The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima, trans. Ivan Morris

In 1950, a young Buddhist acolyte burned down the Kinkaku-ji in Kyoto – a building that had stood for over five centuries and survived the Second World War. Mishima wrote his fictionalised account just six years later, while the event was still in living memory. The novel follows the arsonist's interior life

Published in Japanese as Kinkakuji in 1956. The English translation was by Ivan Morris, published in 1959.

"Mizoguchi grows up a lonely boy in a poor family, a hopeless and frustrated stutterer. Only tales of the beauty of a famous temple in Kyoto, told by his dying father, sustain him. Taunted by his schoolmates, he eventually escapes to become an acolyte at the temple. But there, witness to acts of callous violence and terrified by the bombing of the war, Mizoguchi develops an all-consuming obsession with the temple's preservation - until the beauty of the place itself starts to feel like his deadliest enemy.

This powerful story of sacrifice and unattainable ideals brings together Mishima's preoccupations with violence, desire, religion and national history to dazzling effect."