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69 of 71 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An excellent psychological examination, September 28, 2003
The Temple of the Golden Pavillion is an excellent psychological novel. In this book, we can see how a mind can be driven along to evil through obsession. The main character of this book is Mizoguchi. He is the son of a poor rural priest. He is taken by his dying father to become an acolyte at the Temple of the Golden Pavillion. All throughout his childhood, his father had told him about the spledid beauty of this temple. Mizoguchi builds up an image of ideal beauty in his mind based on this Golden Pavillion. However, this ideal image causes him to feel disappointed in any supposed form of beauty, including women and even the actual physical Golden Pavillion. Nothing can live up to this image of supreme beauty. As he enters university, he comes under the influence of Kashiwagi, a fellow student with a very bitter view of life. Under this influence, Mizoguchi's dark feelings bubble up inside him. One of my favorite parts is Mizoguchi and Kashiwagi's discussion of knowledge and action. Kashiwagi asserts that an unbearable life can be made bearable by just having the knowledge that it is unchangable. However, Mizoguchi argues that knowledge is a dead thing, and that only action to change to change an unbearable life can make it bearable. This attitude leads him to his final desperate attack. I think that this book is particularly important in this age of terrorism. Often people ask why do terrorist do what they do, and they ask this because they don't understand the obsession (whether in ideal beauty as in this book, or with fundamentalist religion as in the case with terrorists), the hopelessness, and the desperation that they feel. I think if you read this book, you can understand how a mind is turned to evil acts through these means. Please read this book, if only to understand this point. A previous reviewer complained that ther isn't much action in this book, and that is true, but that's no reason to give it a low rating. It's a psychological novel about the process of a mind on the road to evil, so naturally the main part of the story takes place in the mind. If you want a novel with exploding cars, you should try a Tom Clancy novel instead.
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23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One reason for 'Kinkakuji', April 22, 1999
By A Customer
This novel is a good example of a theme that frequently arises in Mishima's work: the resentment of the object of desire. Mizoguchi, the protagonist, is overwhelmed by the beauty of the golden temple and learns to resent it through the guru-like counsel of a friend. Over and over, Mizoguchi feels overwhelmed and made insignificant by the beautiful things in his new life as a monk: the beautiful temple, sexual possibility, and ultimately, his autonomy, perhaps even his life. This book, arguably Mishima's best, may well have been another one of the author's suicide rehearsals, and the unforgettable psychological impact of the book is that of a legendary storyteller demonstrating his Hamlet-like "north-by-northwest" madness. Technically, this is an amazing book, dripping with evocative, beautiful imagery and reminds me of a movie in its directorial-like descriptive method, its forceful 'mis en scene'. Artistically, I suspect Mishima was trying to compete with his great literary forefather Kawabata by playing with western ideas of the apolonean, further fueling his hopelessness and his rage with his art and with himself, but that is a bit academic and beyond my ability to determine. Ultimately, I cherish this book for its tortured explanation of the harshness love and beauty cruelly impose, a feral scream quietly hidden in the drug-like beauty of a book.
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Not So Golden, December 6, 2004
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, by Yukio Mishima, is a tragic story about Mizoguchi, the story's protagonist, and his struggle to come to terms with his existence. This novel does not attempt to teach us how or in what way we should live our lives; rather, it offers an insight into the mind of a deeply troubled young man whose existence he justifies by hating the outside world.
Told from the first-person perspective, I had trouble getting into the novel at first - I enjoy an intrusive narrator. After a few chapters, however, I was drawn into Mizoguchi's world of contrasts between evil and beauty. We learn that Mizoguchi stutters a lot and because of this he has been cast out of society at school. His stuttering, his feeling that he is unattractive, and some of the things he has done (such as stepping on a prostitute's stomach) cause him to believe that he is a terribly ugly and evil person. However, Mizoguchi would have himself be seen no other way. Since he has been cast out of the world, he comes to believe that the world is a beautiful and good place in which he does not belong. Yet Mizoguchi soon finds out that this perception of the word - one in which the world is a kind and beautiful place - is not entirely accurate. It is here that I believe Mishima's writing ability stands out among other writers. This is because he is able to show how people like Mizoguchi and Kashiwagi, who is met later in the novel, can see the destruction or defilement of something beautiful as a validation of their own existence.
For example, when Mizoguchi wished "that the Golden Temple was going to be bombed," (62) it was in order for him to remain ugly and evil in his own eyes. While the Golden Temple exists, he is able to find flaws in it - the phoenix looks more like a crow, it is made up of several different architectural styles and its shadow looks more beautiful than the actual building itself. This is not to say that the Golden Temple is not actually beautiful, but that it becomes more beautiful only when it is gone. Since he could then say that the Golden Pavilion was beautiful and that beauty did exist in the world, Mizoguchi could use that as a way to underscore his own ugliness.
With The Temple of the Golden Pavilion Mishima holds his own among the great writes of fiction. Just like any other book, it takes a while to start enjoying, but picks up once you do. It does not try to give us guidelines to live our lives by nor does it have a "The moral of the story is..." This is part of the reason why I enjoyed reading it so much - I did not feel as though there was some sort of a hidden meaning behind every detail of which I needed to be aware. Rather, it provides a detailed insight into the thought processes of a person who can only see himself from a negative perspective.
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