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A review by millennial_dandy
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima
5.0
This is, ostensibly, a book about beauty and how it leads to a young man's destructive, ruinous obsession.
Obsession leading to destruction is hardly a new concept in art or indeed, in real life. It seems a solid half of all true crime series deal in one person's obsession with another leading them to 'kill their darlings.' But what if the person's 'darling' isn't another human, but a building?
That's the premise of Yukio Mishima's 'The Temple of the Golden Pavilion,' based loosely on a real incident in 1950 when a young monk set fire to and destroyed the Temple of the Golden Pavilion in Kyoto.
Our protagonist, Mizoguchi, grows up the son of a priest of a "lonely cape." He isn't particularly attractive, and his most defining feature is a severe stutter. His stutter is, as he reiterates many times, both a prison and the thing that makes him unique. He muses early on in the novel:
"My stuttering, I need hardly say, placed an obstacle between me and the outside world [...] Most people, thanks to their easy command of words, can keep this door between the inner and the outer world wide open, so that the air passes freely between the two; but for me this has been quite impossible. Thick rust has gathered on the key." p.5
And it is in Mizoguchi's inner world that we the reader too must dwell, every scene filtered through the lens of his struggle to self-actualize. The 'thick rust' he describes results not only in his perceived inability to connect with people, but also in his own arrested development. This stunted emotional growth frustrates him greatly, though quickly mutates into detachment and arrogance when he determines his stutter is actually the hallmark of his status as a 'chosen being':
"Was it not natural that a young boy who suffered from an indelible setback like mine should have come to think that he was a secretly chosen being? I felt as though somewhere in the world a mission awaited me of which I myself still knew nothing." (p.6)
His conviction in destiny ultimately becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy as he retrospectively charts the events that led him to arson. He acknowledges that fate can seem like free will by claiming "We do not collide with our destiny all of a sudden. The man who later in his life is to be executed is constantly [...] drawing an image in his mind of the execution site" (p.155) and yet later washes his hands of this responsibility by contrasting his life with that of a recently deceased friend: "what I envied most about [Tsurukawa] was that he managed to reach the end of his life without the slightest conscience of being burdened with a special individuality or sense of individual mission like mine." (p.129-130)
This is a story that at its surface is about beauty. What it is, how we know it, why it exists, and why, ultimately, it must be destroyed.
In his childhood, Mizoguchi is told of the fabulous beauty of the Golden Temple by his father who builds it up, saying: "there was nothing on earth so beautiful." This unreal image of the Golden Temple is frustrated when he first sees it in real life. The real temple is no match for the "fabulous quality to the Golden Temple that was engraved on my heart." He resents this real place for not meeting his fantastic expectations.
Nevertheless, the temple continues to haunt him. Eventually, he is sent to be an acolyte at this very temple and is confronted with it daily. Slowly, the temple of his imagination is projected onto the real thing so he can scarce tell the two apart.
The temple is omnipresent throughout the story, lurking at the back of Mizoguchi's mind as he ages, there in times of happiness, moments of violence, moments of reflection, looming up when, while away from it, he attempts and fails to have sex with the girl provided for him by his friend Kashiwagi. He wants to sleep with the girl, but the closer he gets to that eventuality, the more the hallucinatory image of the temple obscures his view of her.
It hovers oppressively over his life until all at once he decides to flee, hoping by leaving the physical temple behind, he'll be able to reconcile the control it exerts over his life: "Whatever happened, I must leave--leave my surroundings, leave my conception of beauty which so shackled me, leave the isolated obscurity in which I lived, leave my stuttering and all the other conditions of my existence." (p.181)
It is while on this wild pilgrimage he determines to burn the temple down and afterwards kill himself.
Ultimately, it seems as though burning down the temple is indeed the only way for Mizoguchi to find peace; as he sits watching the smoke from a distance he is free.
