Stained Blue: A Review of Mishima’s Forbidden Colors

We had arrived at the park entirely by accident, having sought to see the palace and failed, because our small blue permit had the wrong day marked. Instead of going back to the hotel, a Western-style hotel for tourists with a sushi restaurant and Zen garden that were too just-so, we wandered off and found the park. A plaque told us, in proud, bronze lettering, that this was the first Western-style park in Japan. Western, as in meant for citizens to stroll with babies on Sunday, not for a lord's private amusements or a temple's sacred rites.

We stepped over stones and shallow water to sit on a worn iron bench overlooking the small lake at the heart of the park, in central Tokyo. We took in the view: skyscrapers beyond the trees, a palace roof to the east, and elevated trains darting across the city.

In Western parks, we desire to wander, as equals, separate but together. There's a bourgeois spirit in the smooth lawns. And those lawns were here too; one was right before us, sloping gently down towards the water. The Western paths and English plaques could not hide, though, that the park was Japanese. Billowing domes of camphor trees, cloud-pruned black pines, and iris on the shore told the truth: that this very old, Western park was a Japanese animal, a lovingly tended old beast languid in the city center. Small ponds and tenderly laid-out stones, interspersed with statues and small displays, created ebbing nooks and track-back paths for little adventures on a walk. "Small" is not wholly accurate: there is a mammoth replica of the Liberty Bell, complete with its crack, nestled at the far end of the park beneath a red-brick pagoda. I suppose in my heart they're small, beneath the sky, and across the water. The turtles sunbathing on the rocks below seem bigger, even now, when I know that's not the case. The wayfaring spirit of the Western park is wholly unlike anything that existed in Japan before the Meiji Restoration.

The park, called Hibiya, feels like Lafayette Park in Washington, D.C. One can almost see ghosts of men and women in suits and flapper dresses and hear the rustle of paper parasols and maybe distant jazz. The park doesn't feel ancient, but old, like a great-grandmother's cupboard full of dusty Depression Glass, or a radio from 1932, sitting in an antique shop display. And like Lafayette, Hibiya was also once a popular spot for gay cruising, especially in the immediate aftermath of World War Two. As Mishima writes,

As a human banquet at midnight might become in the final act of a Shakespearean play a banquet for ghosts, the bench where lovers from the office casually sit and chat and enjoy the view becomes at night something that can be termed a "First-class Stage." The dark stone stairway which grade-school children on a hike find too steep and must run up so as not to fall behind has its name changed to "Runway for Men." The long road in back of the park has its name changed to "First Sight Road." All are night names. The police knew these names well as part of their jurisdiction which they neglected, since there were no laws by which they might crack down. In London and in Paris, of course, parks serve this purpose as a practical necessity, but it is a sign of some ironic charity that a public place like this, symbol of the principle of majority rule, should benefit such a small number of people. H—— Park has been used as a gathering place for men of this sort since the time of the last emperor, when a part of its area was a military drill field.

Seventy-five years ago Mishima must have prowled this park at night, looking for men, in search of a story. A story that Bronze Age Pervert told me to read.

 

The Story

In Forbidden Colors (禁色, Kinjiki, 1951; Part II published as 秘楽 or "Secret Pleasure," Higyō, 1953; translated by Alfred H. Marks, 1968), we follow the old author Shunsuké and young and handsome Yuichi on a journey to take revenge on women. Forbidden Colors has a reputation as a nasty, vicious novel.

Shunsuké is an old writer who has never truly felt, or truly thought, in his life, who has never lived, and whose affairs with women have been awful and desperate. Married thrice, he has been cuckolded and blackmailed. He has loved and been hurt by love. He has grown to hate women. In his literary career, he has sought to bring others low, to make them feel that love, thought, and feeling are not real. He nurses a burning, but patient, resentment against the world. In the novel, he is symbolically represented as a forest fire, always burning on the horizon, lapping at the edges of city life like a hungry dog.

