No joke. You'll need to have the "mule-ucs" module installed. A quick Google search turns up plenty of sources.
Oh, I have Emacs 21.3.50. Mule is gone.
You'll also need to have the appropriate fonts installed, of course.
You may need to set your $LANG environment variable to a suitable value
(I use "en_US.UTF-8").
I'm on Mac OS X. The fonts I use show most Unicode characters correctly when I use them in TextEdit...
Thanks,
David