But what does any of this mean? On the face of it, 'The Temple of the Golden Pavilion' seems like a perverse curiosity: boy falls in love with inanimate object; hilarity ensues. Only, it isn't that simple. Mizoguchi himself recognizes that "my attachment to the Golden Temple was entirely rooted in my own ugliness." (p.39) It's the 'ugliness' of his stutter and its significance as the sign that he is special that is the real root of his inner turmoil, not the temple. The temple is a distraction, and his desire to see it destroyed is nothing more than his immature fury at his own perceived failure to live up to the greatness he has decided he is destined for.
He self-sabotages when his life is going well because he is so sure he is "not qualified to enter life through its bright surface" (123).
In other words, this is an anti-coming of age novel. Much like Salinger's 'The Catcher in the Rye' and Musil's 'The Confusions of Young Törless' that predate it, Mishima spins a cautionary tale of what happens to the adolescent who succumbs to their angst. Mizoguchi, much like Holden Caulfield and Törless, cannot accept the ineffability of their own existence, much less that of mankind, and try vainly to ascribe meaning to the series of events that make up their lives. And all the while their struggle makes them feel intellectually superior to their respective mentors, as though their inability to accept life as it is is a mark of their genius, though they come to different conclusions on what to do about any of it.
Holden seems to fall into a stupor of nihilism, Törless has a nervous breakdown and is forced to leave school, and Mizoguchi burns down the Golden Temple. This, to him, is the only way to make meaning of his stuttering. It can't just be chance--he's destined to change the world. "What transforms the world is action. There's nothing else," (p.216) he tells Kashiwagi in a fit of passion.
Many other reviewers seem to consider Mizoguchi a sociopath. I find this rather reductive. That may well be Mishima's intent, but though Mizoguchi seems unable to emotionally connect to other people, he sees the tragedy in it: "As I recalled Uiko and my father and Tsurukawa, an ineffable tenderness arose within me, and I wondered whether the only human beings whom I was capable of loving were not, in fact, dead people."
Mizoguchi's inability to feel empathy for other people seems more a result of his inability to get beyond his need to understand why he stutters than an innate lack of empathy. He cannot feel for other people until he knows the answer. And this is the true tragedy of 'The Temple of the Golden Pavilion': there is no 'why'. We the reader understand; it's obvious there is no deeper meaning, and this disability is not indicative of greatness or the mark of a hero.
By failing to accept this, Mizoguchi willingly becomes the villain of his own story. He burns down the Golden Temple and in retelling how it all came about as a first-person narrator, weaves together a tale of inevitability: this is what he was born to do. Only after the manifestation of his destiny is he free.
This is a cautionary tale, rendered in Mishima's gorgeous prose, rife with the twisted philosophy of the prototypical 'emo' teenager, and wrapped up in a vivid portrait of post-war Japan.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Below I've included several quotes that didn't make the cut for my analysis, but I still find very emblematic of the themes I touched upon and further examples of the reading experience:
"Tsurukawa's eyes, bordered with their long lashes, filtered away my stuttering and accepted the rest of me just as I was. Until then I had been under the strange illusion that to disregard my stuttering was of itself equivalent to annihilating that existence called "me."" p.44
Kashiwagi: "The logical conclusion that I reached after much hard thought was that if the world changed, I could not exist, and if I changed, the world could not exist." p.95
"[Kashiwagi's] manner infected me, and soon I was reciting the sutra in the same high-spirited way in which students hum tunes through their noses. This bit of desecration served to release my spirits to an extraordinary degree and made me feel quite lively." p.117
"Whatever Kashiwagi might believe, this girl loved some good point of his that he himself had not noticed; and, as I now realized, my own arrogant conviction that there was nothing about myself of which I was not aware resulted from my having singled myself out as the one person who could have no such good points whatsoever." p.123
"I [...] was not qualified to enter life through its bright surface. It was Kashiwagi who had first taught me the dark by-way along which I could reach life from the back. At first sight this appeared to be a method that could only lead to destruction; yet it was replete with unexpected stratagems, it transformed baseness into courage, it could even be called a sort of alchemy that restored what is known as immorality to its original state of pure energy. [...] It was a life that advanced, that captured, that changed, that could be lost." p.123
"In that collision, which had lasted no more than a second, there had been a sudden contact and his life had merged with his death." p.128
"Then in a tone that was almost like a curse I addressed the Golden Temple roughly for the first time in my life: "One day I shall surely rule you. Yes, one day I shall bring you under my sway, so that never again will you be able to get in my way."" p.154
"As I recalled Uiko and my father and Tsurukawa, an ineffable tenderness arose within me, and I wondered whether the only human beings whom I was capable of loving were not, in fact, dead people. Be that as it might, how easy dead people were to love compared to those who were still alive!"