One day, his latest lover, the alluring 19-year-old Yasuko, runs away from him and off to a resort. He chooses to chase her. He tracks her down to a beach, where he stumbles upon a beautiful young man, Yuichi, emerging from the blue water. Through troubled family business arrangements, Yuichi happens to be Yasuko's fiancé. He has wolf-like features, rosy cheeks, and soft-boyish lips. He captivates men and women. Not one flaw mars his face in a world where one beautiful feature can compensate for a face of flaws.

Shortly after their meeting, Shunsuké discovers Yuichi's engagement to Yasuko, and they spend an awkward evening at dinner. Late that night, escaping from a sexless, quiet bed, Yuichi comes to Shunsuké's room and confesses that he has no desire for women. He can only love boys (the Marks translation uses "boys" rather than "men"). Shunsuké is not shocked. He is thrilled. He sees in that moment a plan: to use Yuichi to take vengeance upon women. Shunsuké is ugly, even unlovable by women; Yuichi is irresistible to women, though he could never love them. He is an exquisite weapon. Shunsuké aims to use Yuichi's beauty to lure his own ex-lovers into Yuichi's arms, and to have Yuichi then deny them, to torture them with love always on the edge of birth.

Shunsuké lends Yuichi money for his family debts, securing Yuichi's service as his weapon of sexual vengeance. He sets Yuichi on the people who have hurt him the most recently, while encouraging Yuichi to marry Yasuko, regardless of his homosexuality. After all, as Shunsuké says, marriage is naturally loveless, even sexless—so to marry without love is rather normal. Assured by Shunsuké, who is quickly becoming a mentor, Yuichi marries Yasuko and begins to seduce his targets: the refined Mrs. Kaburagi and her accomplice in Shunsuké's blackmail, Count Kaburagi, and the flighty, thoughtless Kyoko.

Forbidden Colors is a tightly written drama rendered in a painterly, fierce hand. The characters are complex and human, and the novel has much more to say across its 400 pages. While much of the novel has to do with homosexuality, there is not one graphic moment. The novel is not intent on scandal.

Spoilers follow.

Love and Colors

Though Yuichi is sexually attracted to men, he comes to love—neither fully platonically nor romantically—both Mrs. Kaburagi and his wife, Yasuko. This feeling first surfaces after Mrs. Kaburagi discovers her husband and Yuichi in an intimate moment in her own home. She is shocked to realize the Count, like Yuichi, is a homosexual. Upon seeing this, she flees to Kyoto. In Kyoto, she sends Yuichi a letter promising him freedom with her. Yuichi, suffering under the triple life of daytime family man, nighttime homosexual, and sometimes seducer, for a moment desires to escape with her. Shunsuké convinces him to stay, insisting that Yuichi already knows the fleeting nature of these feelings in the face of his true desires. He stays.

Yasuko awakens with morning sickness, and soon after, they discover she is pregnant. Yuichi initially considers an abortion, to free Yasuko from him, knowing they will be bound together forever by a child. Shunsuké talks him out of this plan, insisting to him that many children have been born out of these sorts of sexless, loveless marriages. The fire roars on the edge of the forest.

At the goading of Shunsuké, Yuichi stays in the room through Yasuko’s delivery. Upon seeing his child born, a little girl named Keiko, he accepts that some part of him does love Yasuko. He decides to be bound to Yasuko, as Yasuko has already decided to be bound to him. Their marriage cannot be called a fraud, as it has genuine moments of tenderness and romantic beauty. As the novel progresses, we enjoy Yuichi’s increasingly dramatic attempts to conceal his sexual desires, which confirm his deep care for Yasuko and her sensibilities. He cares enough to lie and maintain the social pretense of heterosexual happiness. He even enlists Mrs. Kaburagi in his pretense of heterosexual attraction, in an effort to comfort Yasuko and his aging mother after a particularly awful moment of exposure. Yasuko learns, as Yuichi already knows, that marriage can be loveless. She has yet to learn that this doesn’t mean one must live unhappily.

