The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

Mizoguchi, in his teens at the end of the war, feels he's been betrayed in just about every possible direction. By both his parents, by his religious superior, by his male friends, by women, and — of course — by the state that entered and lost the war and has left him open to humiliation at the hands of American soldiers. He stutters, he's perpetually hungry, he isn't very interested in his studies to become a Zen priest, and he's convinced that he's ugly. So, your typical happy teenage boy! By a logical process that makes complete sense to him, and apparently also to the author, he comes to the view that the only thing left for him to do is to destroy the beautiful thing that seems to be at the focal point of the values of all show more those lines of betrayal.

This is obviously a book that has all the elements of the postwar-adolescent-rebellion novel, and is a kind of apotheosis of the twentieth century Japanese classic (temples, voyeurism, humiliation, duckweed, tea, tatami mats, suicide, mountains, ...). It's all beautifully and very concisely executed, but it can't get round the limitation that any reader who isn't a teenager at the end of his tether is likely to see Mizoguchi's solution as both irrelevant and disproportionate to the problem he's facing. show less

Ah, qué viajecito.

Es una historia que exuda odio e incomodidad, el resultado de una crisis adolescente donde la sensualidad se quiere imponer a las tradiciones y la necesidad de encontrar una trascendencia espiritual.

En fin. Interesante incluso para pensar el fenómeno incel y la crisis espiritual, de expectativas y de masculinidades que ocurre hoy. Me hace pensar en los últimos años de Mishima, obsesionado con tonificar su cuerpo y militarizar su visión del mundo.

Aún así, es precioso y movilizante, tanto intelectual como emocionalmente.

She's rubbing his shoulder
and he's reading about
Western birds.
— Eileen Myles, Sympathy

On Needy Men

We like to imagine Mishima's chief characters as if totally freed from attachments. In famous post-coital scenes these men find themselves premeditating great acts of violence (a mental state in which, one imagines, they are also capable of revolutionary acts of kindness, though such things remain to be seen . . .) These characters are peculiar constructions because their sense of independence appears to derive from the constant need to be near people with whom they refuse to communicate. Mishima idealizes this relationship in his use the koan, Nansen Kills the Cat, in which selective non-communication is the only thing capable of show more saving a life (though, even in this case, it doesn't). Zen Master Joshu dons sandals on his head in a non-response which requires the presence of another (since otherwise he'd cycle about sandal-cephalic all the time).

The psychology of certain independent men who deny they have any attachments at all — despite meeting all their needs through the use of others — is perhaps more worth investigating than the cathected love-triangles in this novel. E.G. It would be possible to write an essay on our chief character's relationship with the eponymous pavilion, whose monkish order rejects him after he witnesses an adulterous carnal scene (through a series of intermediaries), as a surrogate relationship to his monk-father, who we find cowed in relation to his adulterous mother. The scene in which the chief character tramples a pregnant whore representing the impermissible desire to repudiate his mother ("foreclosed" in Lacan's sense), which therefore also masks his relationship to himself (corresponding to the trampled fetus), and so on . . . The burning of the temple as physical manifestation of an unacceptable relationship and so on . . . These are all mere literary conventions. (The only missing scene is the paramour's repudiation of our chief character's mother, but this is left as an exercise for the reader.)

Psychological defenses appear strongest at moments of great vulnerability. The chief character in Mishima's texts (and those of certain others) achieves the apex of his power in the post-coital scene, where, alone in the world with someone else (who has ostensibly just done you a favor), he turns even more strongly toward himself. That such invulnerable men appear to others as one great vulnerability is something he only perceives in brief flashes of terror. In this sense, the oft-quoted phrase is essentially correct: "I wasn't unconscious — I saw everything. The special quality of hell is to see everything clearly down to the last detail. And to see all that in the pitch darkness!" (130) In another context we recognize "seeing everything down to the last detail" as the neutral (scientific) gaze of death. It only becomes terrifying when we recognize what would happen if a needy man came to possess, for a moment, this unclouded vision while at the apex of his power. Then he would realize, with the quality of a Hollywood jump-scare, that while he had thought himself alone in bed, of course there has been someone else with him the whole time. show less

I think I'm finally figuring out Yukio's 'move' as it were. At the end of his stories, the male character is alone, on the street, injured, and desperately, violently, alive.