"Animals don't need knowledge or anything of the sort to make life bearable. But human beings do need something, and with knowledge they can make the very intolerableness of life a weapon, though at the same time that intolerableness is not reduced in the slightest.
[...]
"Knowledge can never transform the world," I blurted out, skirting along the very edge of confession. "What transforms the world is action. There's nothing else." p.216
Father Zenkai: "To look ordinary is by far the best thing. People aren't suspicious of you then, you see." p.245
"For at that moment I gazed at the Golden Temple to bid it a last farewell. The temple was dim in the darkness of the rainy night and its outline was indistinct [...] As my remembrance of the beauty grew more and more vivid, however, this very darkness began to provide a background against which I could conjure up my vision at will. My entire conception of beauty lurked within this somber, crouching form." p.252, 253.
"Perhaps beauty was both of these things. It was both the individual parts and the whole structure, both the Golden Temple and the night that wrapped itself about the Golden Temple. At this thought I felt that the mystery of the beauty of the Golden Temple, which had tormented me so much in the past, was halfway towards being solved [...] The beauty of the individual detail itself was always filled with uneasiness. It dreamed of perfection, but it knew no completion and was invariably lured on to the next beauty, the unknown beauty. [...] Nothingness was the very structure of this beauty. [...] Yet never did there come a time when the beauty of the Golden Temple ceased! Its beauty was always echoing somewhere." p.255
Obsession leading to destruction is hardly a new concept in art or indeed, in real life. It seems a solid half of all true crime series deal in one person's obsession with another leading them to 'kill their darlings.' But what if the person's 'darling' isn't another human, but a building?
That's the premise of Yukio Mishima's 'The Temple of the Golden Pavilion,' based loosely on a real incident in 1950 when a young monk set fire to and destroyed the Temple of the Golden Pavilion in Kyoto.
Our protagonist, Mizoguchi, grows up the son of a priest of a "lonely cape." He isn't particularly attractive, and his most defining feature is a severe stutter. His stutter is, as he reiterates many times, both a prison and the thing that makes him unique. He muses early on in the novel:
"My stuttering, I need hardly say, placed an obstacle between me and the outside world [...] Most people, thanks to their easy command of words, can keep this door between the inner and the outer world wide open, so that the air passes freely between the two; but for me this has been quite impossible. Thick rust has gathered on the key." p.5
And it is in Mizoguchi's inner world that we the reader too must dwell, every scene filtered through the lens of his struggle to self-actualize. The 'thick rust' he describes results not only in his perceived inability to connect with people, but also in his own arrested development. This stunted emotional growth frustrates him greatly, though quickly mutates into detachment and arrogance when he determines his stutter is actually the hallmark of his status as a 'chosen being':
"Was it not natural that a young boy who suffered from an indelible setback like mine should have come to think that he was a secretly chosen being? I felt as though somewhere in the world a mission awaited me of which I myself still knew nothing." (p.6)
His conviction in destiny ultimately becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy as he retrospectively charts the events that led him to arson. He acknowledges that fate can seem like free will by claiming "We do not collide with our destiny all of a sudden. The man who later in his life is to be executed is constantly [...] drawing an image in his mind of the execution site" (p.155) and yet later washes his hands of this responsibility by contrasting his life with that of a recently deceased friend: "what I envied most about [Tsurukawa] was that he managed to reach the end of his life without the slightest conscience of being burdened with a special individuality or sense of individual mission like mine." (p.129-130)
This is a story that at its surface is about beauty. What it is, how we know it, why it exists, and why, ultimately, it must be destroyed.
