Temple of the Golden Pavilion

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima, 262 pages

"Ever since my childhood, Father had often spoken to me about the Golden Temple."  From an early age, then, the ideal of the Golden Temple of Kinkaku-ji dominated Mizoguchi's imagination, but what is a portal for the father becomes a barrier for the son.  Distanced from others by his stutter, convinced of his own essential unloveliness, Mizoguchi comes to hate the Golden Temple more the more he is captivated by its beauty.  After the death of his father, he becomes a novice at the Temple, and it becomes the ultimate symbol of his father, his religion, his country, his traditions, his future, and everything that stands in the way of his freedom to be a beast.

Based on the true story of the novice priest who burned down the Golden Temple in 1950, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion is full of Mishima's characteristic alternately achingly beautiful and shockingly brutal enigmatic vignettes.  The novel - part biography, part prose poem, part koan - is an enchanting tragedy both personal and civilizational.

Mishima

Mishima: A Vision of the Void by Marguerite Yourcenar, translated by Alberto Manguel,152 pages

Early in her short study of the life and works of Yukio Mishima, Marguerite Yourcenar notes how, in our progressively illiterate society, the lives of artists have come to overshadow their works.  In Mishima's case, however, it is impossible to dismiss the former in order to concentrate entirely on the latter, as his life and death were themselves self-consciously artistic.  Indeed, the artist-hero's enthusiasm for traditional Japanese culture has about it an atmosphere of play, not only due to the undeniably strong influence Western culture had on him but, more fundamentally, the patent impossibility of entering voluntarily into a tradition that can only be received, never chosen.  And yet, as Yourcenar maintains, his final gesture was intended as a consummation, an act which fulfilled his desire to enter fully into that tradition.  Throughout his life and work, Mishima treated identity as something transitory and ephemeral, an attitude only reinforced by Buddhist teachings on the illusory nature of the world.  For Yourcenar, Mishima's suicide is the final punctuation on his lifelong existential project of making his own meaning in the void of the absurd, although the interpretation suggests itself that his was a search for something solid on which to rest his faith amidst the great sea of liquid modernity.

Acts of Worship

Acts of Worship: Seven Stories by Yukio Mishima, translated by John Bester, 205 pages

The modern tendency to focus on the biographies of writers rather than their works is certainly on full display with the man who wrote under the name Yukio Mishima, who is better known for his spectacular suicide than for anything he wrote.  Acts of Worship, a collection of seven short stories first published in Japan in the '60s, forms an interesting counterpoint to this tendency, suggesting that identities are crafted, consciously or unconsciously, rather than discovered.  Most of the stories center on young adults as they struggle to build themselves in the face of the gaze of their peers, with the exception being the title story, which forms an elaborate capstone through its depiction of a celebrated poet and his middle-aged housekeeper as they, too, manufacture their identities in the twilight of life.