Word: mishima
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
...TEMPLE OF THE GOLDEN PAVILION (262 pp.)-Yukio Mishima, translated by Ivan Morn's-Knopf...
Borrowing his 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...
...best way of expressing an early-teen-age love is to jump out of a bamboo thicket in the path of his girl's bicycle and scare her half to death. One terrible night, he witnesses his mother in the act of adultery. It is typical of Author Mishima's gift for powerful indirection that this entire episode is conveyed in terms of a ripple of mosquito netting...
...social bridge between them. Village gossip assumes the worst, and Hatsue's father plays the ogre. In the popular Japanese tradition, true love of this kind is expected to end badly, preferably with a double suicide jump off the face of a cliff or into a volcano. Novelist Mishima resolutely avoids the bucket-of-tears finale for an imitation Western happy ending, which will startle readers by its incongruity. But love in Japan is not so much the book's real subject as love of Japan. The desire to evoke the spare, printlike beauty of their native land...