Word: golden
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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With no particular sense of vocation, but simply following in his Zen-priest father's footsteps, young Mizoguchi becomes an acolyte at the Golden Temple. From the 5 a.m. reveille ("opening of the rules") to the evening meal ("medicine") to the 9 p.m. bedtime ("opening of the pillow") the daily ritual is, to Mizoguchi, a crushing bore, though U.S. readers may find it novel and fascinating. He soon discovers that the temple Superior's path of self-enlightenment is strewn with cigarettes, sake and geishas. Mizoguchi's behavior is scarcely more admirable. A diabolical, clubfooted fellow acolyte...
Whiplash Currents. Why does Mizoguchi hate the Golden Temple? Novelist Mishima answers in many ways, none completely successful. The gist of it is that Japan, Author Mishima implies, has been hemmed in to the point of impotence by the worship of ancestors, ritual and beauty. In this sense, Temple belongs to recent, agonizing reason-why literature, in which Japanese writers are still covertly psychoanalyzing the loss of World War II. Mizoguchi is both poor and common, and Temple champions a kind of cultural revolt of the masses, with its rejection of all that is feudal and aristocratic. There...
...crazed theology student dynamiting Chartres Cathedral would be an approximate Western equivalent of a crime that shocked all Japan in 1950. It was the burning of the 14th century Zen temple of Kinkakuji ("Golden Pavilion") by a Zen Buddhist acolyte. The arsonist intended to die in the blaze, but he lost his nerve. At his trial he said, "I hate myself, my evil, ugly, stammering self." But he had no regrets about burning down the Kinkakuji. He envied the Golden Temple its beauty, and he was possessed with "a strong desire for hurting and destroying anything that was beautiful...
...pigments from this true story, one of Japan's leading novelists, 34-year-old Yukio Mishima (The Sound of Waves) has painted a vivid, quasi-existential portrait of an Outsider. He has also given his novel at least as many symbolic levels of meaning as the triple-tiered Golden Temple. In the U.S. the book is unlikely to match its Japanese success, but its underlying theme is far from insular-that beauty, and perhaps civilization itself, may inhibit and paralyze the will to live...
...GOLDEN YOUTH OF LEE PRINCE, by Aubrey Goodman (344 pp.; Simon & Schuster; $4.50), belies the gloom criers who think that U.S. youth consists entirely of beard bearers on one hand and IBM trainees on the other. There are still gold-hatted, high-bouncing young men who know their way to the washroom in the Union Club. In his resplendently gold-jacketed first novel, Yaleman Goodman, 23, lists a few undergraduate acolytes who keep the torch flaming: "Lawlor Reck, who had won the Charleston contest at the Everglades Club in Florida for six years running . . . one of the Du Pont boys...