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The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

Part of Vintage International

Author Yukio Mishima
Translated by Estate of Ivan Morris
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Paperback
$18.00 US
Knopf | Vintage
On sale Oct 04, 1994 | 288 Pages | 9780679752707
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Translated from the Japanese by Ivan Morris. Traumatized as a child by seeing his mother make love to another man in the presence of his dying father, Mizoguchi becomes a hopeless stutterer. Taunted by his schoolmates, he feels utterly alone until he becomes an acolyte at a famous temple in Kyoto. He quickly becomes obsessed with the beauty of the temple. Even when tempted by a friend to explore the geisha district, he cannot escape the temple's image. In the novel's soaring climax, Mizoguchi tries desperately to free himself from his affliction.

"Beautifully translated.... Mishima re-erects Kyoto, plain and mountain, monastery, temple, town, as Victor Hugo made Paris out of Notre Dame."
--The Nation

"An amazing literary feat in its minute delineation of a neurotic personality."
--Chicago Tribune
Yukio Mishima was born in Tokyo in 1925. He graduated from Tokyo Imperial University’s School of Jurisprudence in 1947. His first published book, The Forest in Full Bloom, appeared in 1944, and he established himself as a major author with Confessions of a Mask (1949). From then until his death, he continued to publish novels, short stories, and plays each year. His crowning achievement, The Sea of Fertility tetralogy—which contains the novels Spring Snow (1969), Runaway Horses (1969), The Temple of Dawn (1970), and The Decay of the Angel (1971)—is considered one of the definitive works of twentieth-century Japanese fiction. In 1970, at the age of forty-five and the day after completing the last novel in the Fertility series, Mishima committed seppuku (ritual suicide)—a spectacular death that attracted worldwide attention. View titles by Yukio Mishima

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Translated from the Japanese by Ivan Morris. Traumatized as a child by seeing his mother make love to another man in the presence of his dying father, Mizoguchi becomes a hopeless stutterer. Taunted by his schoolmates, he feels utterly alone until he becomes an acolyte at a famous temple in Kyoto. He quickly becomes obsessed with the beauty of the temple. Even when tempted by a friend to explore the geisha district, he cannot escape the temple's image. In the novel's soaring climax, Mizoguchi tries desperately to free himself from his affliction.

"Beautifully translated.... Mishima re-erects Kyoto, plain and mountain, monastery, temple, town, as Victor Hugo made Paris out of Notre Dame."
--The Nation

"An amazing literary feat in its minute delineation of a neurotic personality."
--Chicago Tribune

Author

Yukio Mishima was born in Tokyo in 1925. He graduated from Tokyo Imperial University’s School of Jurisprudence in 1947. His first published book, The Forest in Full Bloom, appeared in 1944, and he established himself as a major author with Confessions of a Mask (1949). From then until his death, he continued to publish novels, short stories, and plays each year. His crowning achievement, The Sea of Fertility tetralogy—which contains the novels Spring Snow (1969), Runaway Horses (1969), The Temple of Dawn (1970), and The Decay of the Angel (1971)—is considered one of the definitive works of twentieth-century Japanese fiction. In 1970, at the age of forty-five and the day after completing the last novel in the Fertility series, Mishima committed seppuku (ritual suicide)—a spectacular death that attracted worldwide attention. View titles by Yukio Mishima

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