The Temple of the Golden Pavilion: Mishima

In The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1956), celebrated Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima creates a haunting and vivid portrait of a young man's obsession with idealized beauty and his destructive quest to possess it. The novel, considered one of the author's masterpieces, is a fictionalized account of the actual torching of the Kyōto temple by a disturbed Buddhist acolyte in 1950.

The narrator, Mizoguchi, is a young Zen acolyte who is alienated from the world around him. Born frail, physically unattractive, and into bleak poverty, he stutters badly and isolates himself from others. Mizoguchi's relationship with the Golden Temple is ambivalent, mixing both love and hatred, a desire to possess, and a desire to destroy. Mizoguchi's egotistical and obsessive personality, combined with his powerful imagination and resentment toward "others," transforms the temple into an Other of almost divine proportions, comparable to Ahab's vision of Moby Dick.

His obsessive feelings for the Golden Temple vary from disappointment to reverence to identification with the structure. Realizing the profound lack of beauty in his own life, Mizoguchi decides he must set fire to the temple. As the hero of the novel, he says "I hate myself, my evil, ugly, stammering self." He resembles other tormented Mishima heroes who are preoccupied with beauty and death. He may also be compared to a hybrid of (the stuttering) Billy Budd and his nemesis, Claggart (overcome with resentment toward The Handsome Sailor).

Yukio Mishima himself believed that American culture and values had influenced Japan much too greatly and made a mockery of Japanese tradition. On November 25, 1970, he shocked the world: entering an army base in Tokyo, he kidnapped the commander, and read from a prepared manifesto. He demanded that the Japanese National Self-Defense Force must overthrow the government and return to the militaristic spirit of the 1930s. Then, to demonstrate how serious he was about the decay of Japanese culture, he committed ritual suicide conducted in traditional Samurai style.

Thus Mishima's fictional character may be said to symbolize the author's own view of modern Japan, plagued by evil and ugly anti-Japanese traits.

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion:

• Amazon
• Pdf
• Audiobook (10hrs)

Supplemental:

• Lecture by Alphonso Lingis (@51:51) from a Moby-Dick symposium at The DePaul Humanities Center
• "Conflagration" (1958 adaptation)
• Sequence from "Mishima: A Life In Four Chapters"

Extracts:

"The invaders, on their march back to the sea, consoled themselves for their repulse by setting fire to every house and temple in their route..." (Typee, 4)

"...his voice, otherwise singularly musical, as if expressive of the harmony within, was apt to develop an organic hesitancy, in fact more or less of a stutter or even worse. In this particular Billy was a striking instance that the arch interferer, the envious marplot of Eden, still has more or less to do with every human consignment to this planet of Earth. In every case, one way or another he is sure to slip in his little card, as much as to remind us—I too have a hand here." ("Billy Budd")

"Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me." (M-D, 96)

This meetup is part of a series on Japan Unbolted.