I’ve travelled to Japan a couple of times, and on almost all of those trips I’ve ended up at Kinkaku-ji, the golden pavilion found in a temple at Kyoto. It’s something you see in pictures but appears so different in real life: it’s a bit of an architectural confection, this golden structure from another time sitting above a mirror image of itself. 

It’s also a fake, a replacement. While the building was originally erected in the late 1300s, it’s been burned down and rebuilt. Twice. Most recently, this occurred in the 1950s, after a disturbed novice monk incinerated the building. 

Mishima’s story – a central part of Paul Schrader’s excellent Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters – is loosely based on the ’50s immolation, though as usual the author weaves obsession and death through its pages. We’re let in on the inner life of Mizoguchi, the stuttering son of a consumptive Buddhist priest.

His father plants the image of the Golden Pavilion as a singularly perfect entity in the young boy’s mind, and instils in Mizoguchi the idea that one day, the boy will become the temple’s priest. This pressure, coupled with the imagined perfection of the described temple, becomes part of the youngster’s life.

Mishima’s text is very much about the difficulties one faces when the perfection of the mind’s eye collides with the unavoidable flaws of the real. In Mizoguchi’s case, the inability to reconcile the two – the much-lauded image always wins, even when sex is involved – leads to the conclusion that only by corrupting or destroying this carried perfection can he be freed from its reach.

The novel very clearly develops a sense of odiousness as the novice’s life continues. Transgressions begin mildly but become more and more destructive. There’s a distinct sense that Mishima is presenting ugliness and evil as a necessity, as something to work through to master the world – though whether Mizoguchi is successful at becoming the ruler of his own existence is never specifically described. 

Still, it’s probably the Mishima novel that sticks with me the most. The imagery is outstanding, and knowing it is rooted in the real – the author went as far as to interview the real-life arsonist during his research for the text – gives it some oomph I find missing from his other works, somehow.