In his childhood, Mizoguchi is told of the fabulous beauty of the Golden Temple by his father who builds it up, saying: "there was nothing on earth so beautiful." This unreal image of the Golden Temple is frustrated when he first sees it in real life. The real temple is no match for the "fabulous quality to the Golden Temple that was engraved on my heart." He resents this real place for not meeting his fantastic expectations.
Nevertheless, the temple continues to haunt him. Eventually, he is sent to be an acolyte at this very temple and is confronted with it daily. Slowly, the temple of his imagination is projected onto the real thing so he can scarce tell the two apart.
The temple is omnipresent throughout the story, lurking at the back of Mizoguchi's mind as he ages, there in times of happiness, moments of violence, moments of reflection, looming up when, while away from it, he attempts and fails to have sex with the girl provided for him by his friend Kashiwagi. He wants to sleep with the girl, but the closer he gets to that eventuality, the more the hallucinatory image of the temple obscures his view of her.
It hovers oppressively over his life until all at once he decides to flee, hoping by leaving the physical temple behind, he'll be able to reconcile the control it exerts over his life: "Whatever happened, I must leave--leave my surroundings, leave my conception of beauty which so shackled me, leave the isolated obscurity in which I lived, leave my stuttering and all the other conditions of my existence." (p.181)
It is while on this wild pilgrimage he determines to burn the temple down and afterwards kill himself.
Ultimately, it seems as though burning down the temple is indeed the only way for Mizoguchi to find peace; as he sits watching the smoke from a distance he is free.
But what does any of this mean? On the face of it, 'The Temple of the Golden Pavilion' seems like a perverse curiosity: boy falls in love with inanimate object; hilarity ensues. Only, it isn't that simple. Mizoguchi himself recognizes that "my attachment to the Golden Temple was entirely rooted in my own ugliness." (p.39) It's the 'ugliness' of his stutter and its significance as the sign that he is special that is the real root of his inner turmoil, not the temple. The temple is a distraction, and his desire to see it destroyed is nothing more than his immature fury at his own perceived failure to live up to the greatness he has decided he is destined for.
He self-sabotages when his life is going well because he is so sure he is "not qualified to enter life through its bright surface" (123).
In other words, this is an anti-coming of age novel. Much like Salinger's 'The Catcher in the Rye' and Musil's 'The Confusions of Young Törless' that predate it, Mishima spins a cautionary tale of what happens to the adolescent who succumbs to their angst. Mizoguchi, much like Holden Caulfield and Törless, cannot accept the ineffability of their own existence, much less that of mankind, and try vainly to ascribe meaning to the series of events that make up their lives. And all the while their struggle makes them feel intellectually superior to their respective mentors, as though their inability to accept life as it is is a mark of their genius, though they come to different conclusions on what to do about any of it.
Holden seems to fall into a stupor of nihilism, Törless has a nervous breakdown and is forced to leave school, and Mizoguchi burns down the Golden Temple. This, to him, is the only way to make meaning of his stuttering. It can't just be chance--he's destined to change the world. "What transforms the world is action. There's nothing else," (p.216) he tells Kashiwagi in a fit of passion.
Many other reviewers seem to consider Mizoguchi a sociopath. I find this rather reductive. That may well be Mishima's intent, but though Mizoguchi seems unable to emotionally connect to other people, he sees the tragedy in it: "As I recalled Uiko and my father and Tsurukawa, an ineffable tenderness arose within me, and I wondered whether the only human beings whom I was capable of loving were not, in fact, dead people."
Mizoguchi's inability to feel empathy for other people seems more a result of his inability to get beyond his need to understand why he stutters than an innate lack of empathy. He cannot feel for other people until he knows the answer. And this is the true tragedy of 'The Temple of the Golden Pavilion': there is no 'why'. We the reader understand; it's obvious there is no deeper meaning, and this disability is not indicative of greatness or the mark of a hero.
