epub ☆ õ Yukio Mishima
In The Temple of the Golden Pavilion celebrated Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima creates a haunting and vivid portrait of a young man’s obsession with idealized beauty and his destructive uest to possess it fullyMizoguchi an ostracized stutterer develops a childhood fascination with Kyoto’s famous Golden Temple While an acolyte at Oh yes you do so want to read this novel I would mark the following synopsis as a spoiler but all is revealed in the introduction and the events that inspired the book are about as big a mystery for the Japanese as what happened to the Titanic is to Westerners anyway so don't go getting all sore with me like I'm maliciously ruining all your fun We are being multicultural and pretending we already knew about this major historical event before hearing of and reading Mishima's novel Who's with me Then proceedMizoguchi Zen acolyte and aspiring spiritual figurehead of the centuries old Golden Temple in Kyoto develops a pathological reverence for and inevitable hatred of his place of worship Even well before Mizoguchi arrives in Kyoto he positions the Golden Temple in his mind as his only gauge of beauty and divinity in the world Not just aesthetic beauty either; importantly the temple represents the potential for spiritual beauty and meaning both his own and that of othersbut mostly his own Mizoguchi is spiritually void arguably sociopathic and has a major chip on his shoulder about women He has seen some shit man his mother during his childhood a neighborhood girl during his preteen years and an elusive woman during his later teenage years all serve to twist and defile his sexual development his views concerning the female species as a whole and rewire his desires in such a way that they become insurmountable and hallucinatory Added to his troubles he has a painful speech impediment and a temperament generally divorced from the everyday social capabilities of your average red blooded male This paragraph could go on for days if I continued to attempt to fully explain his psychology so I will just try and wrap things up and save the goods for your future reading experience After many a twisted cavern is transpassed in his mind after the Golden Temple's glory has eclipsed that of all else in his life Mizoguchi decides it's time to get all Mark David Chapman on it He must destroy it He will be cleansed he will be remembered the world will be balanced againNever mind the other elements of Mizoguchi's obsession one of the most exuisitely designed aspects of the novel is his rationalization process Mishima pits Zen Buddhism against itself selectively interpreting the scripture in a way that presents Mizoguchi at least to himself as enlightened than his fellow practitioners and fully justified in his actions It's the sand mandala argument beauty is temporary as is everything but suffering The temple is an object of great beauty which has stood in disharmony with this Buddhist doctrine for far too long and Mizoguchi must make right with the world by ridding it of this almost 600 year old mockeryAll this and yet that isn't even the best part The prose the prose oh my I will leave it for you to discover Read some uotes and you will see what I mean I knew from my previous experience with Mishima The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea that the man could deliver a mean inner dialogue that his paragraphs were like finely crafted trapsdark pits and that he was clearly a genius of style That book sort of fell apart for me at the end but I still read the majority of it with a gasp trapped in my throat What a gifted fascinating man A plea please stop killing yourselves gifted fascinating men Fortunately his catalog is enormous and I will probably never read it in its entirety If you decide to try though I suggest you start hereThe pavilion itself was in fact so treasured among others of course that the Allied forces wouldn't even touch Kyoto which should say something; they obviously had very few ualms about large scale jaw dropping destruction
Yukio Mishima õ 金閣寺 mobi
金閣寺N brilliantly portrays the passions and agonies of a young man in postwar Japan bringing to the subject the erotic imagination and instinct for the dramatic moment that marked Mishima as one of the towering makers of modern fiction With an introduction by Donald Keene; Translated from the Japanese by Ivan MorrisBook Jacket Status Jacket Pre review When the Golden Temple got bombed perhaps the phoenix statue at the rooftop would be awakened as a real undying phoenix and rose from the flame and the ashesPeace was kept when death and violence were on display publicly and regularly So the one thing that should be made public properly is execution Actually I read the Taiwanese translation of the story so the above uotes are not from the English translationRating 35 starsI think the first half of the novel is really brilliant and it can easily win 4 or 5 stars The author Yukio Mishima wrote in a slightly smei autobiographical way a twisted coming of age story and this coming of age story is based on a real incident of a young monk's burning of Temple of the Golden Pavilion in the post WWII eraHowever near the ending part and the narration about the MC doing damages to his own life starts to drag that's why the rating has been loweredWhat I really like about the story is the description of the young protagonist's reaction on Japan's defeat in WWII his inferior complex due to his physical disability and a 'weak unimpressive' body I can envision Mishima applying his own thoughts and emotion on these parts and his obsession with the shining perfection which is the Temple of the Golden PavilionIn the few Mr Mishima's novels that I'd read there are always an obsession with beauty and perfection and death love and betrayal nihility and destruction etc Without those elements The Temple of the Golden Pavilion would simply fall apart as a novel Plus I really like how Mr Mishima described his young MC's sense of alienation and being rejected by the normal world I can imagine this sense of alienation is relied to Mr Misima being a homosexual young man growing up in the WWII Japan where the existence of homosexuality or other forms of sexual deviance and desires were barely even acknowledged I've never been to the real life Temple of the Golden Pavilion before but I'd been to the Temple of the Silver Pavilion aka Jishō ji or Ginkaku ji during my visit to KyotoLink Link