A review by sarah_dietrich
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima

4.0

I chose to read The Temple of the Golden Pavilion because I was looking for some dark Japanese literature, and I certainly found it. The story is based around the real event of a young Buddhist monk burning down an ancient temple. The book tells of a man who is an outsider, plagued by stuttering, and becomes obsessed with the Golden Temple from a young age. The temple haunts him, it is everything to him, all that he can think of. He can see the temple and hence the world in ways that noone else can and loses his touch with reality, tormented by the temple: "The special quality of hell is to see everything clearly down to the last detail". This was an intriguing, compulsive read and I really enjoyed it. Mishima has a calm, powerful, clearly defined style that suits this story perfectly.