The Temple of Dawn

The Temple of Dawn (1970)

Yukio Mishima

            Or: in which Shigekuni Honda, the bourgeois lawyer creep, masturbates to the memory of his dead childhood friend. I can tell already that this is going to be a difficult blog post for me to write. I’m running out of things to say about Yukio Mishima!

            The narrative here is divided into two parts: in the first, set in 1941, nine years after the events of Runaway Horses, Honda, now a prosperous corporate lawyer, is sent on business to Thailand. He wanders around Bangkok, visiting the sumptuous temples and soaking in the irrational tropical sunlight. Through his translator and tour guide he hears of a mad young princess who claims to be the reincarnation of a Japanese boy. He meets her and believes her to be genuine. Her family, believing her insane, locks her in a palace so that they might be spared embarrassment. Later Honda travels to India, where in the filth and holiness of Benares he realizes much about the transmigration of souls. After he returns to Japan the Empire declares war on America. Japan is reduced to ash. Honda studies theology and pays no attention to the war. He is completely indifferent: isolated in his study, with his books, feeling no emotion whatsoever. The second part takes place in 1952, after the war. A very large fee from one legal case has left Honda extremely wealthy and he retires to a country villa. He builds a swimming pool and has important people as guests. In the city streets and in the Universities Communists demonstrate against the government. The mad princess Ying Chan is now nineteen and a student in Japan, and has grown into an intoxicatingly beautiful young woman. Honda, a devoted voyeur, hatches a plan to see Ying Chan naked (primarily to confirm whether or not she is Kiyoaki Matsugae’s reincarnation, and secondarily because at this point I’m beginning to suspect Honda may have had a bit of a thing for Kiyoaki) and enlists the aid of a femme fatale neighbor, but the neighbor (Keiko) is a bisexual and she totally cockblocks him. There’s a pretty intense lesbian sixty-nine scene. One of Honda’s houseguests falls asleep while smoking a cigarette and Honda’s villa burns to the ground. The Princess returns to Thailand, is bitten by a cobra, and dies.

            This book is very much different from the two preceding novels. For one, it’s a lot sloppier and/or looser. Whereas Runaway Horses was very hard, disciplined, and straightforward, The Temple of Dawn is hazy and dream-like. It’s a very hallucinatory, disjointed narrative, full of strange vignettes and unique tones. Secondly, it’s much more pessimistic, nihilistic, and more in line with what I would think of as a “Mishima novel”. The first two books were full of what Mishima considered beauty. This book is full of what Mishima considered ugliness. Mishima musters all of his most lurid and deep imagery to paint a hideous picture: in the revolting chaos of Benares humanity moans and dies as they wade hip deep in the fetid Ganges, lepers crawl on festering stumps, flies bite at the tender flesh of the sacrificial lambs, the lungs fill with ashes blowing from the crematorium. Honda’s rich friends are little better: miserable organisms motivated by only the most animal of desires, ugly mounds of sagging flesh articulating degenerate thoughts. In short they are shallow, Westernized intellectuals.  It’s really Honda’s story, and he has turned into a corrupted, deteriorated old creep. New Model Honda has turned into a repulsive human being. You might call him kind of an asshole.

            Another thing that marks this book as being different from Runaway Horses is that this incarnation, the Princess, takes up very little screen time. We never once see a single iota of her thought processes, which I think is strange for a series that has previously been so internally directed. I don’t know if I’ve made it clear but I should say that Mishima very obviously doesn’t believe in reincarnation. He uses the transmigration of souls as a literary device to say something about the state of Japan. I struggle, however, to comprehend what he’s trying to say with the silent, capricious Princess.  

            As a reader I have a very strong tolerance for digressions. I can handle (and adore) say, Bolaño and Pynchon, both of whom are likely to vanish off over the horizon for dozens of pages at a time, while the reader is expected to hold on and enjoy the ride. A good tangent is pleasurable when delivered by some sort of writers. Mishima, however, is not of that sort. I do not expect him to go off into the yonder. I expect Mishima to stay tightly focused on the task at hand. It’s what he’s best at. That being said some tangents are better than others. The story of the gaucho racing the German nobleman on horseback and letting the kraut win in 2666, or the story of the Herero genocide, also involving Germans, from Gravity’s Rainbow, are both wild and brilliant. However, in The Temple of Dawn Mishima sadistically takes it upon himself to subject me to a very long, very lame exploration of highly complex Buddhist and Hindu theology. There are few things I want to hear about less. A dive into convoluted theological concepts that I don’t understand and have no interest in understanding because they are not real is somewhere near the bottom of the list of things I Would Like to Know. However painful and fruitless that portion of The Temple of Dawn is I’d still much rather read about Buddhism from Mishima’s perspective than from Jack Kerouac’s.

            I finished this book up last week while my girlfriend and I were camping in the Owens Valley. We did sort of a deluxe camping thing: we stayed in tent cabins on a ranch just a few minutes outside of the town of Lone Pine and the Alabama Hills. In exchange for staying one night free we did a few hours of work on the ranch, in this case picking lavender. The Owens Valley is a unique environment: the pitiless, violent granite Sierras to the West and the lurid, painterly, rust-colored Inyos to the East, and in between miles of arid High Desert wilderness. Both ranges look as if they could be from two different but equally otherworldly alien planets. In some parts the desolation was fantastic and awe-inspiring. On the other side of the Inyos is Death Valley, I believe, which is as otherworldly as it gets. Not far from Lone Pine is the trail that goes up Mount Whitney. People come from all over the world to climb it; the campground at the base of the mountain was as crowded as a shopping mall. Just north of Lone Pine, between Lone Pine and Independence, are the ruins of Manzanar, one of ten camps where Japanese-Americans were interred for a portion of World War II. Something like ten thousand Japanese were incarcerated in Manzanar alone. It’s now a national historic site, so there is a very nice visitor’s center, and reconstruction has started some of the barracks. Little is left of any of the buildings besides the foundations. On the Western edge of the camp is the cemetery. A bleached white obelisk stands, backed by a view of the harsh, majestic Sierras. The air in the Owens Valley is very clear and one can see for miles. Standing there at Manzanar I felt I could make out every single crevice and crease in the mountain range, which was some thirteen miles distant. Surrounding the obelisk are stones marking several graves. The stones are arranged in ovals tracing out the edge of a particular gravesite. Many of the ovals were only a couple feet to less than a foot in diameter: the graves of children. It was 109º Fahrenheit when we visited, and I don’t think it dropped below 80º during our vacation, even at night. I was able to get into a car with air-conditioning and drive away. I couldn’t imagine being trapped in a barracks with a hundred other people. It was a good environment for reading Mishima: lurid, inhospitable, otherworldly, and ruthless.

            Before I write one of these things I usually devote some time, but not that much time, towards planning what I want to express, and all the points I want to make, but I’ve been stumped by The Sea of Fertility. Usually I don’t wait this long after I finish before I post here. I don’t really know what to think about these books. They aren’t as good as his best works (The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea and Temple of the Golden Pavilion) but they are so different and unique I don’t really know how to categorize them. They have their flaws to be sure, but they are such grand, enormously emotional gestures and that I couldn’t possibly discount them. I don’t think they’re intellectual books. They’re motivated but different parts of the anatomy: the heart, the viscera. Mishima was attempting to make a great arcing artistic point and I’m not sure I get what it was, and I’m unsure if that makes me an inferior reader or what. I’m about a third of the way through Decay of the Angel and it’s going well so far. I’m pretty excited to be done. This has been an interesting experiment, reading all these books back to back. After I’m finished I want to read something short and American.

            Lordy, it’s hard coming up with this much to say about one guy.