Plot summary

Childhood
The protagonist, Mizoguchi, is the son of
a consumptive Buddhist priest who lives and
works on the remote Cape Nariu on the north
coast of Honsh. As a child, the narrator lives
with his uncle at the village of Shiraku (),
near Maizuru.
Throughout his childhood he is assured by his
father that the Golden Pavilion is the most
beautiful building in the world, and the idea of
the temple becomes a fixture in his imagination.
A stammering boy from a poor household, he is
friendless at his school, and takes refuge in
vengeful fantasies. When a naval cadet who is
visiting the school makes fun of him, he
vandalises the cadet's belongings behind his
back. A neighbour's girl, Uiko, becomes the
target of his hatred, and when she is killed by
her deserter boyfriend after she betrays him,
Mizoguchi becomes convinced that his curse on
her has been fulfilled.
His ill father takes him to the Kinkaku-ji for the
first time in the spring of 1944, and introduces
him to the Superior, Tayama Dosen. After his
father's death, Mizoguchi becomes an acolyte at
the temple. It is the height of the war, and there
are only three acolytes, but one is his first real
friend, the candid and pleasant Tsurukawa.
During the 19445 school year, he boards at the
Rinzai Academy's middle school and works at a
factory, fascinated by the idea that the Golden
Pavilion will inevitably be burnt to ashes in the
firebombing. But the American planes avoid
Kyoto, and his dream of a glorious tragedy is
defeated. In May 1945, he and Tsurukawa
visit Nanzen-ji. From the tower, they witness a
strange scene in a room of the Tenju-an nearby:
a woman in a formal kimono gives her lover a
cup of tea to which she adds her own breast
milk.
After his father dies of consumption, he is sent
to Kinkaku-ji. On the first anniversary of his
father's death, his mother visits him, bringing
the mortuary tablet so that the Superior can say
Mass over it. She tells him that she has moved
from Nariu to Kasagun, and reveals her wish
that he should succeed Father Dosen as
Superior at Rokuon-ji. The two ambitionsthat
the temple be destroyed, or that it should be his
to controlleave him confused and ambivalent.
On hearing the news of the end of the war and
the Emperor's renunciation of divinity, Father
Dosen calls his acolytes and tells them the
fourteenth Zen story from The Gateless Gate,
"Nansen kills a kitten", which leaves them
bemused. Mizoguchi is bitterly disappointed by
the end of hostilities, and late at night he climbs
the hill behind the temple, Okitayama-Fudosan,
looks down on the lights of Kyoto, and
pronounces a curse: "Let the darkness of my
heart [...] equal the darkness of the night which
encloses those countless lights!"
Friendship with Kashiwagi
During the winter of that year, the Temple is
visited by a drunk American soldier and his

