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Whiplash Currents. Why does Mizoguchi hate the Golden Temple? Novelist Mishima answers in many ways, none completely successful. The gist of it is that Japan, Author Mishima implies, has been hemmed in to the point of impotence by the worship of ancestors, ritual and beauty. In this sense, Temple belongs to recent, agonizing reason-why literature, in which Japanese writers are still covertly psychoanalyzing the loss of World War II. Mizoguchi is both poor and common, and Temple champions a kind of cultural revolt of the masses, with its rejection of all that is feudal and aristocratic. There is a lot of Zen beatnik in Mishima's hero, and at his worst he is a glorification of the East-West culture bum who has neither the courage nor the talent to remake the world he hates.
Though his nature descriptions are superb, chrysanthemums and moon mist rarely monopolize Author Mishima's vision. He is especially good at charting the whiplash currents of the Japanese temperament, swerving in an instant from refinement to cruelty. His tilt with tradition is spirited but distinctly un-Japanese. Since 1950, the Kinkakuji has been meticulously rebuilt, and may well gaze at its limpid image in the Kyoko Pond for another demi-millennium.