The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
3.9
16
5
1
288
Paperback(1st ed)
15.26
In Stock
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780679752707 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 10/28/1994 |
| Series: | Vintage International Series |
| Edition description: | 1st ed |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Sales rank: | 316,213 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.13(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.58(d) |
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
3.9 out of 5
based on
0 ratings.
16 reviews.
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This is my favorite Yukio Mishima book, I've read almost everything he wrote that has been translated into English, this story has many elements; the ideas of friendship, love, physical handicap, betrayal, death. This is a serious book and very rewarding to read.
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If you haven't yet read Mishima, this would be a good starting point this book gives a good introduction to Mishima's themes (death, beauty, youth, nihilism) and is much more accessible than the Sea of Fertility tetralogy. The darkness and sharpness of Mishima's vision is present here in the study of an acolyte's incerasingly detached internal world. The translation is beautiful and Mishima's writing talent, especially his knack for analogies, shines through. This hardcover edition has a nice print and is definitely worth the extra few bucks over the paperback.
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If you like to read the best modern Japanese literature, you should choose this book. The theme is heavy and you may feel kind of depressed... but it has a beautiful ending. Knowing the fact that Mishima committed HARAKIRI suicide in his real life might help you to taste this story.
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Mishima gives us a fascinating protagonist with the troubled stuttering monk Mizoguchi who is transfixed by the beauty of the Golden Temple, which tempts into destructive obsession. The reader is driven into the mind of this pitiful character, and even compelled to sympathize with him. The questions he asks are at one point, in some form or the other, asked by us all. The impulses that he allows to flare up and consume him twinge in the nerves of even the most level and benevolent among us. Mizoguchi and his madness are a vehicle to explore the nature and power of aesthetics, also the divide between knowledge and action, and of course the often devastating power of obsession. Mishima, with this book, rivals Tanizaki in that last regard. Still, though others may well disagree, this work isn't as penetrating as the Sailor or Spring Snow. It could be that something vital is lost with Mishima trying to blend together a historical event with his personal views and imaginings, rather than when his visions bloom altogether from imagination and individual experience.
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OOhhhh¿I think this book is awesome. I know a lot of people don¿t like it because it is very literary and cerebral, but I eat that stuff up. Most of the time is spent in the protagonists head. We understand the way he thinks and looks at life. We get to see how the mind of a criminal is formed over time. A compelling read. Philosophical. Provokes thought and discussion. A book you can definitely discuss over a meal. It is also based on a famous true story.
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Yet another intense psychological novel from this truly great writer. This story was inspired by actual events - the burning of the Golden Pavilion Kinkaku-ji in Kyoto, dating from the 1400s and considered a national monument, by a young acolyte in 1950. Mizoguchi, the young Buddhist acolyte in the novel, is afflicted with an ugly face and a stutter. His stutter alienates him from others and he starts to harbor evil thoughts. His physical ugliness he justifies with inner ugliness and on this is rooted his obsession for beauty and a pathological urge to destroy whatever represents beauty. The Golden Temple is for him, the most beautiful thing on earth, and so he must destroy it. Typically Mishima, there is plenty of internal monologues in this novel, as well as the intellectualizing of a seemingly trivial act. Symbolisms abound, more obvious in the types of friendships Mizoguchi is able to develop. His dark and morbid outlook is reinforced by his friendship with a fellow-student, who is also ugly and deformed, and who is even more masochistic and bitter with life. He also befriends a student who symbolized the good and the perfect. But all of them reject the world, in their own ways. This is certainly not an easy read, and it takes effort on the reader's part to be able to hold the narrative and follow the thought processes of a disturbed mind.
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What could have been an absorbing treatment of an anti-social neurotic gets tripped up by a lot of navel-gazing twaddle; whether due to Morris' translation or Mishima himself, I'm not sure.
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This is a 1959 novel based on a Japanese student (not a very good one) burning down a temple which he felt was very beautiful. His thought processes were so foreign that I really could not get caught upin the work. Only at the end did it seem worth reading, so I have to say the book did not speak to me--the central character does such bizarre things that he seemed to have nothing to say to me..
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'The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea' is a remarkable novel that examines a child's struggle to accept the world and his place in it. 'The Temple of The Golden Pavilion' is a similar examination, this time looking at a slightly older boy, who is studying to become a Buddhist priest.In this novel, the main character is a young man who suffers from an unconquerable stutter, who finds himself unable to properly interact with the world around him. His every conception of the world is tainted by this stutter, and by his highest ideal of beauty, the Golden Temple in Kyoto, where he studies and lives.As with 'Sailor', the boy is overcome with hatred towards his mother; here, it is for the act of adultery that she perpetrates with his uncle, whilst he is sleeping in the same room, and in the presence of his ill father. This feeling of hatred and anger is made tangible all through the book, right to its bitter conclusion.
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Based on the true story of a young Zen Buddhist monk who torched the Kinkakuji (Golden Temple) in 1950, the protoganist Mizoguchi is a tortured soul who struggles through his formative years with a case of severe stuttering and the conviction that he is too physically ugly to be loved. It's a beautifully written book, if also sometimes stilted in its many florid descriptions (though this may be due to the translation). It's an interesting exercise of trying to get inside a deranged person's head. Whether I come away with a real sense of Mizoguchi's soul is another matter. Glad I read the book, though, and it's interesting to read about life in post-WWII Kyoto.
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reminds me of yugioh.
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Loaded with typos. Find a different edition.
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