After reading Yukio Mishima’s The Temple of the Golden Pavillion, I was moved to visit the real temple described in the novel once more myself. Would it communicate some message to me as it did to Mishima’s narrator Mizoguchi? Unlikely, but a trip to Kyoto is never a waste.
This is the geography of a visitor’s first glimpse of the temple: one stands in the crowd along a fence that separates land from lake. Water creates a distance between viewer and temple, littered with islets and, if one looks closely, large fish. Raising one’s eyes from the sea, the Kinkaku-ji, the Temple of the Golden Pavilion, stands to the right, framed by lush forestry that lines the sky.
The temple, aptly named, is strikingly gold. Two upper floors of the temple are completely covered in gold leaf, from walls to roof. This visit was on an overcast day, making the temple’s walls a dull luster. My first encounter, conversely, was on a sunny summer day, when rays struck the temples walls and refracted beams of light in endless angles. These two images, pale building and shimmering monument, are quite different.
You may have heard of the temple’s history, in which a novice monk set it on fire. This serves as the exigence of Mishima’s novel, as Mizoguchi ends his story by abandoning his hopes of becoming the temple’s master and lighting the upper floors of the temple in flames. How does a man once planning for a life of worship end up destroying the object he so exalted?
Mizoguchi’s relationship with the temple was never one of complete reverence, instead rather tumultuous. His childhood expectation, created by his father’s impassioned descriptions, painted the temple’s eminence in such high esteem that his initial visit proved disappointing. He could not reconcile that the greatest representation of beauty held an image anything less than perfect and pure.
Indeed, it is perfection that occupies, and often harms, Mizoguchi’s mind as he progressively uncovers impurities in his life. He discovers his mother’s adultery in his childhood. His innocent, kind friend dies, and he can’t attend the funeral. He stumbles upon the temple’s master’s depraved sexual acts.
Embedded throughout these stories is an essential isolation – his stutter leaves him near friendless, save his one friend who soon dies and a second who exemplifies selfish depravity. Even more, he perceives all these events as worryingly separate from himself – he struggles to reconcile his friend’s death without seeing the body, he feels an essential distance between himself and his mother, and he approaches the situation with his master with festering ignorance. Perhaps most worryingly of all is his distance between himself and the temple, as he describes before he’s first met the temple:
And the thought that beauty should have already come into this world unknown to me, I could not help feeling a certain uneasiness and irritation. If beauty really did exist there, it meant that my own existence was a thing estranged from beauty.
This Mishima-eque anxiety hits the core of the novel’s major observation. Mishima finds beauty a consuming obsession, unchangeably distant. We find ourselves lost in dreaming beautiful images, rushing to experience a temple with our own eyes. If we do find it, because indeed we may not, we still find a specific distance, a lake that separates the place we exist and an object of beauty. When we do not find that beauty we dream up, we are forced to confront the ephemeral property of beauty, that clouds may cover the sky and temporarily, but undoubtedly, allow beauty to take its leave.
Mizoguchi requires this temporality, dismaying at his mother’s conjecture that Kyoto will never be firebombed in the war and therefore the temple is unlikely to be destroyed. As he spends time with this uncontrollable object of beauty, the temple, and finds himself surrounded by agents that mar perfection, Mizoguchi must rescue beauty and restore the temple’s ephemerality in destruction.
After escaping the temple grounds, he watches the ashes of the fire rise into the sky with the building itself out of view. The distance between Mizoguchi and beauty is maintained. Considering the bottle of arsenic and the knife he prepared, he denies himself suicide.
Then I noticed the pack of cigarettes in my other pocket. I took one out and started smoking. I felt like a man who settles down for a smoke after finishing a job of work.
His deed was only natural, a responsibility to preserve the laws that which Mishima believes. In turn, he denies his own ephemerality, not including himself with the temple’s destruction nor its beauty.
