The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (33 page)

My heart was throbbing merrily and my wet hands were trembling. Moreover, my matches were wet. The first one wouldn't light. The second one was about to light when it broke. The third one burst into flames and as I held out my hand against the wind it illuminated the spaces between my fingers.

Then I had to seareh for the bundles of straw. For, although I had dragged the three bundles in here myself and placed them in different parts of the building, I had completely forgotten where I had put them. By the time that I had found them, the match had burned out. I crouched down by the straw and this time struck two matches together.

The fire delineated the complex shadows of the piles of straw and, giving forth the brilliant color of the wild places, it spread minutely in all directions. As the smoke rose into the air, the fire hid itself within its white mass. Then, unexpectedly far from where I was standing, the flames sprang up, puffing out the green of the mosquito net. I felt as if everything round me had suddenly become alive.

At this moment my head became completely clear. There was a limit to my supply of matches. I ran to another corner of the room, and, carefully striking a match, set fire to the next bundle of straw. The new flames that sprang up heartened me. In the past when I had been out with my companions and we had made campfires I had always been particularly adept at the job.

Within the Hosui-in a great flickering shadow had arisen. The statues of the Three Holy Buddhas, Amida, Kannon, and Seishi were lit up in red. The wooden statue of Yoshimitsu flashed its eyes; and in the back its shadow fluttered.

I could hardly feel the heat. When I saw that the steadfast flames had moved to the offertory box, I felt that everything was going to be all right.

I had forgotten about the arsenic and the pocketknife. Suddenly I had the idea of dying in the Kukyocho surrounded by the flames. Then I fled from the fire and ran up the narrow stairs. It did not occur to me to wonder why the door leading up to the Choondo was open. The old guide had forgotten to close the second-story door.

The smoke swirled toward my back. As I coughed, I gazed at the statue of Kannon that was attributed to Keishin and at the music-playing angels painted on the ceiling. Gradually the drifting smoke filled the Choondo. I ran up the next flight of stairs and tried to open the door of the Kukyocho. The door would not open. The entrance to the third story was firmly locked.

I knocked at the door. It must have been a violent knocking, but the sound did not impinge on my ears. With all my might I knocked at the door. I felt that someone might open the door to the Kukyocho for me from the inside. What I dreamed of finding in the Kukyocho was a place to die, but since the smoke was already pursuing me I knocked impetuously at the door as though I were instead seeking a refuge. What lay on the other side of that door could only be a little room. And at that moment I poignantly dreamed that the walls of the room must be fully covered with golden foil, though I knew that in actual fact they were almost completely defoliated. I cannot explain how desperately I was longing for that radiant little room as I stood there knocking at the door. If only I could reach it,I thought, everything would be all right. If only I could reach that little golden room.

I knocked as hard as I could. My hands were not strong enough and I threw my whole body against the door. Still it would not open.

The Choondo was already filled with smoke. Beneath my feet I could hear the crackling sound of the fire. I choked in the smoke and almost lost consciousness. As I coughed, I kept on knocking. But still the door would not open.

When at a certain moment there arose in me the clear consciousness of having been refused, I did not hesitate. I dodged the stairs. I ran down to the Hosui-in through the swirling smoke; I must have passed through the fire itself. When finally I reached the western door, I threw myself out into the open. Then I started to run like a shot, not knowing where I was going.

I ran. It was fantastic how far I ran without stopping to rest. I can't even remember what places I passed. I must have left by the back gate next to the Kyohoku Tower in the north of the temple precincts, then I must have passed by the Myoo Hall, run up the mountain path that was bordered by bamboo grass and azalea, and reached the top of Mount Hidari Daimonji. Yes, it was surely on top of Mount Hidari Dai-monji that I lay down on my back in the bamboo field in the shadow of the red pines and tried to still the fierce beating of my heart. This was the mountain that protected the Golden Temple from the north.

The cry of some startled birds brought me to my senses. Or else it was a bird that flew close to my face with a great fluttering of its wings.

As I lay there on my back I gazed at the night sky. The birds soared over the branches of the red pines in great numbers and the thin flakes from the fire, which were already becoming scaree, floated in the sky above my head.

I sat up and looked far down the ravine towards the Golden Temple. A strange sound echoed from there. It was like the sound of crackers. It was like the sound of countless people's joints all cracking at once.

From where I sat the Golden Temple itself was invisible. All that I could see was the eddying smoke and the great fire that rose into the sky. The flakes from the fire drifted between the trees and the Golden Temple's sky seemed to be strewn with golden sand.

