The Temple Of The Golden Pavilion (1995) - Plot & Excerpts
This book made me think of a term I learned in a psychology class called eidetic memory; a short look over at wikipedia will give a bit of a misleading definition. Eidetic memory, at least in the form that I learned it, is the short-term, instantaneous memory of visual images that, under certain theories, is stored for a very brief period of time before transferring into long term memory store. The effects of eidetic memory can be shown in a number of ways, but most famous is the optical illusion of staring at an amorphous image for 30 seconds and looking away to see the image of jesus imprinted on the lens of your eyesight. Other examples include an american flag, pictures of presidents, etc. All that it takes is staring at the image for an extended period of time and the picture will superimpose itself onto the wall, the ground or whatever it is that you may be looking at. The length of the image's decay changes from person to person according to the acuteness of his or her's eidetic memory.* Who is this Japanese guy? All the names look the same.Yukio Mishima was a prolific author that began writing when he was only 12 and wrote throughout his school education. He was a rampant consumer of fiction, works not just from his home country but the United States as well. As his writing developed, he became so admired by his teachers and mentors that his stories spread quickly throughout the japanese literary scene. He became a prominent figure at a very young age. He is considered a literary heavy-weight of japanese fiction and cast a shadow over his many successors. I would liken his pervasiveness to that of Hemingway or maybe Fitzgerald. This guy was a big deal. So much so that the author, Haruki Murakami, in his early career, resented him because he was revered so much in japan and abroad. So how's the writing?Well, Mishima began his writing career with saka which is the japanese form of poetry. His background in poetry becomes obvious within the first couple pages. I would love to learn about Mishima's style as it exists in japanese. The translator must have done some considerable work to render it in an english style that still mimicked the original while preserving the plot. Or maybe the work is completely different and I'm drawing false assumptions about it. Either way, the prose is a delight. As translated, it is a bit austere and old-fashioned, think 19th century british novels, but there was at least one line per page that excited and delighted me. I think that the main reason that it is so affecting is because he cherry picks the perfect minutiae and renders them minimal without sacrificing any visuals or content. There is a moment where a crowd of onlookers gather to witness an execution. Notice the attention to small details here:"We were observing the scene from the far end of a rice field. The number of spectators gradually increased and their shoulders touched each other silently in the night. Above our heads hung the moon as small as if it had been squeezed"(14).The lone detail of touching shoulders, is enough to conjure the image of a whole crowd bustling into a small area and cramming into one another but Mishima chooses not to lavish the book with unnecessary description. Instead he lays back and gives you just as much as you need. As far as the descriptions are concerned, Mishima's poetic and minimal sensibility shines throughout. He showcases Japan's Kyoto as beautiful, almost idyllic and idealized, but I would say that the lushness of the scenery is beautiful enough to make one want to visit the place. Where the book does not employ restraint however, is within the narrators interior monologue. There is a great deal of loquacious rambling and non-stop ranting from the mind of a severely neurotic individual. Mizoguchi, begins his slow descent into madness from page one and the march doesn't end until the apotheosis of the last couple pages. Wait, wait wait. What's this book even about?This is a first person story about a young man becoming a priest in the famous temple of the golden pavilion. As revealed throughout the story, you find out that his father was a priest before him, and on down the family. Mizoguchi is faced with continuing pressure from his peers, his mother and the legacy of his dead father to become a great priest. As the story moves along, you begin to find out what a damaged and outcasted kid he really is. He has a severe stutter that prevents him from most social interaction. Coupled with that, he has a great deal of social anxiety and spends a good portion of this book alone, wandering the streets of Kyoto, visitng brothels or catching his Superior living a life of luxury outside the circumscribed world of the temple. He has a lucrative and restrained relationship with his mentor, the Superior. Repeatedly, the mentor shows Mizoguchi the Buddhist virtue of mercy, despite