pregnant Japanese girlfriend. He pushes his

girlfriend down into the snow, and orders
Mizoguchi to trample her stomach, giving him
two cartons of cigarettes in exchange for doing
so. Mizoguchi goes indoors and obsequiously
presents the cartons to the Superior, who is
having his head shaved by the deacon. Father
Dosen thanks him, and tells him he has been
chosen for the scholarship to Otani University. A
week later the girl visits the temple, tells her
story, and demands compensation for the
miscarriage she has suffered. The Superior
gives her money and says nothing to the
acolytes, but rumours of her claims spread, and
the people at the temple become uneasy about
Mizoguchi. Throughout 1946 he is tormented by
the urge to confess, but never does so, and in
the spring of 1947 he leaves with Tsurukawa for
Otani University. He starts to drift away from
Tsurukawa, befriending Kashiwagi, a cynical
clubfooted boy from Sannomiya who indulges in
long "philosophical" speeches.
Kashiwagi boasts of his ability to seduce women
by making them feel sorry for himin his
words, they "fall in love with my clubfeet." He
demonstrates his method to Mizoguchi by
feigning a tumble in front of a girl. She helps
him into her house. Mizoguchi is so disturbed
that he runs away, and takes a train to the
Kinkaku-ji to recover his self-assurance. In May,
Kashiwagi
invites
him
to
a
"picnic"
at Kameyama Park, taking the girl he tricked,
and another girl for Mizoguchi. When left alone
with the girl, she tells him a story about a
woman she knows who lost her lover during the
war. He realises that the woman she is talking
about must be the same one he saw two years
before through a window of Tenju Hermitage.
Mizoguchi's mind fills with visions of the Golden
Pavilion, and he finds himself impotent. That
evening a telegram arrives at the university
bearing news of kindly Tsurukawa's death in a
road accident. For nearly a year, Mizoguchi
avoids Kashiwagi's company.
In the spring of 1948 Kashiwagi comes to visit
him
at
the
temple,
and
gives
him
a shakuhachi as a present. He takes the
opportunity to demonstrate his own skill as a
player. In May he asks Mizoguchi to steal
some irises and cat-tails for
him
from
the
temple garden. Mizoguchi takes them to
Kashiwagi's
boarding-house,
and
while
discussing the story of Nansen and the kitten,
Kashiwagi starts to make an arrangement,
mentioning that he is being taught ikebana by
his girlfriend. Mizoguchi realises that this
girlfriend must be the woman he saw at Tenju
Hermitage. When she arrives, Kashiwagi breaks
up with her, and they quarrel. She runs away
and Mizoguchi follows, telling her that he
witnessed her tragic scene two years ago. She
is moved, and tries to seduce him, but again he
is assailed by visions of the temple, and he is
impotent.
Enmity with Father Dosen

In January 1949 Mizoguchi is walking

through Shinkyogoku when he thinks he sees
Father Dosen with a geisha. Momentarily
distracted, he starts to follow a stray dog, loses
it, and then in a back alley he runs into the
Superior just as he is getting into a hired car
with the geisha. He is so surprised that he
laughs out loud, and Father Dosen calls him a
fool. Over the next two months Mizoguchi
becomes obsessed with reproducing Dosen's
brief expression of hatred. He buys a
photograph of the geisha and slips it into
Dosen's morning newspaper. The Superior gives
no sign of having found it, but secretly places
the photo in Mizoguchi's drawer the next day.
When Mizoguchi finds it there, he feels
victorious. He tears it up, wraps the shreds in
newspaper with a stone, and sinks it in the
pond.
As Mizoguchi's mental illness worsens, he
neglects his studies. On 9 November 1949, the
Superior reprimands him for his poor work.
Mizoguchi responds by borrowing 3000 from
Kashiwagi, who characteristically raises 500 of
the money by taking back and selling the flute
and dictionary he had given as presents. He
goes to Takeisao-jinja (a shrine also known
as Kenkun-jinja) and draws a mikuji lot which
warns him not to travel northwest. He sets off
northwest the next morning, to the region of his
birth, and spends three days at Yura
(now Tangoyura), where the sight of the Sea of
Japan inspires him to destroy the Kinkaku.
He is retrieved by a policeman, and on his
return he is met by his angry mother, who is
relieved to learn that he did not steal the money
he used to flee. Obsessed by the idea of arson,
one day he follows a guilty-looking boy to the
Sammon Gate of the Myshin-ji, and is amazed
and disappointed when the boy does not set it
alight. He compiles a long list of old temples
which have burnt down. By May his debt (with
10% simple interest per month) has grown to
5100. Kashiwagi is angry, and comes to
suspect that Mizoguchi is considering suicide.
On 10 June Kashiwagi complains to Father
Dosen, who gives him the principal; afterwards,
Kashiwagi shows letters to Mizoguchi that
reveal the fact that Tsurukawa did not die in a
road accident, but committed suicide over a
love affair. He hopes to discourage Mizoguchi
from doing anything similar. For the last time,
they discuss the Zen story of Nansen and the
kitten.
Final events
On 15 June, Father Dosen takes the unusual
step of giving Mizoguchi 4250 in cash for his
next year's tuition. Mizoguchi spends it on
prostitutes in the hope that Dosen will be forced
to expel him. But he quickly tires of waiting for
Dosen to find out, and when he spies on Dosen
in the Tower of the North Star, and seems him
crouched in the "garden waiting" position, he
cannot account for this evidence of secret
shame, and is filled with confusion. The next
day he buys arsenic and a knife at a shop near

