—at least all but indignity.

  When hypocrisy becomes a matter of taste, great matters are easily dispatched and small matters are fraught with fine moral shadings. The widow Minami was not inconsistent at all in considering the atmosphere of Rudon’s as simply bad taste. Since it was vulgar, she could not pardon it.

  It was reasonable that, given this background, her usually gentle heart should not be inclined in the slightest toward sympathy with her son. The widow Minami also could not help wondering how an ill-bred thing like this, simply deserving of revulsion, could be related to this pain and these tears that shook her to the depths.

  When the feeding was done, Yasuko put the baby to bed and returned to her mother-in-law.

  “I don’t want to see Yuichi—this evening, anyway,” her mother-in-law said. “Tomorrow I have to talk to him. Let me do the talking. Why don’t you go to sleep, too? It doesn’t pay to keep ruminating about it, does it?”

  She called Kiyo, and hurriedly told her to prepare for bed. She acted as if something were chasing her. She felt confident that once she got into bed this evening, in the extremity of her fatigue, she could sleep the sodden sleep the drunkard craves from his sake.

  During the summer, the Minami family used whatever room was coolest for their meals. The next day was sweltering even in the morning, so Yuichi, his wife, and his mother had a meal of cold juice, eggs, and toast on the veranda. During breakfast, Yuichi was always immersed in the newspaper. This morning, as usual, the crumbs from his toast fell audibly on the paper.

  The meal was over. Kiyo brought in tea, cleared the table, and left. The widow Minami extended the two letters to Yuichi with almost rude abruptness. Yasuko’s heart churned as she watched her, and she looked away. The letters were hidden by the newspaper; Yuichi did not see them. The mother poked the paper with the letters.

  “Won’t you put that useless paper down? Here are some letters that came in the mail.”

  Yuichi dumped the newspaper untidily on the chair beside him and looked at the trembling hand with which his mother held out the letters. He saw the faint smile of tension in her face. He looked at the addresses on the envelopes, then turned them over and saw the blank spaces where the senders’ names should have been. He took out a bulky letter and opened it. Then he took out the other.

  “They’re both the same—the one that came to me, and the one that came to Yasuko,” his mother said.

  When he began to read the letter, Yuichi’s hand also trembled. The color drained from his face, and he kept wiping the perspiration from his brow with a handkerchief.

  He was barely reading. He knew the contents of the anonymous missive. He was more concerned with the painful process of getting out of his predicament.

  He induced a pained smile at the comers of his mouth and summoned all his powers; then he looked squarely at his mother.

  “What’s this rubbish? This headless, tailless, vulgar letter? Somebody’s jealous of me and is trying to cause me trouble.”

  “No. I myself went to the low-class dive named in that letter, and I saw your picture there with my own eyes.”

  Yuichi had lost his powers of speech. His heart was in turmoil; he could not realize that in spite of the fury of his mother’s tone and her distraught look, she was far removed from her son’s tragedy, and that her anger was hardly more severe than if she were scolding him for wearing a tasteless necktie. In the first pitch of his excitement, he saw what was in his mother’s eyes: “society.”

  Yasuko began to weep quietly. Inured to submissiveness, she usually hated to be seen crying, but now she was not sad at all, and therefore suspected her flow of tears. Usually she restrained her tears from fear of incurring her husband’s displeasure; now her tears were meant to rescue him from his plight. Her body had been trained by love and served well in love’s behalf.

  “Mother, don’t go too far!” she whispered brokenly, then rose from her seat. She walked—half-ran—through the house into the corridor, to the room where Keiko slept.

  Yuichi sat wordless, motionless. However oppressed he might be, he had to do something soon to extricate himself. He took the sheets of paper piled helter-skelter on the table and ripped them to shreds. Then he crushed the torn fragments into a ball and dropped it in the sleeve of his white splash-pattern robe. He waited for his mother’s response. She, however, sat with her elbows on the table, not moving, supporting her downcast head with her fingers. It was the son who finally broke the silence.

  “You don’t understand, Mother. If you want to believe all of this letter, all right, but—” *

&nbs
p; The widow Minami almost shouted: “What’s going to happen to Yasuko?”

  “Yasuko? I love Yasuko.”

