The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

Mishima's novel reworks a real event: the burning of the Golden Pavilion, Kinkaku-ji, by a young acolyte monk in 1950. The stammering, ugly Mizoguchi comes from a poor coastal temple to serve at Rokuon-ji in Kyoto, and his worship of the pavilion's unbearable beauty curdles until he destroys it. The city is real throughout: the gilded pavilion above its pond, the temple grounds where he lodges, Otani University where he meets the crippled cynic Kashiwagi, and the wartime and postwar streets of Kyoto.

Uiko

The home temple, the Japan Sea coast

Chapter 1

The stammering boy's imagination is fed by his dying father's talk of the Golden Pavilion as the most beautiful thing on earth. Here too is Uiko, the local girl whose beauty and violent death fix in him the link between beauty, desire and destruction that will govern his life.

Chapter 1

inspired by Mizoguchi grows up at his father's poor temple on a bleak cape of the Japan Sea coast in northern Kyoto Prefecture, near Maizuru; the temple is invented and sited on that remote coast, outside the city.

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