Senbon-Imadegawa, an intersection 2 km to the

southeast of the temple, and loiters outside
Nishijin Police Station. The outbreak of
the Korean War on 25 June, and the failure of
Kinkaku's fire-alarm on 29 June, seem to him
signs of encouragement. On 30 June a
repairman tries to fix it, but he is unsuccessful,
and promises to return the next day. He does
not come. A strange interview with the visiting
Father Kuwai Zenkai, of Ryuho-ji in Fukui
Prefecture, provides the final inspiration, and in
the early hours of 2 July Mizoguchi sneaks into
the Kinkaku and dumps his belongings, placing
three straw bales in corners of the ground floor.
He goes outside to sink some non-inflammable
items in the pond, but on turning back to the
temple he finds himself filled with his childhood
visions of its beauty, and he is overcome by
uncertainty.
Finally he remembers the words from
the Rinzairoku, "When you meet the Buddha,
kill the Buddha", and he resolves to go ahead
with his plan. He enters the Kinkaku and sets
the bales on fire. He runs upstairs and tries to
enter the Kukkych, but the door is locked. He
hammers at the door for a minute or two.
Suddenly feeling that a glorious death has been
"refused" him, he runs back downstairs and out
of the temple, choking on the smoke. He
continues running, out of the temple grounds,
and up the hill named Hidari Daimonji, to the
north. He throws away the arsenic and knife,
lights a cigarette, and watches the pavilion
burn.

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio

Mishima tells the story of a man named
Mizoguchi as he reflects back upon his middle
school years, when, after committing an
irrevocably bad deed, attempts to understand
his
motives
in
retrospect.
Mizoguchi is born into a poor family on a
sparsely populated cape. From an early age he
understands that he is an ugly child; that he is
weakly, and possesses a debilitating stutter that
renders him unable to communicate effectively
with his peers. Isolated and angry, he begins at
an early age to regard the world around him
with ire and distrust, taking solace only in
himself.
Mizoguchi's father, a tuberculosis-infected
priest, instructs him from an early age that the
Golden Temple in Kyoto is the most beautiful
thing on earth. Mizoguchi has an obsession with
beauty, particularly because he doesn't see
himself to possess it as an individual. His issues
are compounded atop each other when his
father brings Mizoguchi to the temple to meet
Tayama Dosen, a priest and higher up at the
Golden Temple. Mizoguchi, having for years
building up ideas of the temple's illustrious
beauty from his father's stories, is disappointed

by

the

reality

of

its

construct.

Years later in 1944 when Mizoguchi's father

dies, he decides to return to Kyoto to study with
Dosen, and there continues his isolated life,
now from the vantage of an acolyte. His prime
interest is the Golden Temple, in that he can't
comprehend the dissidence between his initial
ideas of it and what it actually looks like in
reality. Meanwhile, he befriends a young
understudy named Tsurukawa; Tsurukawa
contrasts dramatically from Mizoguchi, coming
from an upper class family and possessing a
great
deal
of
professional
promise.
When Japan is defeated at the hands of the
Allies during WWII, Mizoguchi's fascination with
the temple wanes. As he continues to shun
reality, he begins instead to take up an interest
in committing acts of evil, as if to separate
himself from the concept of beauty altogether.
In the final pages of the book, Mizoguchi and
Tsurakawa begin to drift apart, and Mizoguchi
instead befriends a student at Otani University
named Kashiwagi. Kashiwagi, endowed with a
clubbed foot, feels similarly to Mizoguchi in
terms of outsider status, and convinces him to
live life to its fullest in a nihilistic fashion.
Mizoguchi, after receiving word from Dosen that
he won't be able to continue on at the Golden
Temple into priesthood, decides in a moment of
madness,
to
burn
it
down.
Mizoguchi sets the Golden Temple ablaze on July
2, 1950. It renews his passion in life, and serves
as a moment of grim catharsis.

