The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (edition 1994)

Mishima inspires to describe his writing as something other than words. It's rich and clean and kind of uncomfortable, like freezing water that is deeper than it looks. There is relatively little plot to this book, with Mishima spending most of his time inside the mind of the main character, whose name is only mentioned twice. I enjoyed the expose of a troubled psyche, but it does make for a rather slow moving novel. The story was enhanced for me as I visited the Golden Pavilion the week I was reading this. I think if you're interested in Mishima, maybe start with the only other book of his I've read -- The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea. It has similar themes. ( )

Mishima inspires to describe his writing as something other than words. It's rich and clean and kind of uncomfortable, like freezing water that is deeper than it looks. There is relatively little plot to this book, with Mishima spending most of his time inside the mind of the main character, whose name is only mentioned twice. I enjoyed the expose of a troubled psyche, but it does make for a rather slow moving novel. The story was enhanced for me as I visited the Golden Pavilion the week I was reading this. I think if you're interested in Mishima, maybe start with the only other book of his I've read -- The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea. It has similar themes. ( )

I'm not too sure when or where this book came into my awareness but I have had it sitting on my bookcase for a few months now. I had initially planned to read Confessions of a Mask first because that was the first Mishima book which caught my attention but I felt drawn to this as my next read. I wasn't too sure whether the synopsis was something that would appeal to me but I was intrigued as to why Haruki Murakami dislikes the work on Mishima so much.

Although it is not a big book I found it slow going especially in the early chapters. I really didn't like the character of Mizoguchi and in truth I found him quite annoying. I felt similar about him as I did with Holden Caulfield when I read Catcher in the Rye, perhaps he is a character that suits younger readers more? I did find that Kashiwaga grew on me a bit despite the fact that he was portrayed as an unlikeable person, I think I felt that he was truer to life that Mizoguchi.

Another bugbear I had with the book is that it seemed to take forever to get to the conclusion of the story. I wasn't aware that the book was based on true events and so I found the build up to the climax pretty laborious. However, as the conclusion got close I started to like the book a bit more.

At the end of the day I think that this might be a bit of a love it or hate it book for a lot of people. I wouldn't go so far as to say I hated it but it didn't move me either. It was an ok read but for me nothing more than that. I am hoping that Confessions of a Mask is a bit more my kind of thing, the synopsis seems to fit me better. ( )

Mishima's mastery in constructing the pathology of the main character, Mizoguchi, raises disturbing questions about emotional dependence, alienation, the value of art and inheritance and the role that childhood experiences and traumas play in distorting adult behavior.

Was it the ostentation of the building, the envy of his adoration by the public or a destructive whim in the mind of an acolyte steeped in doctrine but forced to live in the present material that brought up the pyromaniac in it? ( )

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 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. ( )