all the havoc he wreaks on the temple and it's students.The entire book has a continuous momentum that propels it toward the end, where Mizoguchi is determined to enact a terrible deed on the temple and its people. Without spoiling anything, the conclusion, his sociopathic main objective, is not just portent of a disturbed mind, but is also a crucial element of the tragedy in the book. Mishima does very well to lead you down the path of calculated and perverse reasoning inside the mind of the main character, so when you reach the end, you don't approve of him but you feel for him nonetheless. Mishima has his own Humbert Humbert in this novel and it makes for a wrenching and powerful story. So why only four stars?This is a great book that I highly recommend to everyone. However, there are a few things that didn't sit right with me. First of all, there is always a culture barrier when reading books about different areas of the world. I am completely cognizant of my own western bias and attitudes, but there were many things that put me off. The general attitudes and sentiments conveyed by the characters and the authors seemed odd and backwards. But this is a case of me and not the book. Secondly, a major motif is the reoccurrence of images in the mind of the main character. There are many events that happen within the first 30 pages that get called back to over and over again throughout the novel. And these are not just specific events, they are specific images that are referenced and described ad nauseam. These images are implanted into Mizoguchi and literally come to cover up parts of his life later on. While this was thought-provoking and interesting in the beginning, it lost its effectiveness after a while, until it just became an annoyance. Putting all that aside, this is a book definitely worth reading. Mishima has quite the fanbase and for very good reasons.
On July 1st, 1950, Kinkakuji was burned down by a young monk named Hayashi Yōken. He was imprisoned, but later released due to mental illness, and then died of tuberculosis before his sentence would have been up. To this day, it's not entirely clear why he did it, other than his own comment on it:Although I had planned it from the time I made the purchase [of sleeping medicine], even now I do not believe that I have done anything wrong. It is said that a national treasure has been burned, but that seems more or less meaningless.Well, that's not entirely all--if you want historical background on the incident, I found a link to a book called Terrorism for Self-Glorification: the Herostratos Syndrome that goes into detail on it, including interviews with Hayashi and a mention that Mishima went to visit Hayashi in prison. But I didn't read a true-to-life book about the historical incident, I read Mishima's novelization of it, so that's the end of the history lesson.Though if I may editorialize for a moment, I don't entirely blame him. Kinkakuji is a tourist trap, where visitors are hurried along a path to a point where they can take pictures across the lake, and then past the pavilion and onto the long road past the bathrooms and stalls selling food and trinkets and presents and other tourist junk. It was pretty hard for me to relate to Mizoguchi or his father because I've been to Kinkakuji multiple times in multiple seasons and I didn't find a fraction of the beauty they seem to assign to it. There's nothing about Kinkakuji that you can't get from the hundreds of photos taken of it. If you get a chance to go to Kyōto, go to Ginkakuji and walk in the moss garden, or go to Ryōan-ji and have matcha next to the zen garden, or go to Sanjūsangendō and look at the statues of the Thousand-Armed Kannon. But if you want to go to Kinkakuji, here you go. I've saved you a trip. The ambiguity about why Hayashi did it comes out in the character of Mizoguchi. Toward the end of the book, he claims that he needs to burn down the temple because it is a Buddhist principle that the only permanent part of life is suffering, and the temple still standing for centuries provides humankind with a false sense of security in the face of life, and burning it is actually a kindness that is teaching a valuable lesson, and blah blah blah if this sounds like stupid rationalization to you, it's because it is. A large part of the book is following the way that Mizoguchi comes up with reasons for why he acts the way he does. It often seemed like Mizoguchi was just acting on impulse and then coming up with an ex post facto reason for it, actually.That doesn't mean it's just the ramblings of a madman, though. I mentioned beauty in my rant above, and that's a theme that The Temple of the Golden Pavilion keeps returning to. Mizoguchi's father tells him when he is young that there is no place more beautiful than Kinkakuji, and this single comment seems to sear itself on Mizoguchi's psyche to the extent that he can only relate to beauty in relation