It seemed fitting to read this post-war classic near the date of a US President's first visit to Japan, 70 years after the atrocity. However, the atrocity of A-Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki are conspicuously absent from the narrative, even while the war and its end looms large--instead we are confronted with the destruction of the Golden Temple, not by Allied Forces, but by a stuttering, novice Buddhist priest in 1950.

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion is a fictionalized account of the actual burning of the Golden Temple, but it may as well serve as an extended meditation on the catechetic Zen problem called "Nansen Kills a Kitten," with the kitten (on the novelists' interpretation) serving as fleeting, beauty that is pursued to its show more utter annihilation. The problem derives from the following (paraphrased) story: A kitten happened onto the temple, was eventually caught by monks, and became the object of dispute between the East and West Halls, which both wanted the kitten for their own. Father Nansen interrupted the dispute, grabbing the kitten: "If anyone can say a word the kitten shall be spared; if you cannot, it shall be killed." No one answered, and Nansen butchered the kitten. Upon the evening, the disciple Joshu returned to the temple and Father Nansen informed him of the event. In response, Joshu removed his shoes, put them on top of his head and left. Nansen lamented: "If only you had been here today, the kitten's life could have been saved." (61)
The destruction of the Temple is described by Mishima as the logical consequence of the koan from the perspective of the perpetrating novice in love with the object.

This is an extraordinary book, rife with symbolism, political commentary, and troubling metaphysical (Buddhist) accounts of beauty, evil, and impermanence in the immediate years following WWII. Even knowing quite little about Zen Buddhism (or of Japanese culture during the relevant time period), it is clear that this is a literary masterpiece that explores the rippling rupture of tradition in post-war Japan, as well as the gnawing tension at the heart of the detached life of the Zen Buddhist generally.

I am too ill-informed to speculate on what form of nationalism drove the author of this novel to eventually commit seppuku (harakiri) in 1970, after a failed coup d'etat to restore the power of the emperor. It seems to me that he was equally (perversely?) rapt as the protagonist of The Temple of the Golden Pavilion with beauty, and equally determined to preserve it through destruction. show less

My nature, which already tended to be dreamy, became all the more so, and thanks to the war, ordinary life receded even farther from me. For us boys, war was a dreamlike sort of experience lacking any real substance, something like an isolation ward in which one is cut off from the meaning of life.

The Temple of the Golden Pavillion is many things, but above all I was surprised how deeply and, as becomes Mishima, succinctly it described the war, not through presence but absence: for our narrator, Mizoguchi, the war is about staying behind, being pushed into a kind of surreal state of alternate existence.

Naturally, this sense of otherness and not belonging pervades the whole narrative on all levels, and it most certainly is Mishima’s show more forte, something Murakami has, as well. The anxiety of existential meaninglessness, the strong feeling of guilt, freedom through an act of violence, either literal or metaphorical, and life, ultimately, a never-ending, alternating movement of these dark themes.

Rewarding yet demanding, making one poor before making one abundantly rich.

17 November,
2014 show less

This is a strange, but very thought-provoking book that operates on a number of levels. One the one hand, it is a chronicle of the mental neuroses of its protagonist, Mizoguchi and his descent, not so much into madness, as into a closed-loop unreality that he feels he can break out of only through an act of wanton and great destruction: the burning of the Golden Temple (which actually happened due to arson by one man, in 1950). Mizoguchi obsesses about the Golden Temple almost all his life as the apotheosis of beauty, and is able to indulge this obsession when he becomes an acolyte at the temple, but it is a strange obsession in that he, “staked everything not so much on the objective beauty of the temple itself as on my own power to show more imagine its beauty.” Herein lie two themes of the novel: the concept and meaning of beauty, especially its ephemeral nature, and perceptions of the world through either subjective or objective, i.e. observed, realities.