Originally published in 1956, The Temple of the

Golden Pavilion is based on a true event that
occurred in Japan in 1950. During that year the
entire country of Japan was shocked when the
Zen temple of Kinkakuji in Kyoto, regarded as a
national treasure, was burned to the ground by
a young acolyte who was studying to be a Zen
Buddhist priest at the same temple. The
acolyte, who was afflicted with a stammer, had
become obsessed with the beauty of the
temple. He had originally planned to burn the
temple to the ground and die in the fire, but he
lost his courage at the last moment and tried to
commit suicide after torching the building. He
ultimately failed in his suicide attempt and
turned himself over to the police.
Before setting the temple ablaze, the acolyte
had been exhibiting a pattern of self-destructive
behavior.
He
had
been
drinking,
gambling,stealing,going to geisha houses as
well as not attending his school classes. At his
trial he confessed that the reason that he

burned the temple to the ground was that he

couldn't stand himself or his stuttering any
longer and that he felt compelled to destroy
anything that was beautiful.
Mishima used this incident as the basis for his
novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion.The
story is about a young man named Mizoguchi,
who is studying to become a Zen Buddhist
monk at the Kinkakuji temple in Kyoto Japan. As
a small boy he sees his mother having sex with
another man in the presence of his dying father
after which he is afflicted with a terrible
stammer. Mizoguchi is physically unattractive as
well and so his stammer only compounds his
alienation from other people.
Before dying, his father takes him to see the
Golden Temple. It is while there that Mizoguchi
first develops his obsession with it's beauty.
Mizoguchi wants very badly to live at the
temple as a monk so that he may never be
seperated from its beauty. Mizoguchi's father is
an old friend of the superior of the temple, so
after his father's death, the superior agrees to
take Mizoguchi on as an acolyte. Mizoguchi
starts his training as a Zen Buddhist monk
hoping one day to eventually become the
temple's new superior. He spends every
oppurtunity admiring the beauty of the temple,
but he can't seem to live at peace with it. The
temple's beauty taunts and frustrates him
because it is a quality that he cannot attain.
The superior agrees to send Mizoguchi to school
where Mizoguchi meets another student named
Kashiwagi. Kashiwagi believes that only
knowlege, not faith makes life bearable and he
expresses this attitude to Mizoguchi by trying to
undermine Mizoguchi's faith in the beauty and
purity that he is trying hard to attain. Mizoguchi
becomes fascinated with this nihilistic approach
to life and the two become friends. They start
missing classes and eventually Mizoguchi's poor
academic record causes the school to contact
the superior of the temple. Mizoguchi is warned
by the superior that his performance must
improve. Eventually Mizoguchi becomes more
and more estranged from the life of the temple
untill finally he decides to burn it to the ground.
It is only after he he sets fire to the temple that
he finally knows freedom and wants desperately
to live.
Self-loathing is at the heart of The Temple of the
Golden Pavilion. Mizoguchi desires a beauty and
purity that he cannot attain and as a result he

comes to resent what the temple symbolizes .

