The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

Pocketbok. Tuttle . 1981.

Nära nyskick. "The Temple of the Golden Pavilion has around it an aura of Dostoevskian violence and passion. I found many reminders of Dostoevsky's involved and tortuous struggles with ageless questions. Yet... it is a novel which could only have been written by a member of a race whose cultural heritage is essentially Buddhist.
This is one of its great values to the Western reader....
"In 1950, to the distress and horror of all art-loving and patriotic Japanese, the ancient Zen Temple of the Golden Pavilion was deliberately burned to the ground. This is the incident from which Mishima has built his engrossing novel. But... he has employed the factual record merely as a scaffolding on which to erect a disturbing and powerful story of a sick young man's obsession with a beauty he cannot attain. ...
"The fact that the hero is a Zen acolyte as well as a psychopath, that its pages contain many telling examples of the use, and misuse, of Zen techniques-all this is bound to interest the growing body of Zen enthusiasts in America today.
"But more important, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion offers the Western reader pictures of a rare, paradoxical, and long-enduring civilization. The opportunity offered here by Yukio Mishima's special insight and fictional talent is one for which to feel properly grateful."