The Temple of the Golden Pavilion Read Free

twisted interpretation of several famed Zen koans.
    The quiet scene is terminated by a moment of penetrating and sadistic cruelty on the part of the crippled Kashiwagi toward a woman visitor who has, during the course of a sexual affair, been teaching him the exacting art of flower arrangement. This woman, noting the bouquet of cattails and irises in the alcove, sincerely compliments the clubfooted Kashiwagi, remarking that the beauty of the arrangement testifies to his new skill. Kashiwagi responds to her smiling praise by replying, with cold formality, that he is glad to hear her say just this. Having learned all she has to offer him, he need never see her again, and does not wish to. At this flatly cruel announcement the woman, without abandoning her ceremonious manner (she has been kneeling just inside the door since her arrival), crosses the room, still on her knees, and, without warning, abruptly overturns and destroys his artful arrangement. Kashiwagi, enraged, seizes her by the hair and strikes her in the face.
    This violence affords no relief from the scene's muffled tensions. The refracted quality persists even after Mizoguchi, urged by Kashiwagi to run after the weeping woman to “have” her, accompanies her home. As they sit in her house, quietly talking, following her prolonged bitter outbursts about Kashiwagi's many cruelties and perversities, Mizoguchi, in spite of his handicap of incoherent stuttering, is able to reveal to her what he had just discovered in Kashiwagi’s room. She is the same woman he had once seen by chance in a very intimate and tender tea ceremony in a temple tearoom with her dead soldier-lover. Indeed this is the third time this stranger has impinged on his consciousness. Once before a casual “date” told him the woman's story in such a way that he instantly realized the girl was describing the figure from the tearoom pantomime on which, years before, he had spied from a distance.
    Such a sequence of events is typical of the design of The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. The story unwinds as a slowly moving spiral in which figures originally glimpsed from a distance suddenly, with the passing of time, appear in the immediate foreground. Ghosts of the past also become, momentarily, living realities. In the West such occurrences would be described as "coincidences" or "hallucinations." The East has other interpretations. In this particular scene between Kashiwagi's distraught rejected mistress and Mizoguchi, the woman, deeply moved by the memories that the inarticulate young stammerer has revived for her, cries: “So that's what happened! So that's what really happened, is it? What a strange karma! Yes, that's what a strange karma means." la an uprush of sad-sweet recollection she then offers herself to him. But he cannot take her. Here again, as always, the image of the Golden Temple intervenes to paralyze him. His emotions bind rather than free him.
    The entire episode fades away into the mists of "might have been," of "seemed to be.” This pervasive fog, in which the hero himself is living, reminds one of a Japanese painting, those subtle masterpieces created with sumi ink on silk which show a world tantalizingly half-revealed, half-obscured; misty landscapes in which trees, mountains, people-all of seemingly equal significance-are presented in a great living emptiness. In The Temple of the Golden Pavilion the inference seems to be: Nothing remains what it was. Nothing is really what it seems. Even the death of Mizoguchi's one “good” friend, the unfailingly Kind, optimistic, cheerful, and positive Tsurukawa, turns out to have been not an accident as reported, but a suicide brought on by an unhappy adolescent love affair. What is equally significant-or is it so intended? -- the “evil” cripple, Kasniwagi, reveals after the death of the “good” Tsurukawa that they too had secretly become great friends-even though Tsurukawa had sought to