SOURCE: Schwab, Gabriele. “A Gaze into the Temple of Dawn: Yukio Mishima's ‘Absence in Presence’.” Discourse 14, no. 3 (summer 1992): 131-51.

In the following essay, Schwab examines the dualities of Eastern/Western and masculine/feminine in The Temple of Dawn.

“[A]s long as self-consciousness (the self) existed and perceived, the world was nothing more than a phenomenal shadow, a reflection of the ego's perceptions; the world was nothing and therefore nonexistent” (125). These reflections in Yukio Mishima's The Temple of Dawn pertain to its main character, Honda, the “Western Japanese” lawyer who, looking back at his life, comes to “realize that what had permitted him to live the way he had was the strength of Western thought, imported from the outside” (25).

The Temple of Dawn, the third novel in Mishima's tetralogy The Sea of Fertility, is a novel about the cultural contact between East and West in this century which...