Goodreads Monday is a weekly meme where we randomly select a book from our Goodreads To Be Read list and share it with the world. It’s hosted by Lauren’s Page Turners, so be sure to link back to her site so that we can all see what everyone plans to read!

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
by Yukio Mishima, translated from the Japanese by Ivan Morris
Fiction
247 pages
first published in 1956

From Goodreads: In The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, celebrated Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima creates a haunting and vivid portrait of a young man’s obsession with idealized beauty and his destructive quest to possess it fully.

Mizoguchi, an ostracized stutterer, develops a childhood fascination with Kyoto’s famous Golden Temple. While an acolyte at the temple, he fixates on the structure’s aesthetic perfection and it becomes his one and only object of desire. But as Mizoguchi begins to perceive flaws in the temple, he determines that the only true path to beauty lies in an act of horrendous violence. Based on a real incident that occurred in 1950, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion brilliantly portrays the passions and agonies of a young man in postwar Japan, bringing to the subject the erotic imagination and instinct for the dramatic moment that marked Mishima as one of the towering makers of modern fiction. With an introduction by Donald Keene; Translated from the Japanese by Ivan Morris.

I’ve seen this book several times at one of my local indie bookstores, but I never picked it up. I came across it again in Clifton Fadiman’s New Lifetime Reading Plan, so I decided to finally give it a shot in 2019 and added it to my reading plan for the year. I’m not sure if it’s still available at the bookstore, but if it comes to it, I can have them reorder it for me. I loved Mishima’s The Sound of Waves, which I read for my 2018 Read the World Challenge, so I hope I will love this one, too.