Forbidden Colors Read online

  Forbidden Colors

  A NOVEL OF SEXUAL ANGUISH

  YUKIO MISHIMA

  “An invitation to the world of homosexuality as presented by Japan’s finest, undoubtedly one of the world’s finest, authors.’’

  BEST SELLERS

  "One of the outstanding young writers of the world.”

  The New York Times

  “The world of the homosexual, the blackmailer, the corrupt and corrupted. .. . The world of male lovers in all ages and walks of life, a lavish, swinging party, clubby restaurants, specialty hotels, shabby rooms and niches for rendezvous, are effectively portrayed with considerable psychological insight . . .”

  Publishers’ Weekly

  YUKIO MISHIMA

  Translated from the Japanese by

  ALFRED H. MARKS

  AVON

  PUBLISHERS OF

  DISCUS • CAMELOT • BARD

  AVON BOOKS

  A division of

  The Hearst Corporation

  959 Eighth Avenue

  New York, New York 10019

  Copyright © 1968 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

  Published by arrangement with Alfred Knopf, Inc.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 67-18594.

  Originally published in Japanese as Kinjiki by Shinchoosha Publishing Company,

  Copyright 1951, 1953 by Yukio Mishima.

  All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 501 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022.

  First Avon Printing, March 1970

  AVON TRADEMARK REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES, REGISTERED TRADEMARK—

  MARCA REGISTRADA, HECHO EN CHICAGO, U.S.A.

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  Chapter 1 THE BEGINNING

  YASUKO HAD GROWN accustomed to coming and blithely seating herself on Shunsuke’s lap as he rested in the rattan chair at the edge of the garden. This brought him great joy.

  It was the summer of 1950. Mornings Shunsuke received no visitors. If he felt like it, he would work. If he didn’t, he would write letters, or have his chair set out in the garden and stretch out in it with a book, or close his book on his lap and do nothing, or ring a bell and have a maid bring him tea, or if for some reason he had not had enough sleep the night before, he would pull his blanket up to his chin and drop off for a little while.

  Although he was five years past sixty, he had no diversions, nothing worthy of being called a hobby. In fact, he didn’t believe in them. He was entirely deficient in the quality so important to a hobby: appreciation of the concrete relationships that tied him fast to other men. This acute deficiency in objectivity, accompanied by clumsy, convulsive stabs at establishing a relationship between his inner world and that which lay outside it, imparted a certain freshness and naivete even to the works of his later years, but they took their toll. They took the strength from the very vitals of his fiction: the dramatic incidents, born of the collision of human wills; the humorous portrayals; the urge to limn human character—all nurtured by the rivalry between the human being and his world. On this score, two or three of the crustier critics still hesitated to acclaim him a great writer.

  Shunsuke’s right knee was plagued by seizures of neuralgia. Before each onset he would feel a dim pain deep inside it. It was doubtful that his aging, brittle kneecaps could stand the warm weight of a young woman upon them for very long. As the pain increased, however, an expression of joy slyly stole across his features.

  Finally he said, “My knee hurts, Yasuko. Let me move my leg over like this, and you sit there; so.”

  Yasuko opened her eyes wide and looked at Shunsuke with concern. He laughed: Yasuko loathed him.

  The old novelist understood this loathing. He stood up and grasped Yasuko by the shoulders. Then he took her chin in his hand, tipped it back, and kissed her on the lips. Then, his duty to her thus hurriedly completed, he felt a sudden flash of pain in his right knee and slumped back in his chair. When he was finally able to lift up his face and look around him, Yasuko had disappeared.

  A week afterward, he had still not heard from Yasuko. While taking a walk one day, he dropped by her house. She had gone with two or three school friends to a hot-springs resort on the southern coast of the Izu Peninsula. After jotting down the name of the resort in his memo book, he returned home and began making preparations for a trip. There was a stack of proofs urgently calling for his attention, but 'he took care of them for the time being by saying that he suddenly felt the need to take a midsummer vacation.

