THE TEMPLE OF THE GOLDEN PAVILION ...

THE TEMPLE OF THE GOLDEN PAVILION by Yukio Mishima, translated from the Japanese by Ivan Morris (Vintage: $11; 262 pp.) Originally published in the U.S. in 1959, “Temple of the Golden Pavilion”is based on a true incident: An unbalanced student set fire to the celebrated Zen temple of Kinkakuji in Kyoto. Mishima takes the reader into the tormented mind of the alienated student. An acolyte at the temple, he becomes obsessed with its consummate beauty: “If one compared this beauty to a sound, the building was like a little golden bell that had gone on ringing for five and a half centuries, or else like a small harp. But what if that sound should stop?” “Golden Pavilion” was one Mishima’s first explorations of the morally bereft world of postwar Japan, explorations that would culminate in his “Sea of Fertility” tetralogy and flamboyant suicide.