Recent Reading: Temple of the Golden Pavilion

After recently re-watching the Paul Schraeder biopic of the later Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, I decided to check out some of the late author's work from the public library. I recently finished Mishima's novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Here are a few passages I liked.

In general, things that were endowed with life did not, like the Golden Temple, have the rigid quality of existing once and for all. Human beings were merely allotted one part of nature's various attributes and, by an effective method of substitution, they diffused that part and made it multiply. If the purpose of a murder was to destroy the once-and-for-all quality of one's victim, then that murder was based on a permanent miscalculation. Thus my thoughts led me to recognizing more and more clearly that there was a complete contrast between the existence of the Golden Temple and that of human beings. On the one hand, a phantasm of immortality emerged from the apparently destructible aspect of human beings; on the other, the apparently indestructible beauty of the Golden Temple gave rise to the possibility of destroying it. Mortal things like human beings cannot be eradicated; indestructible things like the Golden Temple can be destroyed. Why had no one realized this? There was no doubting the originality of my conclusion. If I were to set fire to the Golden Temple, which had been designated as a National Treasure in 1897, I should be committing an act of pure destruction, of irreparable ruin, an act which would truly decrease the volume of beauty that human beings had created in this world (pgs 194-195).

This passage did not advance the narrative, but it stood out for me as I read it. The vast majority of Mishima's book does not dwell of the grotesque.

Then a black dog walked through the crowds. He was a large, shaggy dog and was obviously used to walking in crowded places, for he picked his way skillfully between the feet of women in their colorful coats and the men in their military uniforms, and occasionally stopped in front of a shop. I noticed the dog stopping to sniff outside a souvenir shop that had not altered since the time of Shogoin Yatsuhashi. Now for the first time I could see the dog's face in the light of the shop. One of his eyes had been crushed, and the blood and solidified mucus in the corner of the eye looked like a ruby. The uninjured eye was looking directly down at the ground. The shaggy hair on his back was conspicuously bunched together and had a hardened look.

I am not quite sure why this dog should have attracted my attention. Perhaps it was because, as this dog wandered about, he stubbornly carried within himself a world that was dominated by a sense of smell. This world was superimposed on that of human streets, and in effect the lights of the city, the songs that came from gramophone records, and the sound of human laughter were all being threatened by persistent, deak smells. For the order of smell was more accurate, and the smell of urine that clung to the dog's damp feet was accurately connected with the faint, unpleasant odor that emanated from the internal organs of human beings (p. 160).