Ultimately Mizoguchi despises his own identity
and this is what compels him to act the way he
does. At the trial, the monk who actually
torched the famous temple confessed that the
reason he set fire to the temple was that he
could no longer tolerate himself or his stuttering
and he felt compelled to destroy everything
that was beautiful. Mizoguchi also comes to
share these same feelings. At first the temple is
a sanctuary for Mizoguchi, but the temple
obsesses Mizoguchi to the point where it
appears uncontrollably in his thoughts. One
example of this is when he has gone on a
double date with his classmate Kashiwagi. At
one point, he is alone with his date. When he
starts kissing and touching the young woman
images of the Golden temple come into his
mind and his sexual desire is crushed
immediately.
Mizoguchi is like many other Mishima
characters who long for a way of life rooted in
the past. Some biographers have attributed this
aesthetic preference of Mishima's to his
grandmother Natsu's influence, who from the
time Mishima was a small boy filled her
grandson's head with images of a Japan long
gone. Mishima would always long for the past
and the precarious existence that people of that
era seemed to live. The idea that someone's life
could end abruptly at any time had a strange
appeal for him. This is why he romanticized
violent death especially when that death
happened to someone young. Mishima would
always feel that he had been cheated of
something by not dying in the Second World
War. He would confess this feeling to many who
knew him.But the strange coincidence was that
when he had been drafted into the military, he
had managed to deceive a military doctor into
thinking that he had tuberculosis and was unfit
for military service. One of his biographers
would describe a story that Mishima told him
that when he learned of the doctor's decision
not to admit him to military service that he
(Mishima) was so happy that he started running
down the hill of the barracks and went right
home to his family.
Mishima had very contradictory feelings about
dying in the service of the Emperor during the
Second World War. On the one hand he would
always say throughout the remainder of his life
that he felt that he would never attain the glory
in his life that he would have attained by dying
on a battlefield in the service of his country. But

when that possibility actually presented itself,

he fled from the oppurtunity of dying in combat
the first chance he got. For most Japanese men
living in Japan at the end of the Second World
War being drafted for military service was
considered an imperial order to die. The draft
notice was called "the red paper" because
whenever someone's draft notice arrived in the
mail the paper that the form was written on was
a blood red color. Considering how Mishima
wrote about life in the ranks of a military
organization had he actually served in the
Japanese armed forces during the Second World
War and seen combat on some gruesome
battlefield somewhere in the Pacific his
attitudes about war would probably have been
much less romantic.
But The Temple of the Golden Pavilion shares
similarities with other Mishima novels. There is
a feeling of sadness and despair that seems to
envelop so many of Yukio Mishima's characters.
They seem to be floating adrift, lost in the
modern world, trying desperately to cling to
something that anchors them to their past.
Mizoguchi wants to be a Buddhist priest, but the
motivation behind that choice is always unclear.
Does he want to be a priest because he is
devout? Or is it a way of escaping the modern
world? Is Mizoguchi really in awe of the temple's
beauty? Or does the temple act as a wall that
hides a disturbed young man from the critical
and unaccepting eyes of the outside world?
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion is one of
Yukio Mishima's most interesting books. It
contains exceptionally vivid writing. The book's
characters are strange and often unsettling.The
book's point of view allows the reader to follow
a disturbed individual as he reveals more and
more of his unbalanced mind. By the time
Mizoguch finally sets fire to the temple, it is
hard to tell how much of what is going on in his
life is factual and how much of it is happening in
his imagination. An example of this is his
growing hostility towards the superior of the
temple. The superior of the temple was
originally Mizoguchi's benefactor, taking him on
at the temple because of his relationship with
Mizoguchi's father. By the end of the story,
Mizoguchi suspects the superior of all kinds of
deceitful and malicious intrigues, even though
the superior seems to be only remotely aware
of Mizoguchi's existence.