  Concerned about the heat, he took an early morning train. Nevertheless, the back of his white suit was soon soaked with perspiration. He took a sip of the hot tea in his thermos bottle. Then he put his slender hand, dry as bamboo, into his pocket and took out some of the advertising brochures for his next collected works, given him by one of the people at his publisher’s.

  This new collection of The Works of Shunsuke Hinoki would be his third. The first one was assembled when he was forty-five.

  At that point in time, I recall, he thought to himself, that in spite of the great accumulation of my works acclaimed by the world as the epitome of stability and unity and, in a sense, having reached the pinnacle, as many predicted, I was quite given over to this foolishness. Foolishness? Nonsense. Foolishness could never be connected with my works, with my soul, with my thinking. My works are certainly not foolishness. (Italics were often a sign that he was speaking ironically.) Not only that, I was above using thought in mitigation of my foolishness. In order to maintain the purity of my thinking, I kept free from my foolish activities enough spirit to allow my thoughts to form. Sex was, however, not the only motivating force. My foolishness had nothing to do with sex or spirit. My foolishness lay in a wild ability to handle abstractions, which threatened to make me misanthropic. It still threatens, even now in my sixty-sixth year.

  With a sad smile on his lips, he studied the picture of himself on the cover of the prospectus he held in his hand.

  It was a picture of an ugly old man. That was the only way to put it. However, it was not difficult to see in it certain dim and delicate traces of the spiritual beauty so acclaimed by the world. The broad forehead; the clipped, narrow cheeks; the broad, hungry lips; the willful chin: in every feature the traces of long, hard work and of spirit lay open to the light. His face, however, was not so much molded by spirit as riddled with it. It was a face in which an excess of soul was laid bare, causing the onlooker to shrink from looking at it directly, as if it talked too openly of private things. In its ugliness his face was a corpse emaciated of spirit, no longer possessing the power to retain its privacy.

  It was their doing. Shunsuke’s features were termed beautiful by that admirable group which, having been poisoned by the intellectual hedonism of the times, having replaced concern for humanity with individualism, having extirpated universality from the sense of beauty, had larcenously and violently tom beauty from the arms of ethics.

  Be that as it may, on the back of the prospectus that boldly bore the features of an ugly old man, rows of testimonials by numerous prominent men presented a strange contrast to what was on the front. These great men of intellect, this flock of bald parrots prepared to sing a loud song wherever and as directed, were singing of the uncanny beauty of the works of Shunsuke.

  One renowned critic, for example, a well-known Hinoki scholar, summarized the entire twenty volumes of the works as follows:

  This great shower of works cascading into our hearts was written in sincerity and finished in mistrust.

  Mr. Hinoki states that if he didn’t have that instinct of mistrust in his works he would have thrown them away as soon as written
. Was ever such a row of corpses laid before the eyes of the public?

  In Shunsuke Hinoki’s works, the unexpected, instability, the unlucky, misfortune, the unseemly, impropriety—all the minus quantities of beauty—are depicted. If a certain historical period is to be used as background, without fail a decadent period is chosen.

  If a love story is needed for subject matter, without fail the emphasis is placed on the hopelessness and the tedium of it. In his hands the healthy, flourishing form is a passionate loneliness in the human mind exploding with the intensity of an epidemic raging in a tropical city. All the fierce hatreds, the jealousies, the enmities, the passions of humankind, he does not seem to be concerned with. Not only that, he finds much more to write about, much more living, essential value, in a single capillary of warmth in the corpse of the passions than in a living period of human feeling.

  In the midst of coldness comes a clever shudder of feeling. In the midst of immorality appears an almost ferocious morality. In the midst of coldness, a heroic unrest makes itself felt. What masterfully wrought style must this be to intrude into the purlieus of paradox? It is a rococo style, one out of the old Heian times. It is a human style in the real sense of the word. It is a clothed style for the sake of clothing.

