A young Buddhist acolyte, obsessed with the beauty of the Golden Temple in Kyoto, burns it down. Mishima based this on a true incident from 1950, transforming it into a meditation on beauty, destruction, and the relationship between them. Mizoguchi stutters, is ugly, feels excluded from life by his obsession with pure form. The prose is cold and exquisite, describing the temple in passages that make you understand why it must be destroyed. Mishima would later destroy himself in a ritual suicide. This novel reveals the logic of aesthetic self-destruction. Beauty that cannot be possessed must be annihilated.