  “But aren’t you one who hates women? All you can love are ill-bred boys and rich old and middle-aged men!” The son was amazed at the complete lack of tenderness in his mother. Truthfully, his mother’s fury was directed at her son’s blood ties, of which, indeed, half were her own. Thus she could control her tears.

  Yuichi thought: Wasn’t it my mother who rushed me into marriage with Yasuko? It’s pretty rotten that she has to blame it all on me.

  Sympathy with his mother, so weakened by illness, kept him from giving voice to that retort. He said in a clear, clipped tone: “Indeed I love Yasuko. Can’t that be taken as evidence that I like women?”

  His mother, who was not even listening to his plea, answered in a way that seemed almost a threat: “At any rate, I must see Kawada and—”

  “Please—don’t act so gauche. He would think you’re trying to blackmail him.” The son’s words had their effect. The poor woman muttered something incomprehensible and left Yuichi sitting alone.

  Yuichi sat alone at the breakfast table. In front of him was a clean tablecloth somewhat dotted with bread crumbs. There was the garden filled with the light of the sun coming through the trees and the voices of cicadas. Only the crumpled ball of paper weighing down his sleeve made it other than a clear, uneventful day. Yuichi lit a cigarette. He pushed back the sleeves of his heavily starched bathrobe and folded his bare arms. Whenever he looked at his own young, bare arms, he felt an exaggerated pride in his well-being. He felt pain in each breath, as if a solid board were pressing against his chest. His heartbeat was faster than usual. He couldn’t tell, however, whether this chest pain was not one of anticipated joy. There was a certain cheer in his discomfort. He smoked sparingly at what remained of his cigarette.

  He thought: At least now I’m certainly not bored.

  Yuichi searched for his wife. Yasuko was on the second floor. He could hear the mellow sound of the music box.

  In her room, Keiko lay in her mosquito netting. Her eyes were happily open and directed toward the music box. Yasuko looked up at Yuichi and smiled, but it was an unnatural smile and did nothing to mollify her husband. Yuichi’s heart had been open as he mounted the stairs, but when he saw this smile it closed again.

  After a long silence, Yasuko said: “About that letter— I don’t think anything of it.” Then she added clumsily: “I only feel sorry for you.”

  These words of sympathy were spoken in the gentlest tone; so much the more deeply did they wound the young man. What he had expected from his wife was not sympathy so much as frank disdain. His wounded pride could not help scheming a reasonless revenge against her.

  Yuichi needed help. He thought of Shunsuke. But when he realized that Shunsuke was one of those to blame for this turn of events, his hatred rejected the name. He saw on the table the letter from Kyoto that he had read two or three days earlier. She is the only one who can save me, Yuichi thought. He decided to send her a telegram.

  Outside, the street shone with a fiendish glare. Yuichi had come out by way of the back door. At the front gate he saw someone who seemed hesitant about entering.

  At first the visitor walked past the gate. Then he went back. It was as if he were waiting for someone in the house to emerge. When the stranger turned toward him, Yuichi was shocked to recognize the face of Minoru. They ran to each other and shook hands.

  “A letter came, didn’t it? An awful letter. I found out that my old man sent it. I was so sorry about it I cleared out of the house. The old man put a detective on our trail. He found out all about us.”

  Yuichi was not surprised. “I thought as much,” he said.

  “There’s something I want to talk over with you, Yuchan.”

  “Not here. There’s a little park nearby. Let’s go there.”

  Affecting the calmness of an older person, Yuichi took the boy’s arm and guided him. Talking rapidly of the difficulties into which they had just been plunged, they hastened their steps.

  The neighboring N- Park had been a part of the grounds of the estate of Prince N-. Twenty years be fore, the prince’s family had broken up and sold his vast land holdings, donating a portion of the slope surrounding the pond to the borough for use as a park.

  The view of the pond, covered with water lilies at the peak of bloom, was lovely. But for two or three children chasing cicadas, the park at summer noon was empty. The two men sat down on the slope facing the pond, in the shade of a pine tree. The grassy incline, which had not had any care for a long time, was littered with scraps of paper and orange peel. Scraps of newspaper clung to the shrubbery at the water’s edge. After the sun went down, the little park would be crowded with people seeking the cool air.

  “What did you want to talk about?” asked Yuichi.

  “When this business happened, I decided I couldn’t stay in my old man’s house any more. I’m going to leave home. Yuchan, will you come with me?”