By failing to accept this, Mizoguchi willingly becomes the villain of his own story. He burns down the Golden Temple and in retelling how it all came about as a first-person narrator, weaves together a tale of inevitability: this is what he was born to do. Only after the manifestation of his destiny is he free.
This is a cautionary tale, rendered in Mishima's gorgeous prose, rife with the twisted philosophy of the prototypical 'emo' teenager, and wrapped up in a vivid portrait of post-war Japan.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Below I've included several quotes that didn't make the cut for my analysis, but I still find very emblematic of the themes I touched upon and further examples of the reading experience:
"Tsurukawa's eyes, bordered with their long lashes, filtered away my stuttering and accepted the rest of me just as I was. Until then I had been under the strange illusion that to disregard my stuttering was of itself equivalent to annihilating that existence called "me."" p.44
Kashiwagi: "The logical conclusion that I reached after much hard thought was that if the world changed, I could not exist, and if I changed, the world could not exist." p.95
"[Kashiwagi's] manner infected me, and soon I was reciting the sutra in the same high-spirited way in which students hum tunes through their noses. This bit of desecration served to release my spirits to an extraordinary degree and made me feel quite lively." p.117
"Whatever Kashiwagi might believe, this girl loved some good point of his that he himself had not noticed; and, as I now realized, my own arrogant conviction that there was nothing about myself of which I was not aware resulted from my having singled myself out as the one person who could have no such good points whatsoever." p.123
"I [...] was not qualified to enter life through its bright surface. It was Kashiwagi who had first taught me the dark by-way along which I could reach life from the back. At first sight this appeared to be a method that could only lead to destruction; yet it was replete with unexpected stratagems, it transformed baseness into courage, it could even be called a sort of alchemy that restored what is known as immorality to its original state of pure energy. [...] It was a life that advanced, that captured, that changed, that could be lost." p.123
"In that collision, which had lasted no more than a second, there had been a sudden contact and his life had merged with his death." p.128
"Then in a tone that was almost like a curse I addressed the Golden Temple roughly for the first time in my life: "One day I shall surely rule you. Yes, one day I shall bring you under my sway, so that never again will you be able to get in my way."" p.154
"As I recalled Uiko and my father and Tsurukawa, an ineffable tenderness arose within me, and I wondered whether the only human beings whom I was capable of loving were not, in fact, dead people. Be that as it might, how easy dead people were to love compared to those who were still alive!"
"Animals don't need knowledge or anything of the sort to make life bearable. But human beings do need something, and with knowledge they can make the very intolerableness of life a weapon, though at the same time that intolerableness is not reduced in the slightest.
[...]
"Knowledge can never transform the world," I blurted out, skirting along the very edge of confession. "What transforms the world is action. There's nothing else." p.216
Father Zenkai: "To look ordinary is by far the best thing. People aren't suspicious of you then, you see." p.245
"For at that moment I gazed at the Golden Temple to bid it a last farewell. The temple was dim in the darkness of the rainy night and its outline was indistinct [...] As my remembrance of the beauty grew more and more vivid, however, this very darkness began to provide a background against which I could conjure up my vision at will. My entire conception of beauty lurked within this somber, crouching form." p.252, 253.
"Perhaps beauty was both of these things. It was both the individual parts and the whole structure, both the Golden Temple and the night that wrapped itself about the Golden Temple. At this thought I felt that the mystery of the beauty of the Golden Temple, which had tormented me so much in the past, was halfway towards being solved [...] The beauty of the individual detail itself was always filled with uneasiness. It dreamed of perfection, but it knew no completion and was invariably lured on to the next beauty, the unknown beauty. [...] Nothingness was the very structure of this beauty. [...] Yet never did there come a time when the beauty of the Golden Temple ceased! Its beauty was always echoing somewhere." p.255