Forbidden Colors by Yukio Mishima

Author:Yukio Mishima
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-12-11T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19 MY HELPMATE

YUICHI WAS EMBARRASSED about visiting the Kaburagi home. Nobutaka had to call and leave word many times before he finally complied one evening.

When, some days earlier, Nobutaka Kaburagi and Yuichi had come downstairs and failed to find Mrs. Kaburagi, Nobutaka was not greatly concerned. When a day passed and she had not returned, he began to worry. This was no ordinary absence. There was no doubt that she was concealing her whereabouts. What was more, there could be only one reason why she had disappeared.

On this evening the Nobutaka whom Yuichi saw was a different person. He was haggard; he needed a shave—a state Yuichi had never seen him in before. The cheeks that always had such good color were baggy and had lost their glow.

“Hasn’t she come back yet?” Yuichi said. He sat down on the arm of the sofa in the den and tapped the end of a cigarette against the back of his hand.

“That’s the way it looks. We were seen.”

This laughable solemnity was so unlike the usual Nobutaka that Yuichi agreed with him purely out of cruelty: “I suppose so.”

“That’s the way it looks. I can’t think of anything else.”

Actually, Yuichi had noticed that the latch was not in place, and had realized immediately what might have happened. His extreme embarrassment had come to be diluted after a few days by a sense of liberation. At the same time he fell into the coldly heroic state of feeling neither embarrassment for himself nor sympathy for Mrs. Kaburagi.

This was why Nobutaka seemed ridiculous in Yuichi’s eyes. He suffered pain and lost weight only because he had been “seen.”

“Have you notified the Missing Persons Bureau?”

“I don’t like to do that. It isn’t that I don’t have some idea.”

Yuichi observed that Nobutaka’s eyes were misty, and he marveled. Then Nobutaka said: “I hope she hasn’t done anything regrettable.”

These words, incongruously sentimental as they were, pierced Yuichi’s heart. There had never been one word to indicate so clearly the spiritual harmony between this strange couple. Only a heart forced to feel tremendous understanding of the love that his wife felt for Yuichi would be capable of such minute powers of the imagination. That same heart would have been wounded in the same degree by his wife’s spiritual unchastity. In the consciousness that none other than his own wife was in love with the person he himself loved, Nobutaka became a cuckold twice over; what is more, he tasted the pain of using his wife’s passion to whip up his own. The wounds of this heart Yuichi now saw for the first time.

This is how necessary Mrs. Kaburagi has been to Count Kaburagi, Yuichi thought. Perhaps it was beyond the youth’s powers of understanding. However, through these considerations, Yuichi momentarily arrived for the first time at a supremely tender feeling toward Nobutaka. Did the count see this ever so tender look in the eyes of the one he loved?

Nobutaka looked down. He was worn out, his confidence gone; his corpulent body, in a flashy dressing gown, was slumped in a chair.

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