to Kinkakuji. He wonders what it is his father saw that he cannot. At a later point, he mentions "the sterile and fragile characteristics of beauty," and has a very hard time reconciling the exist of material things, which decay and age and rot and fail to live up to ideals, with the beauty he imagined when his father first told him about the temple. Therefore, the only way for Kinkakuji to truly live up to its reputation for beauty is for him to destroy it.But...well, that's a different reason than the rationalization from Buddhist principles, so maybe all the talk about beauty is also just a rationalization. Or maybe it depends on what point in the story you ask Mizoguchi, since he often seems to change his mind even when he comes up with new ideas on a similar theme. There's another part about how mortal things cannot be destroyed because they have no true eternal existence anyway, and so murderers aren't accomplishing anything. Instead, only permanent things can truly be destroyed. Ceterum autem censeo Templum Aureum esse delendam.Speaking of ridiculous rationalizations, there was one moment of the various philosophical circles the characters spin in that actually struck me. When Kashiwagi, Mizoguchi's pickup artist friend (seriously, his attitude towards women is basically "Bitches and whores," he spends most of his time expounding on his ridiculous philosophical ideals, and the rest of the time he treats women like trash in an attempt to get them to sleep with him. He's a textbook PUA), says:Knowledge alone is capable of transforming the world, while at the same time leaving it exactly as it is. When you look at the world with knowledge, you realize that things are unchangeable and at the same time are constantly being transformed.I'll admit that's kind of Intro to Philosophy-level, but that's Kashiwagi's gig. He goes on long, pontificating speeches about his philosophical "insights" with little or no prompting from Mizoguchi, and occasionally something interesting comes out.Though thinking of it now, it relates back to Mizoguchi catching his mother sleeping with her relative at the beginning of the novel. The world is the same before and after Mizoguchi knew, because the act still occurred, but his knowledge changed his relationship and interaction with his mother. So it may be simple philosophy, but it's definitely relevant to the book.I'm not sure I can point to a single part of the book that made me think it deserves five stars. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion is about a lot of things--alienation, the nature of beauty, religion and hypocrisy, impermanence--and it's the mix of all of them together that really gives the book its power. Even with all the books I have on my pile, I can see myself reading this one again.
What do You think about The Temple Of The Golden Pavilion (1995)?
How wonderfully freaked out is this book? It's about a young, introverted zen priest who becomes obssessed with a six hundred year old temple to the exclusion of everything else in his life, and then decides it has to be burned down to the ground. And it actually happened! Mishima is just brilliant at sucking you into the world of Mizoguchi's damaged neurosis. And almost every paragraph has at least one mind-fuck brilliant observation about beauty, ugliness, love, obsession, destruction, what have you. It's not exactly a novel, and not exactly a treatise on aesthetics, but some delerious hybrid of both. I feel like this book is an example of the exact right author finding the exact right story.
—Jeremy
Among the plays slated for later this year at the Lincoln Center Festival will be the American premiere of "The Temple of the Golden Pavilion" by Japan's Kanagawa Arts Theatre, a dramatization of Yukio Mishima's most well-known novel. Anyone who saw Paul Schrader's "Mishima: A Life In Four Chapters" will remember that one of those chapters was taken up with this spell-binding story, replete with Mishima's customary violence and obsession with obsessions.“The Temple of the Golden Pavilion” tells the story of the stuttering, antisocial Buddhist acolyte Mizoguchi, who will eventually set the fire that destroys Kinkaku-ji, the 550-year-old temple in Kyoto. Based on an event that occurred in 1950, Mishima supposedly went so far as to interview the real arsonist, a schizophrenic, in prison in preparation. Inside this novel is a carefully drawn portrait of a mind’s slow descent into madness, but also the struggle of an individual frustrated by his surroundings, searching for freedom.