In the end, Yuichi triumphs. He arrives at Shunsuké's home, aiming to return the money. Over a slow evening of chess and drinking and chatting about literature, Shunsuké lectures Yuichi on the artistic meaning of death, which he considers the only way to complete the work of art he has made of life. He then disappears into another room, and when Yuichi goes in search of him, he finds Shunsuké dead, next to a note indicating that Yuichi should look in his desk. There, Yuichi finds ten million yen. Shunsuké's suicide deprives Yuichi of total victory, preserving Shunsuké's artistic integrity before what would have been defeat. Make of this what you will in light of Mishima's death.

Despite Yuichi's failure to fully throw off Shunsuké's yoke, his victory, the victory of beauty, remains. For Shunsuké did not realize that Yuichi could find freedom, happiness, and love that Shunsuké could never find. Shunsuké's use of Yuichi as a weapon of vengeance affirms less that there is no love in the world than that Shunsuké was simply incapable of love. His revenge against Kyoko—completed in the most vicious way—is always undercut by his inability to take vengeance upon Mrs. Kaburagi, who wins herself a true place in Yuichi's heart, but never wins his body. She learns that to possess the former, she must renounce the latter. This is another dark mirror held up to Shunsuké, who saw only her body and never her soul. While a loveless, sexless marriage may sound cruel, Mishima insists that Mrs. Kaburagi and the Count become more comfortable with each other and enjoy more fully the things they share love for, like Yuichi.

Translated as "Forbidden Colors," the Japanese title, 禁色 or kinjiki, refers to the eighth-century system of the Ritsuryō code: colors of dress were restricted to specific courtly and royal ranks. The second character, 色, also refers to erotic love. Shunsuké is forbidden beauty, so he uses Yuichi as his puppet, yet grows to desire him. In turn, Yuichi cannot claim conventional love, yet wears Yasuko—and Mrs. Kaburagi—as wife and lover.

This is the intended meaning, but if we read the translation through a more Western lens, Mishima's "forbidden colors" are the human feelings Shunsuké writes with, and the ones he lives his revenge with through Yuichi. We are forbidden to paint with real life and confined to ink on page and paint on canvas: to write with forbidden colors, with real feeling, to manipulate for the sake of art (even vengeance as art) is forbidden. Shunsuké's depravity is merely what others already do. In the novel, Mishima explores how our constant manipulation of each other is the stuff of marriage, society, culture, and love.

Mishima is just as attuned to the society that flows from the Western park as he is to courtly history. In fact, Mishima is very aware that despite the egalitarian landscaping of the Western park, stratification always returns at night. Just as high society may aspire to bourgeois egalitarianism, beauty always returns to dominate. Not one billionaire would enter a room and declare himself better than all others there; but a beautiful person enters, and everyone knows. The political power of beauty is that it always reveals that inequality is fundamental to nature, as it is to culture.

On Living Well

Beautiful things always intimidate me, Shunsuké thought. More than that, sometimes they drag me down. How can that be? Is it a superstition that beauty elevates mankind?

On a deeper reading, a great concern of the novel, less a secondary theme than an insistent argument, is that love and marriage; beauty and youth, or beauty and being uplifted, or beauty and originality; sex and romance; man and woman; art and life are wholly disconnected. Convention dictates, for example, that marriage is loving and that men love women; Mishima aims to show that these are independent things, like colors on an artist's refreshed palette, unmixed without the brushstrokes of life.

The two strolled about for a time, side by side through the crowds. "You don't like youth, do you?" Yuichi came out with this suddenly. They were words Shunsuké had not anticipated. "What do you mean?" he said, affronted. "If I don't like youth, how did I ever beat my old bones into coming down here?" "Just the same, you don't like youth." Yuichi said it again with finality. "Youth that is not beautiful. 'Beautiful youth' is an annoying twist of phrase. My youth was ugly. That's something you can't imagine. I spent my youth wishing to be born again."

