The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (2 page)

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
is rich in scenes, incidents, episodes which, though developed in great detail, often leave the reader uncertain as to their meaning and portent in relation to the story's main line. There is in this a similarity to life itself, where the threads of relationship are never neatly woven into a clear and fixed pattern. In reading Mishima's novel, one is not so much baffled as frequently
suspended.
Sometimes Mishima's minor incidents seem not unlike certain discursive, even apparently extraneous, passages in
The Possessed
and
The Idiot.
In both Mishima and Dosto evsky, the reader's response to these minor themes and commentaries will depend on his own personal literary taste. He will consider them enrichment of the central theme or mere excrescences. (The "spun-out" quality in Mishima, as in Dos-toevsky, may be partly due to the circumstance of the original serialization form of their novels.)

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
frequently presents, in the course of a single episode, the most highly developed Japanese national traits: refined taste, finesse, delicacy of feeling, along with the most sharply contrasted types of behavior: coldness, ugliness, cruelty. I think in particular of a scene in which Mizoguchi's blackhearted, clubfooted student friend, Kashiwagi, artfully composes a bouquet of flowers after the Kansui style of flower arrangement in the traditional Heaven, Earth, and Man manner. The bouquet is made up of irises and cattails which he has persuaded Mizoguchi to steal for him from the temple gardens. As Kashiwagi deftly and gently arranges the flowers in the
tokonoma
in his room, Mizoguchi plays some melodies on a flute. Kashiwagi also offers at this time his own ingenious and twisted interpretation of several famed Zen
koans.

The quiet scene is terminated by a moment of penetrating and sadistic cruelty on the part of the crippled Kashiwagi toward a woman visitor who has, during the course of a sexual affair, been teaching him the exacting art of flower arrangement. This woman, noting the bouquet of cattails and irises in the alcove, sincerely compliments the clubfooted Kashiwagi, remarking that the beauty of the arrangement testifies to his new skill. Kashiwagi responds to her smiling praise by replying, with cold formality, that he is glad to hear her say just this. Having learned all she has to offer him, he need never see her again, and does not wish to. At this flatly cruel announcement the woman, without abandoning her ceremonious manner (she has been kneeling just inside the door since her arrival), crosses the room, still on her knees,
and, without warning, abruptly overturns and destroys his artful arrangement. Kashiwagi, enraged, seizes her by the hair and strikes her in the face.

This violence affords no relief from the scene's muffled tensions. The refracted quality persists even after Mizoguchi, urged by Kashiwagi to run after the weeping woman to “have” her, accompanies her home. As they sit in her house, quietly talking, following her prolonged bitter outbursts about Kashiwagi's many cruelties and perversities, Mizoguchi, in spite of his handicap of incoherent stuttering, is able to reveal to her what he had just discovered in Kashiwagi's room. She is the same woman he had once seen by chance in a very intimate and tender tea ceremony in a temple tearoom with her dead soldier-lover. Indeed this is the third time this stranger has impinged on his consciousness. Once before a casual “date” told him the woman's story in such a way that he instantly realized the girl was describing the figure from the tearoom pantomime on which, years before, he had spied from a distance.

Such a sequence of events is typical of the design of
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion.
The story unwinds as a slowly moving spiral in which figures originally glimpsed from a distance suddenly, with the passing of time, appear in the immediate foreground. Ghosts of the past also become, momentarily, living realities. In the West such occurrences would be described as "coincidences" or "hallucinations." The East has other interpretations. In this particular scene between Kashiwagi's distraught rejected mistress and Mizoguchi, the woman, deeply moved by the memories that the inarticulate young stammerer has revived for her, cries: “So that's what happened! So that's what really happened, is it? What a strange karma! Yes, that's what a strange karma means." la an uprush of sad-sweet recollection she then offers herself to him. But he cannot take her. Here again, as always, the image of the Golden Temple intervenes to paralyze him. His emotions bind rather than free him.

