The subject of "Kinkakuji" is one that lies close to Mishima's heart, and the book is written with great intensity and passion, though without any trace of incoherence. It is the imaginary autobiography of an actual person who in 1950 committed a crime that shocked all conventional Japanese. This was the burning of the Kinkaku, the Golden Pavilion of the Rokuon Temple, the sole survivor of a group of palace buildings erected in Kyoto between 1395 and 1397. (p. 113)

For Mishima, the Kinkaku affair became symbolic of the situation of his generation as he saw it. The Kinkaku itself, the elegant folly that had by dint of survival become a holy object, stood for the irrelevant cultural legacy his generation had in herited from feudal Japan, while its resurrection, intact, perfect, and meaningless, from its own ashes provided a perfect allegorical representation of the sacrifice of the living present to the...