  It is the diametrical opposite of a bare style. It is filled with lovely tucks and pleats, like those in the sculptures of the Fates in the gable of the Parthenon, or those in the clothing of the Nike by Paeonius. Flowing pleats, flying pleats, not simply those that follow the motions of the body and so subordinate themselves to its lines. These are pleats that flow of themselves, that of themselves fly to heaven ...

  A smile of irritation flickered about Shunsuke’s mouth as he read. Then he muttered, “I don’t get it at all. He missed the boat completely. It’s a fabricated, flowery eulogy; that’s all it is. After twenty years, he turns out tripe like this.”

  He turned to look out of the broad window of the second-class coach. The sea was in view, and a fishing boat, its sail spread, was heading for the open water. The white canvas, its womb not quite filled with wind, clung to the mast, languidly flirted with it. At that instant a sliver of light glinted from the base of the mast; then the train sliced into a grove of red pines, their trunks bright in the morning sun of summer; then it entered a tunnel.

  Well, Shunsuke thought, I wouldn’t be surprised if that glimmer of light came from a mirror. There must be a fisherwoman aboard that boat who’s in the middle of making herself pretty. In her sunburnt hand, stronger than a man’s, she is probably sending off sidelong signals toward the passengers of each passing train, in order to retail her secrets. In Shunsuke’s poetic fancy the face of the fisher-woman changed to that of Yasuko. The aging writer shook his thin, sweaty frame.

  All the fierce hatreds, the jealousies, the enmities, the passions of humankind he does not seem to be concerned with.

  Lies! Lies! Lies!

  The process in which a writer is compelled to counterfeit his true feelings is exactly the opposite of that in which the man of society is compelled to counterfeit his. The artist disguises in order to reveal; the man of society disguises in order to conceal.

  Another result of Shunsuke’s reticence was the attack on his lack of intellectuality by the people who sought to bring about the unity of the arts and the social sciences. It stood to reason that he would have no part of the silly display of philosophy in the epilogue of a work, much like a burlesque girl pulling up her skirt and exposing her thighs. Just the same, there was something in the thinking of Shunsuke, in his attitude toward art and life, that persistently invited sterility.

  What we call thought is not born before the fact but after the fact. It enters as the defense attorney of an action born of accident and impulse. As-defense attorney it gives meaning and theory to that action; necessity is substituted for chance, will for impulse. Thinking cannot heal the wounds of a blind man who has walked into a lamppost, but it can show that the lamppost and not the blindness was at fault. To one action after another theory after the fact is applied until theory becomes the system. The agent of actions becomes nothing more than the probabilities within all actions. That’s what threw the scrap of paper in the street. It thought and threw the scrap of paper in the street. In this way he who possesses the power of thinking, seeking to extend that power beyond all limits, becomes himself the prisoner of thought.

  Shunsuke drew a sharp line between thought and foolishness. As a result of this he blamed his foolishness without extenuation. The ghost of his foolishness, rigidly excluded from his works, nightly stalked his rest. Surely his three disastrous marriages might be glimpsed once or more in his works. In his youth that fellow Shunsuke’s life had been a succession of debacles, a chain of miscalculations and failures.

  He knew nothing of hatreds? A lie. Nothing of jealousy? A lie.

  In contrast to the serene resignation that floated within his works, the life of Shunsuke was filled with hatred, with jealousy. After the breakdown of his third marriage, after the clumsy resolutions of ten or so love affairs—the fact that this old artist, beset by an ineradicable detestation of womankind, had never once decked out his works with the blossom of that detestation was an achievement of immeasurable self-restraint, of immeasurable arrogance.

  The women who entered the pages of his humorous books appeared to women as well as men among his readers as annoyingly pure. One curious scholar of comparative literature placed his heroines alongside the ethereal heroines of Edgar Allan Poe, namely, Ligeia, Berenice, Morelia, and the Marquesa Aphrodite—more marble than flesh. Their easily wearying passions were like the transient light of the afternoon sun reflecting here and there off carved features. Shunsuke was afraid to endow his heroines with deep feeling.

