“Shunsuk’ entered the study and looked for something on the shelf of original works in French literature, which was up fairly high. He soon found the book he was looking for. It was a special edition with rice-paper pages of Musa Paidica in French translation. Musa Paidica is a collection of poems by the Roman poet Straton, of the time of Hadrian. He followed in the steps of the Emperor Hadrian, who loved Antinous, and he wrote poems only about beautiful boys:

Let the cheek be fair
Or dipped in honey shades,
Of flaxen hue the hair
Or black with every grace;
Let the eyes be brown
Or let me disappear
Into those flashing pools
Of deepest black.

He of the honey-colored skin, the black hair, and the jet-black eyes must have been born in Asia Minor, as was the famous Eastern slave Antinous. The ideal youthful beauty dreamed of by second-century Romans was Asian in nature.”

—Yukio Mishima, Forbidden Colors, 1953. Translated from the Japanese by Alfred H. Marks, 1968.