read 金閣寺 doc Í Hardcover

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read 金閣寺 doc Í Hardcover ☆  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 TemplThe temple he fixates on the structure’s aesthetic perfection and it becomes the one and only object of his desire But as Mizoguchi begins to perceive flaws in the temple he determines that the only true path to beauty lies in an act of horrendous violence Based on a real incident that occurred in 1950 The Temple of the Golden Pavilio On 1 July 1950 during the Allied Occupation of Japan a Buddhist monk by the name of Yoken Hayashi set fire to the Kinkaku ji or as it is known in English ‘The Temple of the Golden Pavilion’ Yoken was a man of little conseuence; a character in history who had he not committed such an acrimonious act would not have been remembered today He suffered from a debilitating stutter and was considered ugly by many of his peers It is often conjectured that Yoken was either schizophrenic or suffered from some degree of mental illness And yet some observers such as the Japanese literary scholar Donald Keene think that Yoken’s motives to destroy the Kinkaku ji were inspired by feelings of indignation regarding the commercialization of Buddhist temples during the Occupation The only known insight that Yoken has offered on his crime was “ I do not believe that I have done anything wrong It is said that a national treasure has been burned but that seems or less meaningless” To this day his true motives cease to be completely understood Some years later the iconoclastic Japanese novelist Mishima Yukio researched the burning of the Kinkaku ji using it as source material for a deeply philosophical novel entitled The Temple of the Golden PavilionThe Kinkaku ji – its proper name was the Rokuon ji – is a by product of Muromachi culture and was originally a villa built by the statesman Saoinji Kintsune It was subseuently purchased by Ashikaga Yoshimitsu After the death of Yoshimitsu what was once intended as a relaxing place to escape the pressures of the administrative duties of the Shogunate was converted into a Zen Buddhist temple The particular sect of Buddhism practiced was Rinzai Buddhism which focuses on meditation and koans Japanese riddles; it is one of the three main sects of Zen Buddhism in Japan It was in this building that Yoken trained to become a Zen priest as his father had Bathed in the luster of its gold covering embodying aspects of Chinese style architecture and Heian aesthetics this three storied double roofed structure located at the edge of a pond surrounded by lush forestry is truly an image of cultural beauty In developing the character of Mizoguchi who is based on Yoken Mishima wanted to create a figure whose personal deformities – his stutter and his ugliness – provoke an obsession with a symbol of pure beauty Early in the novel Mizoguchi’s fascination with the Kinkaku ji is inspired by what he sees as its permanence in a world full of death and constant decay “I knew and believed that amid all the changes of the world The Golden Temple remained there safe and immutable” Against the historical backdrop of the Pacific War Mizoguchi sees a good deal of death around him Uiko a local girl he knew in Maizuru is killed by the Kempeitai Japanese military police for sleeping with a deserter his father passes as well as his close friend Tsurukawa later revealed to be a suicide and he witnesses the devastation reaped by the Pacific War specifically the air raids throughout Japan Kyoto where the Kinkaku ji is located was an exception during this time During the strategic aerial bombings orchestrated by Curtis Lemay Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s one reuest was that Kyoto not be destroyed as it was the cultural heart of the Japan and most notably its former Imperial capital; the focus was on the industrialized areas such as Tokyo and Osaka It is this uality of immutability that Mizoguchi sees in the Kinkaku ji that eventually inspires feelings of hatred Initially he decides to burn down the temple because he assumes that it will eventually be destroyed as many lives around him have but the resilience of this ancient structure is what motivates him into actionAnd ultimately action not words is what is truly important to both Mizoguchi and Mishima Later in the novel Mizoguchi befriends a fellow deformed student with ‘clubbed feet’ named Kashiwagi He admires Kashiwagi because as he saw it “I understood that he disliked lasting beauty His likings were limited to things such as music which vanished instantly or flower arrangements which faded in a matter of days; he loathed architecture and literature” Though it has been commented on before it’s tempting here to draw the ultimate artistic parallel that between Yoken’s act of burning down the Kinkaku ji and Mishima’s attempted coup d’etat in 1970 resulting in his suicideIn this light the uestion becomes one of whether the dramatic actions of these men were motivated by political realities or it was because both of them were so disturbed by the impermanent nature of beauty in the real world that they felt the need to destroy it in order to free themselves from the oppressive philosophical weight of its transient essence Considering his reverence for the Heian aesthetic Buddhism and Japanese nationalism it’s likely that Mishima saw in Yoken an act of protest against the increasing modernity prevalent in Japanese culture and social life after the war In spite of Mishima’s apparent fondness for European literature and philosophy as well as his interest in American culture he saw Japan’s situation as relatively hopeless In the years leading up to his death he confided in his close friend the Japanese film scholar Donald Richie that for Japan “there is nothing to save” This leads Richie to speculate on Mishima’s motives for his suicide “When I learned of his suicide that is what I first remembered that he already knew that there was nothing to save His may have been a political statement an aesthetic statement but it was also a despairing personal statement” This last line is the most striking “a despairing personal statement” It’s uestionable that Yoken’s character was as deeply philosophical as he is portrayed by Mishima Rather in The Temple of the Golden Pavilion Mizoguchi comes off as a literary mouthpiece for Mishima’s thematic obsession with the fleeting nature of existence This melancholy preoccupation with the transient nature of life was first articulated with precision by the 18th century philosopher and literary critic Motoori Norinaga whose interpretation of the Heian period classic The Tale of Genji viewed the book in the context of mono no aware or “ a sensitivity to things This same thematic concept one seemingly poetic and artistic than political is also embodied in Mishima’s rendition of the famous Noh play Sotoba Komachi which is of a mono no aware take on femininity In his book on Noh theater William T Vollmann opines that “Mishima continually implies that the beauty of femininity’s mask is not merely delusory but dangerous distracting voracious the ruination of male energy Again there is a clearly defined thematic concern with aging and transience in Mishima’s take on the destruction and passing of beauty; this time on the grotesue Noh figure of Komachi Mishima was also very fond of Lady Murasaki’s classic tale of the “shining prince” The Temple of the Golden Pavilion is a rich complicated novel as are many of Mishima’s other books While the theme of mono no aware is predominant throughout this fictional account of a crazed Buddhist acolyte and his relatively inscrutable actions there are metaphysical Aristotelian musings; Mizoguchi’s distinction between the world of words that creates his inner world and the outer world of reality The hypocrisy of Zen Buddhism is called into uestion the Superior's courting of a geisha which is reminiscent of the character of Redshirt in Natsume Soseki’s Botchan And above all else a Japan that was experiencing the American influence of the military postwar poverty and a diminishing faith in the kokutai after Emperor Hirohito was renounced his divinity While all of these historical details add depth to the story of a man who many thought was insane if not just painfully dull the most powerful theme is the hatred of beautiful things This hatred and cruelty as Mizoguchi describes it are again inspired by the unattainable nature of beauty As Mizoguchi declares in conversation with Kashiwagi right before he’s about to finally put his words into action and tap into that “outer reality” “Beauty beautiful things’ I continued ‘those are my most deadly enemies And for Mishima this was also true His life in its many guises and forms was a continuous pursuit of and battle with the transient essence of beauty Whether he found it in the literary classics of Japan ancient temples femininity or the nationalistic fervor of the kokutai the profound effect that beauty had on Mishima’s life in the end made living unbearable