The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
by Yukio Mishima(1956)
NovelJapanese
“Ever since my childhood, Father had often spoken to me about the Golden Temple.”
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
Yukio Mishima(1956)
A young acolyte stands before the most beautiful building in Kyoto and feels not peace but a compulsion that will end in arson. Yukio Mishima based this 1956 novel on the true story of a novice monk who burned the Kinkaku-ji in 1950, transforming it into a meditation on the unbearable weight of beauty. Mizoguchi is a stutterer, an outsider for whom the pavilion has become an obsession blocking all access to life. Mishima's prose enacts the paradox with merciless precision: the more exquisitely the temple is described, the more inevitable its destruction becomes. The novel asks whether beauty can be possessed or only annihilated, and refuses to answer. It remains one of the century's most disturbing explorations of the sacred and its shadow.
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Dostoevsky builds the same obsessive approach to a transgression, and the act is just as inevitable and just as insufficient.
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Camus stages the same inexplicable act of violence by a man who cannot explain himself to the world that judges him.