“He who chases fantasies lacks judgment,” or such is the judgment of Proverbs 12:11. Mizoguchi, from an early age and inspired by his father, sees the Golden Temple as the very essence of beauty. Not the Temple itself, which initially disappoints him, but the image he has created in his mind. Because of this, he easily contrasts it against himself, the personification of ugliness. Interestingly, Mishima - or his translator, Ivan Morris - decides not to let us hear Mizoguchi’s stutter for ourselves. His thoughts, of course, which tell the story, flow freely. But they are a contradictory lot, with conflicting observations about the nature of beauty, ugliness, being and nothingness, good and evil. From an early age, Mizoguchi is alone and proud of being misunderstood, which is the beginning of his fall. It gives him a sense of mission, which is key to his development as the story unfolds.Halfway through the book, Mizoguchi reminds himself that “the essence of Zen is the absence of all particularities, and that the real power to see consists in the knowledge that one’s own heart possesses neither form nor feature.” In a way, he longs for the nothingness, the lack of attachment, of his calling, but his pride in his otherness keeps drawing him out of this. “It is impossible to touch eternity with one hand and life with the other,” he says. But he stands in opposition to the beauty of the Temple, the ever-present, suffocating, undeniability of the Temple. Mizoguchi does not “have any feeling of solidarity with nothingness.” Indeed, he cannot, not because of his defect, not because of the Temple. It is little wonder that his encounters with women repeatedly find him impotent.One can spot several different messages arising within the story. Beauty acts as an ideal, but also as a curse. It reminds Mizoguchi - and us - that the trials of the world are not so easily escaped even by the devoted and devout. The obsessions we wrap ourselves in can dominate us, and easily turn what is just a historical building of great beauty into a reminder of the unworthiness we perceive in ourselves. One is left to wonder if the individual within Mizoguchi might have been encouraged, in a different setting, or if the process of encouragement itself would have any effect. After all, what would he be encouraged to do? But we also have an all-too familiar picture of the angry loner, a figure who comes to believe that only through destruction does he define himself, that destiny has fingered him for an awful end, but it is his own end, and he will embrace it willingly because it is his. The Christian idea of sin, of malignant desire for that which is beyond redemption or even beyond understanding, is recognizable. But there is something else - a rebellion against the eastern concept of the ideal, which is an existence beyond attachment, identity and struggle.With the death of Mizoguchi’s father, he begins his career at the Temple, and he befriends Tsurukawa, an upright man. But Mizoguchi’s malevolence is growing, “a wordless force” that seeks to possess him. He nurtures it as he recognizes it, and it blooms when he makes a new friend, Kashiwagi. An arrogant, malicious, self-absorbed man with a club foot, he projects all of these twisted qualities onto Mizoguchi and shows him how to use his disability to his disadvantages.The appearance of Kashiwagi midway through the novel is Mizoguchi’s catalyst, and the beginning of his emotional apprenticeship. Mizoguchi also learns about the nature of hypocrisy from the Superior, Father Dosen, who has both frustrated and advanced Mizoguchi’s career. At its beginning, Mizoguchi held the ambition to one day succeed him, but only later does this contort itself into the desire to destroy the Temple. After all, the Temple is more alive than Mizoguchi.Near the end, before Mizoguchi carries out his plot, he begs a visiting father to see past his face and look into his heart. We realize that he too recognizes what is going on inside him, that he does care, that he perceives the outer “ugliness” has taken root inside him, but the father cannot see inside him, and instead unknowingly inspires him to go ahead. Given the author, one might expect Mizoguchi to kill himself in sight of the flames of the Temple. But instead, he smokes a cigarette and embraces the freedom he has found for himself, the individuality, the singularity of his existence. It is not our thoughts which define us to others - but our actions. But our thoughts define us to ourselves, and make the action inevitable.
—William
“To be sure, there are times when the reality of the outer world seems to be waiting for me, folding its arms as it were, while I was struggling to free myself. But the reality that is waiting for me is not a fresh reality. When finally I reach the outer world after all my efforts, all that I find is a reality that has instantly changed colour and gone out of focus- a reality that has lost the freshness that I had considered fitting for myself, and that gives off a half-putrid odour."Mishima is such a great writer.His protagonist in this novel, Mizoguchi, is truly a sociopath; his creepy obsession with beauty, the Golden Pavilion in particular, threatens to consume him. He is very philosophical to the point of arrogance. All in all, a very well-written book.
—Rowena
