The Temple of the Golden Pavilion Book

"I walked back and forth in front of the Nishijin police station. It was evening and several of the windows were brightly lit. I noticed a police-detective hurrying into the building. He was wearing an open-neck shirt and was carrying a briefcase. No one paid any attention too me. No one had paid any attention to me during the past twenty years and under present conditions this was bound to continue. Under present conditions I was still a person of no importance. In this country of Japan there were people by the million, by the tens of millions, who were tucked away in corners and to whom no one paid any attention. I still belonged to their ranks. The world felt not the slightest concern as to whether these people lived or died and for this reason there was something reassuring about them."

An odd, intriguing read, one that reminded me of Dostoevsky or Camus, in that it seemed as much a parable as a narrative. I won't spoil the plot, but Mishima cannily took a real event, changed little, and made it a psychological profile of a young man in turmoil. The lead, a stuttering acolyte at a temple in Kyoto, is unlikable - after a childhood trauma, he becomes hopelessly obsessed with the Temple of the Golden Pavilion. The book presents him with various interlocutors and sexual temptations, all of which lead to an inevitable crescendo.

What frightened me - what made me pull the paragraph above - is the insight that Mishima has into the mind of the young domestic terrorist. Mizoguchi, the lead, is a primordial version of an incel, and his cool rationalization of the inexplicable is chilling. Though the novel drags through the occasional parable and has a preposterous coincidence at its core (a minor character keeps appearing in different subplots with no real explanation), it is an accomplishment.