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio

Mishima
Among the plays slated for later this year at the
Lincoln Center Festival will be the American
premiere of "The Temple of the Golden Pavilion"
by
Japan's
Kanagawa
Arts
Theatre,
a
dramatization of Yukio Mishima's most wellknown novel. Anyone who saw Paul Schrader's
"Mishima: A Life In Four Chapters" will
remember that one of those chapters was taken
up with this spell-binding story, replete with
Mishima's customary violence and obsession
with
obsessions.
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion tells the
story of the stuttering, antisocial Buddhist
acolyte Mizoguchi, who will eventually set the
fire that destroys Kinkaku-ji, the 550-year-old
temple in Kyoto. Based on an event that
occurred in 1950, Mishima supposedly went so
far as to interview the real arsonist, a
schizophrenic, in prison in preparation. Inside
this novel is a carefully drawn portrait of a
minds slow descent into madness, but also the
struggle of an individual frustrated by his
surroundings,
searching
for
freedom.
He who chases fantasies lacks judgment, or
such is the judgment of Proverbs 12:11.
Mizoguchi, from an early age and inspired by his
father, sees the Golden Temple as the very
essence of beauty. Not the Temple itself, which
initially disappoints him, but the image he has
created in his mind. Because of this, he easily
contrasts it against himself, the personification
of ugliness. Interestingly, Mishima - or his
translator, Ivan Morris - decides not to let us
hear Mizoguchis stutter for ourselves. His
thoughts, of course, which tell the story, flow
freely. But they are a contradictory lot, with
conflicting observations about the nature of
beauty, ugliness, being and nothingness, good
and evil. From an early age, Mizoguchi is alone
and proud of being misunderstood, which is the
beginning of his fall. It gives him a sense of
mission, which is key to his development as the
story
unfolds.
Halfway through the book, Mizoguchi reminds
himself that the essence of Zen is the absence
of all particularities, and that the real power to
see consists in the knowledge that ones own
heart possesses neither form nor feature. In a
way, he longs for the nothingness, the lack of
attachment, of his calling, but his pride in his
otherness keeps drawing him out of this. It is
impossible to touch eternity with one hand and
life with the other, he says. But he stands in
opposition to the beauty of the Temple, the
ever-present, suffocating, undeniability of the
Temple. Mizoguchi does not have any feeling of
solidarity with nothingness. Indeed, he cannot,
not because of his defect, not because of the
Temple. It is little wonder that his encounters
with women repeatedly find him impotent.

One can spot several different messages arising

within the story. Beauty acts as an ideal, but
also as a curse. It reminds Mizoguchi - and us that the trials of the world are not so easily
escaped even by the devoted and devout. The
obsessions we wrap ourselves in can dominate
us, and easily turn what is just a historical
building of great beauty into a reminder of the
unworthiness we perceive in ourselves. One is
left to wonder if the individual within Mizoguchi
might have been encouraged, in a different
setting, or if the process of encouragement
itself would have any effect. After all, what
would he be encouraged to do? But we also
have an all-too familiar picture of the angry
loner, a figure who comes to believe that only
through destruction does he define himself, that
destiny has fingered him for an awful end, but it
is his own end, and he will embrace it willingly
because it is his. The Christian idea of sin, of
malignant desire for that which is beyond
redemption or even beyond understanding, is
recognizable. But there is something else - a
rebellion against the eastern concept of the
ideal, which is an existence beyond attachment,
identity
and
struggle.
With the death of Mizoguchis father, he begins
his career at the Temple, and he befriends
Tsurukawa, an upright man. But Mizoguchis
malevolence is growing, a wordless force that
seeks to possess him. He nurtures it as he
recognizes it, and it blooms when he makes a
new friend, Kashiwagi. An arrogant, malicious,
self-absorbed man with a club foot, he projects
all of these twisted qualities onto Mizoguchi and
shows him how to use his disability to his
disadvantages.
The appearance of Kashiwagi midway through
the novel is Mizoguchis catalyst, and the
beginning of his emotional apprenticeship.
Mizoguchi also learns about the nature of
hypocrisy from the Superior, Father Dosen, who
has both frustrated and advanced Mizoguchis
career. At its beginning, Mizoguchi held the
ambition to one day succeed him, but only later
does this contort itself into the desire to destroy
the Temple. After all, the Temple is
more alive than
Mizoguchi.
Near the end, before Mizoguchi carries out his
plot, he begs a visiting father to see past his
face and look into his heart. We realize that he
too recognizes what is going on inside him, that
he does care, that he perceives the outer
ugliness has taken root inside him, but the
father cannot see inside him, and instead
unknowingly inspires him to go ahead. Given
the author, one might expect Mizoguchi to kill
himself in sight of the flames of the Temple. But
instead, he smokes a cigarette and embraces
the freedom he has found for himself, the
individuality, the singularity of his existence. It
is not our thoughts which define us to others -

but our actions. But our thoughts define us to

ourselves, and make the action inevitable.

