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It's said that even the most exalted auteurs are mainly rewriting their one driving vision in various incarnations. Hitchcock, Truffaut, Melville, Godard come to mind.
Even though I'm necessarily viewing Yukio Mishima's ouevre through the refracted lens of various English translators, in my ongoing binge I am coming to the realization that, like Stravinsky, Mishima remakes his language, his choreography, his orchestration, his POV, his most intrinsic philosophy, his narrative trajectory wholly invested and recreated in each unique work.
The Temple of The Golden Pavilion is a novel based on true events. Mizoguchi is a Zen acolyte, son of a Buddhist priest, apprenticed at the Golden Pavilion. We are witness to his coming-of-age, pathologically, beginning from an abusive act of ultimately inhumane hypocracy from his father, through his Travis Bickle trajectory into evangelistic mania and ultimate catastrophe. (Don't make the same mistake I did by reading Nancy Wilson Ross' inadequate introduction; just read from Mishima's beginning.)
Not since Joseph Heller's extraordinary incipient descent in Something Happened have I read such a compelling and repelling narration of incipient madness.
The tyranny of beauty, the purity of evil, the pervasive sense of 'unease', so clearly in kinship with the German 'unheimlich': uncanny; the uncontrollable trembling of the hands indicative of psychosis only given voice and witness by Mariko, this Taxi Driver's Whore With a Heart of Gold; the inviolate and indestructible quality of human life and the immortality and fragility of symbols and structures.
The crazier he gets, the more hallucinatory and beautiful the prose becomes. Beginning in a place of utter, ascetic and emotionless inception, Mishima escalates Mizoguchi's perverse but inexorable pursuit of knowledge into an ecstasy, an unfettered erotic and evangelical incendiary impulse.
- Paperback: 256 pages
- Publisher: Vintage/Ebury (a Division of Random; 32nd Printing edition (May 3, 2001)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0099285673
- ISBN-13: 978-0099285670
- Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 0.6 x 7.8 inches
- Shipping Weight: 7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
- Average Customer Review: 39 customer reviews
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Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#1,332,357 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #36524 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
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