I crossed my legs and sat gazing for a long time at the scene.

When I came to myself, I found that my body was covered in blisters and scars and that I was bleeding profusely. My fingers also were stained with blood, evidently from when I had hurt them by knocking against the temple door. I licked my wounds like an animal that has fled from its pursuers.

I looked in my pocket and extracted the bottle of arsenic, wrapped in my handkerchief, and the knife. I threw them down the ravine.

Then I noticed the pack of cigarettes in my other pocket. I took one out and started smoking. I felt like a man who settles down for a smoke after finishing a job of work. I wanted to live.

Other
T
UTTLE
C
LASSICS
by YUKIO MISHIMA

“He had an economy of means to create enormous myths—his novels are compressed visions”-
Arthur Miller, American Playwright

After the Banquet
ISBN: 978-4-8053-0968-1

Kazu is a successful, independent woman determined never to fall in love again—that is, until a former government cabinet minister walks into her life. Attracted despite herself by Noguchi's aristocratic background and intellectualism, she marries him—even as the wide social and moral gulf between them signals catastrophe. In her own selfish attempt to resurrect Noguchi's political career, Kazu secretly funds his idealistic campaign, but Noguchi finds out and is morally offended. Now Kazu has to decide: should she comply with her husband's strict code of conduct, or return to the independent life she'd once cherished? The climax of this tale reveals Mishima's full range of power as a master storyteller and novelist.

Confessions of a Mask
ISBN: 978-4-8053-0232-3
Long regarded as one of the most important novels to appear in postwar Japan,
Confessions of a Mask
is an allegory of a lonely boy's yearning quest for belonging and his gradual acceptance of his homesexuality. With its overlay or intense sado-masochistic fantasy, the author drawns deeply from the well of his own emotion and perhaps subconsciously hints at his own demise. The boy's quest for a place in the sun mirrors the monumental and sometimes futile efforts of Japan to find equal footing with the great nations of the world, while attempting to remain true to its unique spirit.

Death in Midsummer and Other Stories
ISBN: 978-4-8053-0617-8

Death in Midsummer and Other Stories
is a collection of nine of the finest stories by the renowned novelist, essayist and playwright, Yukio Mishima. Personally selected by Mishima for this anthology, and translated into English by four outstanding Japanologists—Donald Keene, Ivan Morris, Geoffery Sargent, and Edward Seidensticker—they display Mishima's masterly command over the short story, a form practiced as major art in his native Japan. They also represent Mishima's extraordinary ability to depict, with deftness and penetration, a wide range of human beings in moments of significance. His characters are very often sophisticated, modern Japanese who, in the end, are revealed as not so liberated from the past as they had thought. In the title story,
Death in Midsummer,
set at a beach resort, a triple tragedy becomes a cloud of gloom that requires exorcizing. In “Patriotism," a young army officer and his wife choose the voilent but traditional
seppuku,
or ritual suicide, as a way of vindicating their belief in ancient values. In another of the stories, a working-class couple, touching in their simple love for each other, pursue financial security by rather shocking means.

Five Modern Noh Plays
ISBN: 978-4-8053-1032-8

Five Modern Noh Plays
brilliantly revives a great art form that has long fascinated audiences and readers throughout the world. In his introduction, Donald Keene calls there the first genuinely successful modern Noh plays and adds, “If the medium is given a new lease on life it will be because of Mishima and his work"
.
As long ago as 1916 William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound were excitedly discovering Noh plays. In 1922, Arthur Waley's fine translations appeared in a collection titled
The Noh Plays of Japan.
Since then, interest has grown steadily in this unique art form. At the heart of Noh lies the accidental encounter through which the workings of Fate are revealed. Often one of the persons in not what he or she seems to be: perhaps a ghost or a person fallen from high estate. Mishima has been marvelously successful in preserving in preserving the weird and haunting mood of classical Noh, but his characters and situations have the directness and hardness of an encounter on a cuty street. The emotion of these plays is so communicable that one can imagine them staged anywhere in the world. Or they can be read and reread in Donald Keene's excellent translation.

Other Great Names in the
TUTTLE CLASSIC SERIES

by KOBO ABE

The Woman in the Dunes
ISBN: 978-4-8053-0900-1

First published in 1962, this avant-garde work is esteemed as one of the finest Japanese novels of the postwar period, and it was the first of Abe's novels to be translated into English. Niki Jumpei, an amateur entomologist on a weekend trip from the city, comes upon a bizarre village among towering dunes where the residents are living deep within pits. First drawn to assist a widow in one of the pits, he is entrapped and must shovel along with her the ever-encroaching dunes that threaten to bury the community. While Niki attempts to escape his prison of sand, his relationship with the woman is evolving and, he comes to accept a whole new identity... With striking similarities to the work of Franz Kafka,
The Woman in the Dunes
entices with its unusual plot, its vivid detail, and its existential examination of the human condition.

