‘The Temple of the Golden Pavilion’, is one of the most known books of Yukio Mishima. It presents a dark vision, and is a purely beautiful and utterly disturbing novel. It shows beauty and destruction, dedication and cruelty, sacrifice and betrayal; all whilst containing incredibly vivid descriptions. ‘The Temple of the Golden Pavilion’ is a book that haunts you ever since one starts reading it and continues haunting one long after finishing it. Despite it having been the first book of the author which I’ve really read, and despite the close attention I had to pay to it whilst reading due to my unfamiliarity with the topic and culture at hand, I adored it.
‘The Temple of the Golden Pavilion’ focuses on the life of a young Zen Buddhist acolyte named Mizoguchi after the end of WW2, who because of the boyhood trauma of seeing his mother make love to another man in the presence of his dying father, is a hopeless stutterer. Taunted by others, he feels alone until he eventually becomes an acolyte at a famous temple in Kyoto, where he develops a consuming obsession with the temple’s beauty. It ends with the man deciding to set fire to the temple despite his obsession with its beauty, all whilst showing a fascinating study of depression and madness.
The story itself is based on the real-life event of the burning of the Golden Pavilion (the temple Kinkakuji) by Buddhist acolyte Hayashi Yoken in 1950. Though not much information exists about him outside of Japanese literature – much of this not being very detailed itself in turn to avoid the events being memoralised – Mishima researched the events carefully, and even interviewed Hayashi in prison before Hayashi passed away. Thus the novel is very closely linked on these real-life events, though with some changes added for philosophical and dramatic effects. The prose reads easily, neither being too cold or dense, and shows great understanding and sensitivity. The voice is deeply original, and makes this a hypnotic book, and proved to be really hard to put down.
‘The Temple of the Golden Pavilion’ shows a dark story and vision that affects the protagonist at every turn, also showing and laying out the themes prevalent in the rest of Mishima’s work. The notion of beauty affected Mishima throughout his life, leading him to model himself as a bodybuilder and believing that strengthening the body was as important as strengthening the mind – particularly for an intellectual. As such it shows a fascinating insight into the author himself, who remains very much a mystery, and subject of great controversy (particularly due to his attempted coup d’état).
Is ‘The Temple of the Golden Pavilion’ worth reading? Most definitely. It isn’t often that one has the chance to truly encounter literature that comes across as fascinating as the great classics, so to say, and this part of Mishima’s work definitely achieves to really stand out. Easy and a fascinating read, it is definitely a worthy book to read as both an introduction to the author and a look at the overarching themes of this three-times-nominated Nobel Literature Prize author’s work. It definitely earns the highest rating, and it’d be a shame for any person interested in this particular period of time or author to miss it.
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