Temple of the Golden Pavillion by Yukio Mishima

Temple of the Golden Pavillion by Yukio Mishima

In The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, celebrated Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima creates a haunting portrait of a young man's obsession with idealized beauty and his destructive quest to possess it fully.

Mizoguchi, an ostracized stutterer, develops a childhood fascination with Kyoto's famous Golden Temple. While an acolyte at the temple, he fixates on the structure's aesthetic perfection and it becomes his one and only object of desire. But as Mizoguchi begins to perceive flaws in the temple, he determines that the only true path to beauty lies in an act of horrific violence. Based on a real incident that occurred in 1950, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion brilliantly portrays the passions and agonies of a young man in postwar Japan, bringing to the subject the erotic imagination and instinct for the dramatic moment that marked Mishima as one of the towering makers of modern fiction. With an introduction by Donald Keene; Translated from the Japanese by Ivan Morris.

Yukio Mishima was born in Tokyo in 1925. He graduated from Tokyo Imperial University's School of Jurisprudence in 1947. His first published book, The Forest in Full Bloom, appeared in 1944. He established himself as a major author with Confessions of a Mask (1949). From then until his death he continued to publish novels, short stories, and plays each year. His crowning achievement, The Sea of Fertility tetralogy--which contains the novels Spring Snow (1969), Runaway Horses (1969), The Temple of Dawn (1970), and The Decay of the Angel (1971)--is considered one of the definitive works of twentieth-century Japanese fiction. In 1970, at the age of forty-five and the day after completing the last novel in the Fertility series, Mishima committed seppuku (ritual suicide)--a spectacular death that attracted worldwide attention.

Alfred H. Marks (1920-2014) was a professor of early American literature at the State University of New York at New Paltz, who published works on Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman. He served in Japan during World War II as part of the military intelligence, and was a visiting and Fulbright scholar in Kanazawa in 1965. He was a translator of modern Japanese literature, including works by Yukio Mishima.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9784805306376
ISBN 10	4805306378
Title	Temple of the Golden Pavillion
Author	Yukio Mishima
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Tuttle Shokai Inc
Year published	2018-06-01
Number of pages	262
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.