  “With you?” Yuichi hesitated.

  “Are you concerned about money? Don’t worry about that. Look how much I have.”

  His face serious, his mouth slightly open, the boy unbuttoned the back pocket of his trousers. He withdrew a carefully folded roll of bills.

  “Keep it for me,” he said, handing it to Yuichi. “Heavy, isn’t it? It’s a hundred thousand yen.”

  “Where’d you get this money?”

  “I broke open the old man’s safe and cleaned it of cash.”

  Yuichi looked at the pitiful, the niggardly result of one month of dreaming with this boy of adventure. They had turned away from society and dreamed of a youth of daring deeds, exploration, heroic evil, of the brotherly love of comrades-in-arms who face death on the morrow, of sentimental exploits they knew would end in disaster, and of all manner of youthful tragedy. They knew that they had been cut out for nothing but tragedy, that a cruel lynching by a secret society lay in store for them, or the death of Adonis slain by a wild boar, or a dungeon into which evil men had trapped them and where the water rose moment by moment to drown them, or ritualistic ordeals in cave kingdoms in which there was no chance of survival, or the end of the world, or fabulous opportunities to rescue hundreds of their fellows by sacrificing their lives, or glory filled with horrendous perils. Indeed, these were the only catastrophes meant for youth. If such opportunities for catastrophe are allowed to pass, youth must die. What is the death of the body, after all, compared with the unbearable death of youth?

  Like many other youths—Why? Because living the life of youth is a never-ending, terrible death!—they spent their youths dreaming of ever new annihilations.

  The outcome of these reveries, however, was now before Yuichi’s eyes. It was nothing more than an urban incident; it had no hint of glory, nor of the smell of death. This drab incident, appropriate to a ditch rat, might perhaps come out in the newspapers—an item about the size of a sugar cube.

  This boy’s dreams have the tranquillity of a woman’s, was Yuichi’s disheartening thought. We’re supposed to elope with stolen money and live somewhere, just the two of us. Ah! If only he had had the courage to kill his old man, then I would fall down on my knees before the boy!

  Yuichi called forth his other self, the young head of a family. He quickly decided the attitude he should assume. Compared with the other, pitiful outcome, the alternative of hypocrisy seemed far preferable.

  “Suppose I hold on to this,” said Yuichi, putting the roll of bills in his inside pocket.

  Innocent trust shone in the boy’s eyes, so like a rabbit’s, and he answered, “All right.”

  “I’ve got a little business at the post office. Would you like to come along?”

  “Wherever you go . . . I’ve entrusted my body to you too.”

  “You sure have,” Yuichi said, as if to reassure himself.

  At the post office he sent a telegram to Mrs. Kaburagi that read as if it had been sent by a fretful ch
ild: “Need you. Come right away.” Then he called a cab and told Minoru to get in.

  “Where are we going?” asked Minoru.

  Yuichi told the driver the destination in a low voice. Minoru, who hadn’t heard, assumed they were going to some fine hotel. Then, seeing the cab approaching Kanda, the boy thrashed about like a sheep brought back to the fold.

  “Leave things to me,” said Yuichi; “I won’t do anything wrong.”

  The boy quickly seized upon something in Yuichi’s resolute tone and smiled. This hero was now going to show his strength and revenge himself, the boy thought. When the boy imagined the face of his foster father, ugly in death, his body trembled with joy. Minoru dreamed that Yuichi dreamed about him just as he dreamed about Yuichi. Yuichi had a knife. He would impassively cut the old man’s jugular vein. As Minoru thought about the beauty of the killer in that moment, Yuichi’s profile became in the boy’s eyes something that possessed all the perfection of a god.

  The cab stopped in front of the coffee shop. Yuichi got out. Minoru followed. On this school street at noon in midsummer there were few passers-by. As the two crossed the street, the sun at the zenith barely made a shadow. Minoru triumphantly lifted his eyes toward the surrounding second- and third-floor windows and scanned them. The people who were looking unconcernedly down on the street were certainly not dreaming that these youths were on their way to kill a man. Great deeds always are carried out at just such obvious times as this.

  The shop was quiet inside. To eyes accustomed to the light outside, it was terribly dark. When he saw the two entering, Fukujiro, who had been sitting by the cash register, suddenly stood up.

  “Where did you go off to?” he demanded of Minoru, as if about to grab him.