Secret Rendezvous
ISBN: 978-4-8053-0472-3

In this surrealistic detective story, a man awakens one morning with the groggy recollection that an ambulance has taken his wife from their home in the middle of the night. In his laborious quest to locate her at the hospital, his senses are assaulted by the depraved environment he enters, a labyrinth filled with odd and insane sights, sounds and people.

by YASUNARI KAWABATA

Snow Country
ISBN: 978-4-8053-0635-2

Perhaps the most famous of Kawabata's classical novels, this is the story of a doomed love affair between Shimamura, a rich socialite, and Kamako, the strong-willed mountain geisha he befriends. Although Shimamura knows all about love in the abstract, he is incapable of truly loving this woman even though she offers her own love to him in return. Although Komako gives shimamura her heart, she finds that true love can never be a one-sided affair. To this haunting novel of wasted love Kawabata brings the brushstroke suggestiveness and astohishing graps of motive that earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Thousands Cranes
ISBN: 978-4-8053-0971-1

This melancholy tale uses Japan's classical tea ceremony as a backdrop for the relationships between young man Kikuji and two of his late father's former mistresses. Whereas the bitter and domineering Chikako has become as coarse and meddlesome as Kikuji's father had been, the beguiling and charming Mrs Ota remains as young and as alluring as ever. Further complicating these relationships is Mrs Ota's 20-year-old daughter, Fumiko. Kikuji retraces his father's fickle footsteps as he tries to escape the domineering Chikako while harboring a guilty passion for Mrs Ota, and Fumiko's efforrs to intervene ultimately lead to the novel's stunning climax. Kawabata deftly employs the symbolism of the Japanese tea ceremony as the minimalist style of
sumi-e, haiku,
and Noh theater in this exploration of sex, love guilt, and raw revenge.

by JUNICHIRO TANIZAKI

Some Prefer Nettles
ISBN: 978-4-8053-0633-8

The conflict between traditional and modern Japanese culture is at the heart of this novel. Kaname is a smug, modern man living in a smug, modern marriage. Gamely he allows his wife to become the lover of another man, but such liberalism can never cure the profound sadness at the heart of their relationship. So Kaname gradually retreats into the protection of traditional rituals, attitudes and tastes, eventually making love to O-Hisa, his father in-law's old-fashioned mistress, as he abandons the modern world entirely. The novel's other characters, including Kaname's wife, his lover, his father-in-law, and even the cities in which they live, all symbolize the modern and ancient ways of life in Japan. Tanizaki's characteristic irony, eroticism, and psyehological undertones make
Some Prefer Nettles
an exceptional enjoyable read.

The Key
ISBN: 978-4-8053-0632-1

A middle-aged husband and his wife both seek passion outside of their loveless, dead-end marriage, and their stories are told in the form of parallel diary entries. As they record their personal thoughts of the perior night's sexual adventures, this novel carefully balances shock value with literary value to fully explore the themes of repressed sexual desire, psyehosexual emotion, and sexual taboos. Tanizaki's restrained and delicate prose artfully convey not only the consequences of the couple's pursuits, but also the very best of Japanese literature.

by SOSEKINATSUME

And Then
ISBN: 978-4-8053-0615-4
Thus opens one of Natsume Soseki's most admired works.
And Then
is a novel of love and disillusionment. This is the story of a young man for whom idleness has become an expression of rebellion. Having become thoroughly alienated by the cultural upheaval, Daisuke has lost the values to guide his life. Yet his refined indifference to everything is completely disrupted when he falls in love with his best friend's wife. Now for the first time, Daisuke must choose his own fate.

Kokoro
ISBN: 978-4-8053-0746-5
Set in the turbulent Meiji era, a chance encounter on a Kamakura beach irrevocably links a young student to a man he simply calls “Sensei.” Intrigued by Sensei's aloofness and wanting to know more about him, the student calls upon Sensei with increasing frequency. Eventually, Sensei and his beautiful wife open up their home and their lives to him. The young man graduate from university and is called home to his dying father, but the Sensei draws him back to Tokyo with a letter of heartfelt confession... Written in 1914,
Kokoro
provides a timeless psyehological analysis of one man's alienation from society, and starkly but gently shows the depth of both friendship and love.