The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
InThe Temple of the Golden Pavilion, celebrated Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima creates a haunting and vivid 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 the one and only object of his 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 horrendous violence. Based on a real incident that occurred in 1950,The Temple of the Golden Pavilionbrilliantly 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.(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
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- I deleted Facebook around 2016 and did a lot of reading.
The Art of Deception and The Art of Intrusion were good, but are outdated and more to be read as historical documents at this point.
If you wish to master disinformation, "The Prince", "The Art of War" and "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" are all required reading.
Also, read the translator's notes prepending the English version Mein Kampf, but the text itself is not very interesting. Skip it and pick up a copy of "The Commandant" by Rudolph Hess, along with "Eichman in Jerusalem" if you want to learn how to influence people at scale.
Oh, and Helter Skelter. Don't forget that one.
(Generals do not face each other in battle... they send their troops to do their bidding.)
Fictionwise, read Lolita, Convenience Store Woman, Post Office, and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion.
- Pfffff you really asked the impossible question here. Best I can do is scan through the books on the shelves next to me:
* Beyond good and evil: Nietzsche
* The Temple of the Golden Pavilion: Yukio Mishima
* Steppenwolf: Hermann Hese
* Library of babel: Borges
* The Brain: David Eagleman
* The Magical Mountain: Thomas Mann
* The Dark Tower: Stephen King(actually tons of King books - I am a bit of a fanboy)
* Factfulness: Hans Rosling
* William Blake: selected poetry
* Dostoevsky: The idiot
* Captain Nemo: Jules Verne
* The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Adams
- Mishima's late-life militarism and his death tend to overshadow his early work. Both "Confessions of a Mask" and "Temple of the Golden Pavilion" are masterpieces, and you can see the raw impulses that motivated him, before he sublimated them to a political agenda.
- I think I was 12 or 13 when I stumbled upon The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Till this day is easily in my top 10 favourite books. And oddly enough almost 20 years later the same copy is sitting right besides me on the shelf. I am very interested in getting a copy in another language and reading it just to see how I feel about it(sadly Japanese is out of the question): I've been surprised how different books feel in different languages. On the subject of Mishima, his biography really shocked me when I first read it. Most notably how the book and his life ended - incredibly similar, yet incredibly different. It's really hard to describe it but for anyone who hasn't read the book, I highly recommend it.
- It's a shame that the blog doesn't mention Mishima's most famous work, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (a fictionalized account of the real case of a deranged monk burning down Kyoto's most famous temple), or (IMHO) his magnum opus, the Sea of Fertility tetralogy, which he finished immediately before his death. Both showcase Mishima at his finest: intense, dense, obsessed with sex and death.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Temple_of_the_Golden_Pavil...
- Three Japanese authors that are wildly different from Murakami:
* Yukio Mishima. Prose is incredibly dense to the point of being baroque (there are pages of footnotes even in the Japanese originals), but there's nobody else quite like him: heavy focus on themes of sex, death and mysticism. "Temple of the Golden Pavilion" is his most famous work but the "Sea of Fertility" tetralogy is also good.
What I wanted was to die among strangers, untroubled, beneath a cloudless sky. And yet my desire differed from the sentiments of that ancient Greek who wanted to die under the brilliant sun. What I wanted was some natural, spontaneous suicide. I wanted a death like that of a fox, not yet well versed in cunning, that walks carelessly along a mountain path and is shot by a hunter because of its own stupidity…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukio_Mishima
* Osamu Dazai. The F. Scott Fitzgerald of Japan in time, themes and popularity, wrote a series of heavily autobiographical novels about his struggles with money, health, family and basically everything. Fairly grim but compelling reading.
The year before last I was expelled from my family and, reduced to poverty overnight, was left to wander the streets, begging help for various quarters, barely managing to stay alive from one day to the next, and just when I'd begun to think I might be able to support myself with my writing, I came down with a serious illness. Thanks to the compassion of others, I was able to rent a small house in Funabashi, Chiba, next to the muddy sea, and spent the summer there alone, convalescing. Though battling an illness that each and every night left my robe literally drenched with sweat, I had no choice but to press ahead with my work. The cold half pint of milk I drank each morning was the only thing that gave me a certain peculiar sense of the joy in life; my mental anguish and exhaustion were such that the oleanders blooming in one corner of the garden appeared to me merely flicking tongues of flame...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osamu_Dazai
* Murakami Ryu. Not to be confused with his namesake, Ryu's writing is very opposite of whimsical and "Almost Transparent Blue" is shockingly brutal.
This was a factory, a sorting house. We were no different from dogs and pigs and cows: all of us were allowed to play when we were small, but then, just before reaching maturity, we were sorted and classified. Being a high school student was the first step toward becoming a domestic animal.
