Beauty & the Beat

THE TEMPLE OF THE GOLDEN PAVILION (262 pp.)--Yukio Mishima, translated by Ivan Morn's--Knopf ($4).

A 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."

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.

Sake & Geishas. As Mizoguchi, the future arsonist, is born to know it, life is a visitation of plagues. His face is ugly. He stammers. His 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.

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 convinces Mizoguchi that immorality is one way to restore life "to its original state of pure energy." After this, it is only a step in Mizoguchi's simple, fevered brain to the proposition that a great crime--the burning of the Golden Temple--will give him a sense of identity and rebirth.

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 is a lot of Zen beatnik in Mishima's hero, and at his worst he is a glorification of the East-West culture bum who has neither the courage nor the talent to remake the world he hates.

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.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.