  One good-humored critic pointed to Shunsuke and said that his position of eternal feminist was absolutely charming.

  His first wife had been a thief. In their two years of married life she cleverly stole and sold a winter overcoat, three pairs of shoes, material for two spring suits, and a Zeiss camera—just on a whim. When she went out, her neckband and her sash were studded with jewels. Shunsuke was, after all, a rich man.

  His second wife had been mad. Obsessed by the notion that her husband would kill her in her sleep she grew so weak from lack of rest that she became hysterical. One day Shunsuke returned home and was greeted by a strange odor. His wife stood at the door, barring the way, refusing to allow her husband to enter.

  “Let me in,” he said. “What’s that strange smell?”

  “No, you can’t come in,” she said. “I’m doing something very exciting.”

  “What?”

  “You’re always leaving me and going off somewhere, so I snatched the kimono off the back of your mistress, and I’m burning it. My, it feels good!”

  He pushed his way in, and saw pieces of charcoal smoldering all over the Persian rug. His wife walked back to the stove and, daintily holding back her long sleeve, in perfect composure, scooped out the burning charcoal and sprinkled it on the rug. In dismay, Shunsuke restrained her. With terrible strength, his wife struggled to free herself. Like a captive bird beating its wings to the full extent of its power she resisted. Her whole body, sinew and flesh, had gone rigid.

  His third wife had been with him until her death. This woman of great sexual need gave Shunsuke a taste of every variety of husbandly agony. He clearly remembered the first morning of that agony. s

  Shunsuke’s work always had to wait until after the act, but its pace had picked up enormously. About nine o’clock at night he and his wife would go to bed. After a while he would leave her and go up to his study on the second floor, work there until three or four in the morning, and then go to sleep again on the little bed in the study. He kept to this routine rigidly. From the previous night until about ten in the morning he never saw his wife.

  Late one summer night he felt a strange impulse to shock his wife out of her slumber. His strong desire to go on with his work, however, l
ed him to resist the impulse and the mischief it entailed. Until five o’clock that morning, in fact, as if to punish himself, he worked without letup.

  He had lost all desire to sleep. Surely his wife was still sleeping . . . Noiselessly he crept down the stairs. The bedroom door was open. His wife was nowhere to be seen.

  In that instant Shunsuke was struck with the feeling that this was what usually went on. That must be why I’ve been keeping myself to this schedule, he thought to himself. “I must have known it; I must have feared it.”

  He soon got himself under control. His wife must have thrown her black velvet robe over her nightgown, as usual, and gone to the bathroom. He waited. She didn’t return.

  Shunsuke walked uneasily down the hall toward the downstairs lavatory. Under the kitchen window, at the kitchen table, the black-robed form of his wife quietly rested, propped forward on its arms. It was not yet dawn. He could not tell whether the dim figure was sitting or kneeling. Shunsuke hid behind the thick damask curtains that led to the hall.

  As he did so he heard the squeal of the wooden gate twenty-five or thirty feet from the kitchen door. He heard a low, musical whistle. It was time for the milk delivery.

  From the yards nearby the dogs barked, one after another. The milkman wore sneakers. Over the stone walk wet with the night’s rain he bounded joyously, his body flushed from labor, his bare arms extending from his blue polo shirt and brushing the wet leaves of the eight-finger shrubs, the cold wet stones passing behind him. The clear note of his whistle bespoke the freshness of his young lips in the morning.

  She stood up and opened the kitchen door. In the gray night a black human shape could be seen. His teeth, white as he smiled, and his blue polo shirt showed faintly. The morning wind came in and shook the tassels of the curtain.

  “Thank you,” said Shunsuke’s wife.

  She took two bottles of milk. The sound of the bottles clinking together and the silvery clink of her ring against the glass reverberated softly.