Though they may mix—men may love women, as Yuichi comes to love Yasuko and Mrs. Kaburagi—this love isn’t assured by social convention, but is hard-won, and never so simply given. This idea is initially cruelly explained by Shunsuké, who sees in the separateness of these things their absence (insisting to Yuichi that a loveless, sexless marriage is simply the way of things). Yuichi, who becomes an adept painter of these colors under Shunsuké's tutelage, comes to far outdo his master and find in a loveless, sexless marriage: love; and in his absence of loving women, love for women. He succeeds where Shunsuké fails because, whereas Shunsuké demands women's bodies, Yuichi is given their souls with the barest asking. He is Shunsuké's full mirror: beautiful in body and soul, as Shunsuké is ugly in both soul and body. While Shunsuké sought to weaponize Yuichi's body against women, it is his soul that cannot but be a balm to them. He gives his wife a child and a safe home; his mother health; and his faux-lover, Mrs. Kaburagi, peace with her husband and his companionship.

Mishima's lesson to the reader is that living an artful life doesn't necessitate living a cruel one. When we think of an artful life, we may think of a person who coldly does as they desire, rejecting closeness and trust for purity, clinging to beauty at the expense of love, but in Forbidden Colors Mishima insists that the artful life is the opposite. An artful life is one in which convention becomes a tool, rather than a restriction to be studiously obeyed or wholly ignored. In the separateness of such fundamental things as love and sex, men and women, marriage and happiness, there is opportunity for a triumphant, creative life. Mishima’s desire is that we paint with these colors, more honestly, more freely, to live in love with them as they are, in their full embrace, even if this comes at the absurd cost of a sexless love or loveless sex.

Mishima's Forbidden Colors is often considered a cruel, vicious work; I found the novel tender and loving. My reading is thus contrarian. The novel is considered cruel because it is unsparingly honest. While Shunsuké's insistence that marriage is loveless is rather extreme, many marriages are! I have seen more loveless marriages than loving; and those which are loving nest cruelty like straw for duck eggs. Mishima is giving you the freedom to live with that fact, rather than run from it. In the end, Yasuko no longer loves Yuichi; Yuichi has bound women to him; Yuichi's choice is to shine his shoes; yet there is still love. If evoked through dark ritual, if half-honest and given unwillingly, if burdened and hard-won, there are babies laughing! There is still a marriage. There is more life. Though the novel's reputation is as a critical, nasty work, I found it rather tame. The human reading of the novel is that Mishima offers us, through unsparing depiction, the ability to live freer and more beautiful lives if we accept that our conventions are courtly and contrived, rather than absolute and unforgiving. He is not inviting readers to take vengeance upon women, but to cease avenging themselves: to live well in one's station; or to rise above, by virtue of unconquerable beauty. Both are superior to living poorly, or living low, when one could live better.

fin

At night, around the corner, the stepping stones of Hibiya Park may be used for shocking purposes, but here, on the warm iron bench, hand in hand with my lover, I can feel the sun, and hear nothing more disturbing than a crow rooting through fallen leaves. I laugh and giggle at the old men, already starting to arrive, looking at each other furtively, perched on the edge of eagerness. Risking glances at young men waiting in line around the hedge, they begin to collect next to the tennis court... As it passes to twilight, I realize we're there together. We'll leave soon for the pub; we'll be playing our role in this charade, as well. The role of passers-by, so vital for the mischievous allure of shadows, which stretch their hands out, entreating salarymen to journey down First Sight Road—which I suspect is just past the Liberty Bell. The turtles are coaxed there too, by hot rocks; as I am by accident, and the sun; and they are, by sex. In the Western park, all are welcome, so long as laziness and desire are all you ask. I yearn to return to the park at midnight, belly-warmed with white beer, to watch and listen. Past the maple, I bet I'd hear a sound. But I won't linger: I will go back to my hotel. That's my duty, my sacred obligation, to the brothers in the bush, for whom life is a string of secrets, but for this. They would do the same for me.

There's a pub there, with rare beer. Go if you ever can.