AUTHOR
Mishima Yukio, pseudonym of Hiraoka
Kimitake (born Jan. 14, 1925, Tokyo
died Nov. 25, 1970, Tokyo), a prolific writer who
is regarded by many critics as the most
important Japanese novelist of the 20th century.
Mishima was the son of a high civil servant and
attended the aristocratic Peers School in Tokyo.
During World War II, having failed to qualify
physically for military service, he worked in a
Tokyo factory and after the war studied law at
theUniversity of Tokyo. In 194849 he worked in
the banking division of the Japanese Ministry of
Finance.
His
first novel, Kamen
no
kokuhaku (1949; Confessions of a Mask), is a
partly autobiographical work that describes with
exceptional stylistic brilliance a homosexual
who
must
mask
his
abnormal
sexual
preferences from the society around him. The
novel gained Mishima immediate acclaim, and
he began to devote his full energies to writing.
He followed up his initial success with several
novels whose main characters are tormented by
various physical or psychological problems or
who are obsessed by unattainable ideals that
make everyday happiness impossible for them.
Among
these
works
are Ai
no
kawaki (1950; Thirst
for
Love), Kinjiki (1954; Forbidden
Colours),
and Shiosai (1954; The
Sound
of
Waves). Kinkaku-ji (1956; The Temple of the
Golden Pavilion) is the story of a troubled young
acolyte at a Buddhist temple who burns down
the famous building because he himself cannot
attain to its beauty. Utage no ato (1960; After
the Banquet) explores the twin themes of
middle-aged love and corruption in Japanese
politics. In addition to novels, short stories, and
essays, Mishima also wrote plays in the form of
the Japanese N drama, producing reworked
and modernized versions of the traditional
stories. His plays include Sado kshaku fujin
(1965; Madame de Sade) and Kindai ngaku
shu (1956; Five Modern Nh Plays).
Mishimas last work, Hj no umi (196570; The
Sea of Fertility), is a four-volume epic that is
regarded by many as his most lasting
achievement. Its four separate novels, Haru no
yuki (Spring
Snow), Homma (Runaway
Horses), Akatsuki no tera(The Temple of Dawn),

and Tennin gosui (The Decay of the Angel), are

set in Japanand cover the period from about
1912 to the 1960s. Each of them depicts a
different reincarnation of the same being: as a
young aristocrat in 1912, as a political fanatic in
the 1930s, as a Thai princess before and after
World War II, and as an evil young orphan in the
1960s. These books effectively communicate
Mishimas own increasing obsession with blood,
death, and suicide, his interest in selfdestructive personalities, and his rejection of
the sterility of modern life.
Mishimas novels are typically Japanese in their
sensuous and imaginative appreciation of
natural detail, but their solid and competent
plots, their probing psychological analysis, and
a certain understated humour helped make
them widely read in other countries.
Mishima was deeply attracted to the austere
patriotism and martial spirit of Japans past,
which he contrasted unfavourably with the
materialistic, Westernized people and the
prosperous society of Japan in the postwar era.
Mishima himself was torn between these
differing values. Although he maintained an
essentially Western life-style in his private life
and had a vast knowledge of Western culture,
he raged against Japans imitation of the West.
He diligently developed the age-old Japanese
arts of karate and kendo and formed a
controversial private army of about 80 students,
the Tate no Kai (Shield Society), with the idea of
preserving the Japanese martial spirit and
helping protect the emperor (the symbol of
Japanese culture) in case of an uprising by the
left or a Communist attack.
On Nov. 25, 1970, after having that day
delivered the final installment of The Sea of
Fertility to his publisher, Mishima and four
Shield Society followers seized control of the
commanding generals office at a military
headquarters near downtown Tokyo. He gave a
10-minute speech from a balcony to a thousand
assembled servicemen in which he urged them
to overthrow Japans post-World War II
constitution, which forbids war and Japanese
rearmament. The soldiers response was
unsympathetic, and Mishima then committed
seppuku
in
the
traditional
manner,
disemboweling himself with his sword, followed
by decapitation at the hands of a follower. This
shocking event aroused much speculation as to
Mishimas motives, and regret that his death
had robbed the world of such a gifted writer.