Rating: 
Summary: Kinkakuji
Review: Although I read this book several times before and wrote an analytical paper about it, I'll just say that it's an excellent book. Even if you end up hating it, you'll be glad you read it.
If you can, read it in Japanese, or in the French translation which is much better than the English one. It is a pity that Keene didn't translate this work, probably Mishima's best.
For those of you who have already read it: the Kinkakuji really does look as if it hovers in the air above the pond. Don't miss it if you happen to go to Kyoto. Another place (and very different sect) where you should go is Koyasan in winter.
Rating: 
Summary: Inane Internal Instrospective Inferno
Review: Given the other reviews, this seems a dissenting opinion, but Mishima's "The Temple of the Golden Pavilion" was a pretty laborious read. I read the entire book out loud to an audience and found myself wishing it would come to an end. All apologies to those who liked this book. I respect that, but the problem for me came in the amount of endless introspection that overflows the pages of "The Golden Pavilion." I don't mind some philosophical pandering in my literature and thoroughly enjoy it when it's done with the uniqueness of Don DeLillo or Milan Kundera. But here, Mishima takes whatever plot is involved in this tale of a temple student gone awry in the face of foreign influence, loss of values, poverty, and psychosis and sucks the life blood right out the marrow of it. This leaves the book with no skeletal structure, no bones, just a big lethargic mushy mass of meandering thoughts and not even well-worded or unique ones at that. Here's what I mean, we get no less than 5 pages of a bee landing on a Chrysanthemum...somebody help me please. We get laboriously repetitive words (not sure if that's the translators fault or Mishima's) with a mention of the character's Kashiwagi's clubfoot about every other sentence. We get 7 counts of the use of the word, "adumbration" in one paragraph...7 mind you. Who uses the word "adumbration", much less 7 times in a paragraph, 3 in one sentence? Don't get me started. Not a detail goes by without Mishima turning it over in the character's mind endlessly until we are no longer remotely interested. It's your typical boy loves temple, temple is too beautiful, boy must destroy temple sort of story. And where the plot starts moving along towards the end, Mishima interjects some inane meandering ethereal philosophy that seems to lead nowhere, just to kill the momentum. On page 255 there's the line, "I was overcome by intense weariness." So true, so true. That's how this book grabbed me through and through.
Rating:
Summary: Inane Internal Instrospective Inferno
Review: Given the other reviews, this seems a dissenting opinion, but Mishima's "The Temple of the Golden Pavilion" was a pretty laborious read. I read the entire book out loud to an audience and found myself wishing it would come to an end. All apologies to those who liked this book. I respect that, but the problem for me came in the amount of endless introspection that overflows the pages of "The Golden Pavilion." I don't mind some philosophical pandering in my literature and thoroughly enjoy it when it's done with the uniqueness of Don DeLillo or Milan Kundera. But here, Mishima takes whatever plot is involved in this tale of a temple student gone awry in the face of foreign influence, loss of values, poverty, and psychosis and sucks the life blood right out the marrow of it. This leaves the book with no skeletal structure, no bones, just a big lethargic mushy mass of meandering thoughts and not even well-worded or unique ones at that. Here's what I mean, we get no less than 5 pages of a bee landing on a Chrysanthemum...somebody help me please. We get laboriously repetitive words (not sure if that's the translators fault or Mishima's) with a mention of the character's Kashiwagi's clubfoot about every other sentence. We get 7 counts of the use of the word, "adumbration" in one paragraph...7 mind you. Who uses the word "adumbration", much less 7 times in a paragraph, 3 in one sentence? Don't get me started. Not a detail goes by without Mishima turning it over in the character's mind endlessly until we are no longer remotely interested. It's your typical boy loves temple, temple is too beautiful, boy must destroy temple sort of story. And where the plot starts moving along towards the end, Mishima interjects some inane meandering ethereal philosophy that seems to lead nowhere, just to kill the momentum. On page 255 there's the line, "I was overcome by intense weariness." So true, so true. That's how this book grabbed me through and through.
Rating:
Summary: Eastern thought, universal writing...