Mizoguchi travels a great distance in his perception of beauty as embodied in the temple. Beauty is, at first, “an object that once could touch with one’s fingers, that could be clearly reflected in one’s eyes. I knew and I believed that, amid all the changes of the world, the Golden Temple remained there safe and immutable.” But, he is aesthetically disappointed when he first sees the temple and he experiences, “the pain of having been deceived by something of which I had expected so much”. And then, speaking to the temple, he pleads: “Please let me see the real Golden Temple more clearly than I see the image of you in my mind. And furthermore, if you are indeed so beautiful that nothing in this world can compare with you, please tell me why you are so beautiful, why it is necessary for you to be beautiful.” Here we have the theme of deception that plays throughout Mizoguchi’s life: one day he sees the Superior of the temple, a revered and conscientious leader, in the company of a prostitute; Mizoguchi is an ostracized stutterer and he befriends a club-footed fellow student, Kashiwagi, who turns out to be a master manipulator of people; his closest friend, Tsurukawa, who seems to represent all that is good about an optimistic outlook on life, has a dark side of deep depression. Nothing, and no one, exists in a single dimension, everything is conjoined and opposites mirror each other in a single personality or object: “When people concentrate on the idea of beauty, they are, without realizing it, confronted with the darkest thoughts that exist in this world.” This leads Moziguchi further, to believe that, “to live and to destroy were one and the same thing.” And to see life as, “a dangerous burlesque with which one tried to smash the reality that had deceived one by means of an unknown disguise, and with which one cleaned the world so that it might never again contain anything unknown.”

For Mizoguchi, the temple becomes transformed from an immovable structure into, “a symbol of the real world’s evanescence.” This is the central tenet of Buddhism, that everything changes, nothing is immutable, and for Mizoguchi, this is a stage on his road to the perception that he must destroy the temple. But the destruction is in fact, pre-ordained as Mishima seems to say that beauty holds within itself the seeds of its own destruction: “The very fact that the temple should have struck a young boy as so incomparably beautiful contained the various motives that were eventually to lead him to arson” .

Does beauty exist only as a subjective construct? It does seem, in Mizoguhci’s world, that knowledge or awareness of reality is an act of defilement. Mizoguchi once sees a woman offer her breast to a man and he fantasizes about it and the meaning of what he saw, but he actually meets the woman and she offers her breast to him, “This flesh did not in itself have the power to appeal or to tempt. Exposed there in front of me, and completely cut off from life, it merely served as a proof of the dreariness of existence.” Mizoguchi muses on what is immutable versus that which can be destroyed: “Thus my thoughts led me to recognizing more and more clearly that there was a complete contrast between the existence of the Golden Temple and that of human beings. On the one hand, a phantasm of immortality emerges from the apparently destructible aspect of human beings; on the other, the apparently indestructible beauty of the Golden Temple gave rise to the possibility of destroying it. Mortal things like human beings cannot be eradicated; indestructible things like the Golden Temple can be destroyed.” This ying and yang of existence plays out throughout the novel. When Mizoguchi is preparing the fire that will destroy the temple, he has second thoughts about going through with it but, “One part of my mind still kept telling me that it was now futile to perform this deed, but my new-found strength had no fear of futility. I must do the deed precisely because it was so futile.”

Mishima also muses, through Mizoguchi, on the meaning of time and our relation to it. He states: “The continuity of our lives is preserved by being surrounded by the solidified substance of time that has lasted for a given period.” And it is this “solidified substance” that Mizoguchi aims to disrupt through the destruction of the temple which would, “thrust the world in which the Golden Temple existed into a world where it did not exit. The meaning of the world would surely change.”

As I said, a thought-provoking book. One that deserves re-reading and contemplation. It is easy to see why Mishima was hailed as such a fresh and challenging voice in literature. show less