Word: mishima
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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...
Though his nature descriptions are superb, chrysanthemums and moon mist rarely monopolize Author Mishima's vision. He is especially good at charting the whiplash currents of the Japanese temperament, swerving in an instant from refinement to cruelty. His tilt with tradition is spirited but distinctly un-Japanese. Since 1950, the Kinkakuji has been meticulously rebuilt, and may well gaze at its limpid image in the Kyoko Pond for another demi-millennium...