Review: Having only read Mishima's Sound of Waves prior to this, I was pleased to find the same beautiful writing with an edgier subject matter...I found this book particularly notable. The first person narrative (by Mizoguchi, in the novel) provides contrast, in that most people will note the logical fallacies in the narrators thinking and conclusions - and yet we are given those fallacies as fact, as Mizoguchi takes them to be fact. This results in a startling perspective, given without moral censure, which in itself is very interesting. There is never a time when Mishima implies that anything Mizoguchi does is "wrong", something which is done in most books by western authors. All conclusions on right and wrong are left to the reader, which is refreshing in a time and a country where right and wrong are increasingly dictated by outside authorities. This freedom is handled very deftly, although some people may find it disturbing. The last point I like about this book is that, while it is based around a Buddhist temple and many of the characters are from within that world, the religion is never preached - instead, it is more of a background, something taken for fact because of where the novel is set and who it is about. All in all, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion is a remarkable book, and I recommend it strongly to anyone who considers reading it.
Rating:
Summary: One of Mishima's best
Review: I reckon The Temple of the Golden Pavilion to be one of the best novels of Mishima. This book is therefore quite something since Mishima in my opinion is one of the best writers of the 20th century. The protagonist is Mizoguchi a shy boy with a speaking problem(or has he problem speaking?). Mizoguchi is mentally and phisically overwhelmed by the building of the Golden Pavilion to such an extent, that it leads to disastrous consequences. If you want to read a great book by one of Japanese finest writers try this one.
Rating: 
Summary: Japan and sex.
Review: I've seen some shows that the Japanese have a wierd take on sex. I don't believe that all Japanese are like this. If they as a country were lost in the world of sex, they wouldn't have the power that is spreading everywhere in the world.
Now, this power is not selfish, nor is it dangerous. This power that prevalent is the power of governmental submission. As in Japan, and other asian countries, there is an enormous sense of duty to country. Like JFK said, "Do not ask what your country can do for you, but ask what can you do for your country." This small little country once attacked the large country of America. Seems crazy, huh? But remember, we had to nuke Japan to win the war. Not so crazy, huh?
This is a good thing, obedience to authority. Even better, servitude to God and country. Sounds like the boy scouts.
Well, I don't know what I have said, but this is the bomb that destroys all.
-Calvin Newman
Rating:
Summary: Masochistic Nihonjinron
Review: It is hard to tell whether Yukio Mishima's The Temple of the Golden Pavilion is meant to be a harsh criticism of Japan's superficial and self-interested modern society or rather one man's confession of a life long obsession with masochistic beauty. A sickly youth, a passive War-time experience and a longing for a beauty that can only be found in self destruction blurs the Narrator's voice and that of the author into one form. This novel can only be read and understood through allegory due to Mishima's everything-but-subtle writing style. In doing so, Mishima's poetic prose capture the full on collision between traditional and modern Japan during and after World War II. Over the course of the text, the reader follows the Narrator in horrific delight as traditional Japan dies a slow death as symbolized by the Golden Temple.
As with many of his novels, Mishima insists on mourning beauty that has survived too long in the real world. When first confronted with the Golden Temple, the Narrator is shocked to find that the actual Temple pales in comparison to his personal vision of the perfection embodied by the Temple in his mind, "Then the Golden Temple, about which I had dreamed so much, displayed its entire form to me most disappointingly... The shadow was more beautiful than the building itself, " (24). For the Narrator, the Golden Temple symbolized all that is beautiful, precious and sacred in the world. Over time, the Temple in his mind became synonymous with the glory and beauty of Japan and its past. After his initial shock and disillusionment, Narrator comes to believe that the image of the Golden Temple which he held in his mind of was more beautiful than the actual Temple could ever be. It is only when faced with what seems like inevitable destruction that the Narrator is able to see beauty not only in the Golden Temple but also within himself.
The Narrator's stuttering and his insistence on his own ugliness is brought out in his description of the reality of the dilapidated Temple. Before coming to the Golden Temple, the Narrator saw his ugliness, stuttering and suffering as a sign that there must exist somewhere in this world a thing such as perfection and beauty. This masochistic way to cope with a depraved world backfires when the Golden Temple falls short of the Narrator's mental image. With nothing beautiful nor perfect in this world, all is suffering and there is no hope for the Narrator's redemption nor a glimpse of beauty. In response, the Narrator's disillusion takes on yet another form when his life takes on a new purpose.
Once he enters the priesthood, the Narrator soon comes to realize that maybe it is not the Temple that is ugly but rather that he has overestimated the world in which he lives, "It was quite natural that wars and unrest, piles of corpses and copious blood, should enrich the beauty of the Golden Temple. For this temple had been constructed by unrest... " (36). After realizing this, the Narrator starts to feel almost at one with the Golden Temple. Both are products of times of unrest and baseness. With the backdrop of World War II it no surprise that the Narrator's fascination with the Temple takes another masochistic form of beauty.