The entire episode fades away into the mists of "might have been," of "seemed to be.” This pervasive fog, in which the hero himself is living, reminds one of a Japanese painting, those subtle masterpieces created with
sumi
ink on silk which show a world tantalizingly half-revealed, half-obscured; misty landscapes in which trees, mountains, people-all of seemingly equal significance-are presented in a great living emptiness. In
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
the inference seems to be: Nothing remains what it was. Nothing is really what it seems. Even the death of Mizoguchi's one “good” friend, the unfailingly Kind, optimistic, cheerful, and positive Tsurukawa, turns out to have been not an accident as reported, but a suicide brought on by an unhappy adolescent love affair. What is equally significant-or is it so intended?
--
the “evil” cripple, Kasniwagi, reveals after the death of the “good” Tsurukawa that they too had secretly become great friends-even though Tsurukawa had sought to warn Mizoguchi against the crippled student's friendship. All the last letters written from Tokyo before his suicide had been written to Kashiwagi, Mizoguchi, the old companion, received none. Is this another expression of life's spiral riddle; a further subtle Eastern emphasis on the error of seeing "opposites"? Are the only definable qualities of human existence illusion and evanescence? Mizoguchi muses, at one point: "It is said that the essence of Zen is the absence of all feature, and that the real power to see consists in the knowledge that one's heart possesses neither face nor feature."

The character of the Superior in
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
is another example of the subtle mystifications that are presented to the Western reader in the pages of Mishima, novel. The Superior is a figure of utmost significance to the young acolyte, Mizoguchi, yet he remains throughout as baffling (deliberately baffling?) to the reader as he is to the novel's hero. This particular Zen Master is hardly, by anyone's standards, a disciplined “holy” man, with his fleshly pursuits, his open enjoyment of the good things of life-fine food, cigarettes, saké-his secret adventures with geishas. Yet there is a scene in which the young acolyte discovers this head priest crouched alone in an isolated room within the temple grounds, bent over ‘‘to the utmost possiole extent... with his head between his knees and his face covered with his long sleeves." An altogether new and different note is lightly struck for a moment; a note of deepened mystery. Here is the Superior in a pose of supplication and abasement quite unlike his usual calm, poised, and powerful self. The plump, self-indulgent, omhiscient Master of the temple has been abruptly transformed into a broken figure of suffering humility, kneeling alone in The Tower of the North Star. But the note of mystery is only briefly sounded; indeed it
hardly
registers, drowned out by the onrolling development of Mizoguchi's pathology. For to Mizoeucni, the Master's crouching figure was only "utterly devoid of pride and dignity. There was something ignoble about it, like the figure of a sleeping animal."

As for the deliberate introduction into the story of the use of Zen
koans,
those aphoristic problems or "riddles" by which Zen aspirants seek to pierce through into the reality of "self-enlightenment—they too are presented in various interpretations as though allowing the reader to reach his own conclusions. One of the most absorbing and mystifying scenes takes place in the Zen temple the day the war was officially declared lost. To the amazement of all the young acolytes, the Superior appeared at evening services in his most splendid robes, “the scarlet priest's robe which he had kept stored away for years." There was about him a "ruddy air of good health,” even a "look of overflowing delight.” Without so much as speaking about the war or its tragic conclusion, the Superior, after the sutra recitation, gives a lecture on a classic Zen catachetic problem:
Nansen Kills a Cat,
or as it is sometimes called:
Shoshu Wears a Pair of Sandals on his Head.
The Superior offers an interpretation of this classic
koan
which appears to his young audience in no way to relate to the shameful disgrace of the loss of the war. The boys walk away deeply puzzled. "We felt as though we had been bewitched by a fox. We had not the faintest idea why this particular Zen problem should have been chosen on the day of our country's defeat.” Tsurukawa's explanation is: “I think that the real point of tonight's lecture was that on the day of our defeat he [the Superior j should not have said a word about it and should have talked about killing a cat."

