3.5

I had high hopes for this when I read about it and was mesmerised for the first chapter or so. It promised a depth and a genuinely new insight into life (and death). In the end, I struggled to push through to the finish. Though I have had my fair share of disassociative and depressive episodes, they have never held on for long. Reading this book over the course of the month, and introducing it to moments of lightness (aka summer downtime) has been torture.

In particular, some of the paradoxes and complexities made sense to me, but some felt non-sensical. I’m unsure if it was me not getting it, or the very point - to bring you into the confusion and uneasiness, or even show how webs of rationalisations can be used to defend and embed self-hatred, shame, commitment to certain self-destructive deeds etc. This aspect, at least, I feel confident would be more natural and impactful in the original language (Japanese)

Quotes:

“I had, however, been living too much out of touch with the external world, and had as a result conceived the fancy that, once I leaped into the outer world, everything became easy, everything became possible.”

“Something had bestowed reality on all this without waiting for my participation; and this great, meaningless, utterly dark reality was given to me, was pressed on me, with a weight that I had until then never witnessed.”

“I wished that the witness of my disgrace would disappear. If only no witnesses remained, my disgrace would be eradicated from the face of the earth. Other people are all witnesses. If no other people exists, shame could never be born in the world.”

“The Golden Temple had made its way through an immense night. A crossing whose end one could still not foresee”

“Observing this perfect little image of the Golden Temple within the great temple itself, I was reminded of the endless series of correspondences that arise when a small universe is placed in a large universe and a smaller one in turn placed inside the small universe. For the first time I could dream. Of the small, but perfect Golden Temple which was even smaller than this model; and of the Golden Temple wnich was infinitely greater than the real building-so great, indeed, that it almost enveloped the world.”

“For a dead man's face falls to an infinite depth beneath the surface which the face possessed when it was alive, leaving nothing for the survivors to see but the frame of a mask; it falls so deep, indeed, that it can never be pulled back to the surface.”

“A dead man's face can tell us better than anything else in this world how far removed we are from the true existence of physical substance, how impossible it is for us to lay hands on the way in which this substance exists”

“Evidently Tsurukawa accurately classified human feelings in the neat little drawers that he kept in his room, like boys who classify various specimens of insects; and occasionally he enjoyed taking them out for a bit of practical experimentation.”

“The matter was entirely self-evident: my feelings suffered from stuttering. They never emerged on time. As a result, I felt as though the fact of Father's death and the fact of my being sad were two isolated things, having no connection and not infringing on each other in the slightest. A slight discrepancy in time, a slight delay, invariably make the feelings and the events that I have undergone revert to their disjointed condition, which, so far as I am concerned, is probably their fundamental condition. When I am sad, sorrow attacks me suddenly and without reason: it is connected with no particular event and with no motive.”

“My lust did not seem to advance directly, but to run round a circuitous track: The cloudy white sky, the rustling of the bamboo grove, the strenuous efforts of the ladybird as it crawled up the leaf of an ins—all these things remained as they had been before, scattered and without order.”

“I thought of how much must be learned from the body in order that the spirit might possess so simple a sense of its own existence. It is said that the essence of Zen is the absence of all particularities, and that the real power to see consists in the knowledge that one's own heart possesses neither form nor feature. ”

“This sense of individuality robbed my life of its symbolism, that is to say, of its power to serve, like Tsurukawa's, as a metaphor for something outside itself; accordingly, it deprived me of the feelings of life's extensity and solidarity, and it became the source of that sense of solitude which pursued me indefinitely. It was strange, I did not even have any feeling of solidarity with nothingness.”

“The intoxication that I derived from the Golden Temple served to make part of my personality opaque”

“The impression had been fermenting so long within me that the breast which I now saw seemed to be nothing but flesh, nothing but a material object. This flesh did not in itself have the power to appeal or to tempt. Exposed there in front of me, and completely cut off from life, it merely served as a proof of the dreariness of existence.”

“Human beings were merely allotted one part of nature's various attributes and, by an effective method of substitution, they diffused that part and made it multiply”

“With the passage of time, the actual form of this drawer is surpassed by time itself and, after the decades and centuries have elapsed, it is as though time had become solidified and had assumed that form. A given small space, which was at first occupied by the object, is now occupied by solidified time. It has, in. fact, become the incarnation of a certain form of spirit.”

“For a moment I felt that I was on the verge of being caught up once more in the charm of life or in an envy for life.”

“When I returned to my room, I was conscious that tonight, in the fierce sound of the rain, in my solitude, I had been released.”

“But human beings do need something, and with knowledge they can make the very intolerableness of life a weapon, though at the same time that intolerableness is not reduced in the slightest.”

A moving psychological deep dive into what beauty means and where it's value lies. This is not an easy book to read, but well worth your time if you enjoy books that make you think and question the world around you. It's the kind of book that absorbs you and infiltrates your daily thoughts. The author's voice is gripping and almost takes on a dreamlike quality at times. Set against the real life event of a man burning down the Kinkaku-ji (Golden Pavilion) this book follows the criminal from his childhood to the act that he became known for. The author expertly crafts a psychological portrait of a troubled young man during the post WW2 years as he lives his life. This book feels like a dark piece of poetry in it's complex simplicity. Gave it 4 stars instead of 5 due to how heavy it was.

Nakon što je jedan student 1950-te godine spalio Zlatni Paviljon u Kjotu, koji su potom Japanci još lepše to rekonstruisali jer su to ipak Japanci, Mišima je uzeo i iseckao sve novinske članke koje je mogao da pronadje i manje više na osnovu njih napisao ovaj roman. Dakle – psihološki profil na četristo stranica, odnosno pokušaj odgovora na pitanje „zašto bokte?“

I kao takav, roman u mnogome uspeva. Narativno pripovedanje protagoniste romana / antagoniste Japana u prvom licu ostavlja bogaoca prostora za od osobe do osobe specifičnu interpretaciju, jer ovo je na kraju, bez obzira na očitu istorijsku inspiraciju, i dalje izrazito simboličan roman, sa mnogo lažnih tragova (nepoverljivi narator) i mnogo više nečega što ostaje tek u nagoveštaju. Zanimljivo i jezivo, ali ipak moooožda i suviše otvoreno na neki način, gde sve može biti a ništa nije. Filozofska razglabanja o lepoti su takodje hit-end-mis, često za trunku suviše konfuzna ili dugačka, pa to malo spušta sveukupni utisak knjige. A možda samo nije bila knjiga za plažu.

4+

One and a half stars
Do you have to read all parts of a book to have the privilege to review it? Nu huh.
Haters gonna hate.

It was an interesting read and I liked how the author took the perspective of the main character because of how difficult he was to sympathise with. I also liked exploring the Japanese aesthetic tradition, with its focus on integration with nature and attention to detail. Mishima's descriptive power was impressive and the fact of its being a true story added historical interest, not to mention Mishima's own life. I understand the philosophical issues touched on by the novel: the nature of beauty and its relation to destruction and eroticism, but the youthful idealism of the protagonist was distasteful to me. The book was similar to Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and I had problems with it for the same reason.

pretty mesmerising

This would be the Joker's favorite book