In the face of utter and inevitable destruction, the Narrator feels that by burning to ash with the Golden Temple both can together attain true, eternal beauty. The only way them to become beautiful is to escape from the tangible world into the world of formlessness, "Indeed, if things continued as they were, the Golden Temple was sure to turn into ashes. Since this idea took root within me, the Golden Temple once again increased in tragic beauty... This beautiful building was before long going to be turned into ashes, I thought. As a result, my image of the Golden Temple gradually came to be superimposed on the real temple... [as] a symbol of the real world's evanescence, " (42,45). This dream of beauty is again dashed to pieces when indeed the Temple is not burned down during the war. Having both lived beyond their only chance for poetic destruction, both the Narrator and the Golden Temple seem cursed to die the slow death of all real and ugly things.
If the Temple is seen as a symbol of traditional Japan, what idea is Mishima driving towards with this novel? What is meant when the Narrator chooses to burn the Temple down himself? In the end, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion is a picture of Japan in the post-war era. A traditional culture, which only can be seen as beautiful in the midst of war and the baseness of human nature, lives on in a country that obsesses over its own uniqueness, ignorant of the suffering out of which their proud history was born. This is Mishima's Nihonjinron. Just as the Narrator masochistically attaches his good intentions to the Golden Temple only to be let down, so too is the nature of those who follow the illusion of Nihonjinron. Mishima leaves the reader with the intention to tear down all the symbols of the past which have outlived their stay in this world. Only then can the tragedy of the loss of culture and the end of history in the face of modernity truly be mourned for all of it's beauty.
Rating:
Summary: Yes! Yes! Yes!
Review: Mishima is one of the most talented writers who arose from the disaster of World War II. *Kinkakuji* is a journey through inner chaos. While the temple symbolizes everything that is beautiful for the book's tragic protaganist, it also reminds him of his own insignificance. The book is written from a Buddhist perspective and gives a glimpse into the paradoxical world that is Japanese.
Rating:
Summary: Yes! Yes! Yes!
Review: Mishima is one of the most talented writers who arose from the disaster of World War II. *Kinkakuji* is a journey through inner chaos. While the temple symbolizes everything that is beautiful for the book's tragic protaganist, it also reminds him of his own insignificance. The book is written from a Buddhist perspective and gives a glimpse into the paradoxical world that is Japanese.
Rating:
Summary: Alienation
Review: Mishima's beautiful introspective language and unique imagery kept me engaged in an unfolding tragedy. I find I disagree with almost all the other reviewers as to the meaning of this work. The young Mizoguchi finds he can not have sexual intercourse without the image of the Golden Pavilion dominating his consciousness. Mishima repeats the Zen koan "If you meet the Buddha in the road, kill him." three times. He also provides long dreamy discourse on the beauty of the temple. Surely there is a connection between attachment to beauty and diversion from enlightenment. To some extent the acolyte mets the Buddha in the road and kills him when Mizoguchi burns the national treasure, the temple of the Golden Pavilion. My edition has an introduction by Nancy Wilson Ross where she interprets MIzoguchi's alienation as the result of nationlessness, an experience for post-war Japanese. Whereas extreme nationalism may have been a concern for Mishima, I did not detect this influence as a major contirbutor to Mizoguchi's alienation. In fact, his bare reality confrontive dismissive mother would be enough to shake any psyche. Other critics have pointed out that the theme is resentment of the object of desire. This rings more true but doesn't provide a strong enough theory to pull the entire narrative together. There are several amazing images in the book. The Japanese naval officer who formally meets with his mistress in a tea ceremony prior to his leaving for war is haunting and beautiful. The mistress pulls her breasts from her kimona and squeezes her milk into the tea, which is drunk by her lover as his farewell. What an amazing image of love's nourishment and the observation that intimacy between human beings is mediated by our body fluids. I also found the relationship between the Superior of the Temple and Mizoguchi to be interesting. The Superior's aloof attitude could also be interpreted as a mature recognition that we can not really mentor anyone without making our mark upon them. The Superior takes a hands off attitude toward Mizoguchi, allowing him to struggle toward some self realization. Yet, when the Superior realizes that a deep wound exists in Mizoguchi's soul, he responds by assuming a prostrate submissive humble posture during his garden meditations where he is sure Mizoguchi will see him. It is as if to say, "I bring no weapons against your evil, pass away from us." Mizoguchi does pass, but not until he burns the temple.
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