The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

Literary fiction

Print length: 304 pagesEveryman's Library, 1995

Description

Yukio Mishima’s The Temple of the Golden Pavilion centers on Mizoguchi, a withdrawn young man whose stutter deepens his sense of isolation. Raised to regard Kyoto’s Golden Pavilion as the embodiment of beauty, he later becomes an acolyte at the temple. Proximity does not free him from its hold; instead, the building increasingly dominates his imagination and sharpens his resentment toward ordinary life. Against the upheaval of wartime and postwar Japan, he moves through friendship, desire, cruelty, and philosophical debate while his reverence turns destructive. The novel traces an unsettling conflict between aesthetic worship, alienation, and violence.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Dense · Descriptive · Lyrical · Poetic

Pace

Measured

Tone

Atmospheric · Dark · Philosophical · Unsettling

Structure

Linear

Focus

Atmosphere · Character · Ideas

Emotional intensity

4 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 4 / 5
Ideas: 4 / 5
Structure: 3 / 5
Background knowledge: 2 / 5

Themes

Art and creativityIdentityIsolationMoralityObsession

About Mishima Yukio

Yukio Mishima was a major postwar Japanese stylist whose unusually broad career encompassed novels, plays, short stories, essays, film, and a libretto. His writing joins elaborate, often lyrical language to an exacting interest in how people turn beauty, desire, and social roles into private absolutes. He drew on both traditional Japanese and modern Western literary styles, placing formal elegance beside psychological and physical extremity. Confessions of a Mask and Forbidden Colors examine the performance of acceptable identity under the pressure of concealed desire, while The Temple of the Golden Pavilion follows an ideal of beauty as it hardens into alienation and destruction. Across such work, Mishima repeatedly tests the distance between inward life and public conduct, and between aesthetic ideals and the violence they may invite. The autobiographical essay Sun and Steel extends his range beyond fiction. His increasingly visible far-right politics and political activities also made him a controversial figure, complicating the reception of a body of work distinguished by its stylistic control and unsettling intensity.

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Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Everyman's Library
Language: English
ISBN: 9780679433156

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