This same
koan
reappears later in the book during Kashi-wagi's flower-arranging scene, where it is given a twisted interpretation characteristic of the clubfooted student's twisted mind. At this same time an even more fateful
koan
is also quoted by the clubfooted Kasniwagi to the inarticulate, stuttering Mizoguchi. This is a quotation from the famed master Rinzai (here given as Ivan Morris translates it from Mishima):"When ye meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha! When ye meet your ancestor, kill your ancestor! When ye meet the disciple of Buddha, kill the disciple! When ye meet your father and mother, kill your father and mother! When ye meet your kin, kill your kin! Only thus will ye attain deliverance. Only thus will ye escape the trammels of material things and become free." (This stern exhortation brings an echo of Christ's admonition: "He that loveth father or mother, son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me” and that a "man's foes” are "those of his own household.
”)

The quotation from Rinzai rises to the surface of the acolyte's mind and, in his sick consciousness, seems to command him to commit his final unforgivable crime—this at the very last moment when the temple's compelling beauty in the nighttime garden is about to deprive him of his will to act. With his own nihilistic misinterpretation of the ancient saying about the drastic path one must follow to gain self-enlightenment, Mizoguchi seeks to rid himself of the paralyzing obsession with the Golden Temple that has haunted him since childhood. He sets a match to carefully placed bundles of straw. The Golden Temple is doomed!

One closes the novel with the feeling that this sacred arehitectural relic from the days of Japan's rich, paradoxical, and turbulent past may well be the true protagohist in these pages, as the book's title suggests.

Two passages from
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
linger strongly in my mind; both of them, in a sense, profoundly Eastern and Buddhist-though not particularly Zen in tone.

One of these passages occurs early, on the occasion of Mizoguchi's first visit to the temple with his dying father. He sees a skillfully executed model of the Golden Temple resting in a glass case in one of the rooms. "This model pleased me. It was closer to the Golden Temple of my dreams. 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 placea in a large universe and a smaller one is 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 which was infinitely greater than the real building-so great, indeed, that it almost enveloped the world."

The other passage occurs near the end, a part of the musings of the young acolyte just before he sets fire to the temple. "When the Golden Temple reflected the evening sun or shone in the moon, it was the light of the water [in the pond before it] that made the entire structure look as if it were mysteriously floating along and flapping its wings. The strong bonds of the temple's form were loosened by the reflection of the quivering water, and at such moments the Golden Temple seemed to be constructed of materials like wind and water and flame that are constantly in motion."

To its invisible basic elements the mad young acolyte-in both fact and fiction—reduced the Golden Temple's gloriously visible form. The rooms in which Shogun Yoshimitsu once sat on a straw mat, drinking tea, listening to the flute, and composing poetry, went up in flames and disappeared in ashes. It is perhaps not irrelevant to state, however, that the Japanese have already rebuilt the Kinkakuji. True to the symbol of the eternally reborn phoenix that surmounts its rooftop, The National Treasure stands again in the famous Kyoto monastery grounds. Some even say it is "more beautiful and more golden than before."

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
is a novel which could only have been written by a Japanese and a member of a race whose cultural heritage is essentially Buddhist. This is one of its great values to the Western reader. The fact that the hero is a Zen acolyte as well as a psyehopath, that the book deals with the willful destruction of a famed Buddhist religious monument, 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-and in a wider context-
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
offers the Western reader pictures of other ways of lite, other world views, differing radically from our own but perhaps of equal validity. The Japanese have developed slowly over the centuries-in part because of their determined isolatiohism-a truly unique civilization. Through the pages of a novel like Yukio Mishima's, one is able to perceive some of the elements that have gone into the creation of this rare, paradoxical, and long-enduring civilization; elements wnich well may, in the modern world, face final dissolution. In
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
a fragment of contemporary Japanese life, with its roots still deep in the culture of the past, is presented not for our judgment but for our observation. The opportunity offered here by Yukio Mishima's special insight and fictional talent is one for which to feel properly grateful.