A finger Proust

Yukio Mishima real name Kimitake Hiraoka is a Japanese writer, born January 14, 1925, and who committed suicide by seppuku 25 November 1970. He published nearly forty novels, but also essays, short stories and plays . His novel The Golden Pavilion was published in Japan in 1956.
The author was inspired by a true story that shocked many authentic Japanese, arson in 1950 the Golden Pavilion in Kyoto by a young Buddhist monk. This temple, a national treasure built in 1400 had survived so far all attempts to destroy the course of history.
Mizoguchi, son of a Buddhist priest, is educated in the idea that the Kyoto Golden Pavilion is the climax of beauty, after the death of his father he enters as a novice with the prior, old friend of the deceased. The young man gradually develops a fascination for the temple exacerbated to the point of hope to become the master or to be destructive. Poor stutterer and he has no friends and introversion leads him to put in comparison the aesthetic splendor of the sacred temple with his detestable constitution of human being disabled.
The entire novel is to Mishima to make us walk alongside the boy, not physically and psychologically, to understand how his mind slowly perverted by its extremist pursuit of Beauty will lead him to his final gesture, "The idea that the flame that would destroy me destroy also the Golden Pavilion almost gave me drunk. " For the young Mizoguchi feels literally a mission, driven by a big egos, "That a boy, hopelessly handicapped, comes to think that he is a chosen secretly, should we be surprised? ". Excluded from the world of beauty because of its unattractive, only destruction Pavilion d'Or 'perfect symbol of Beauty' will enable it to achieve absolute Evil. Since the Fair is forbidden, it will be evil at its highest level, and only then, once the gesture accomplished in a perfect communion he finally find its place in this world because "no doubt that this was I wanted to LIVE to fire the Golden Pavilion ". The last lines of the novel shows us the arsonist, quietly smoking a cigarette and watching the blazing temple, like Nero at Rome in flames, according to legend.
I had never read Mishima and I was amazed by his style 'at least in this novel very modern. I imagined a text very "Japanese" to the old, slow and bombastic, when in fact it is very Western and even introspective aspect of the young monk, if he stays in the Asian tradition, can resemble Proust whose soul and body suffer at the beauty. In his life as in his work, Mishima will be remembered as the man of ambiguity.
"Before going to bed, I had to go to the Golden Pavilion. (') It's true, I had never seen asleep, slept like the rest of the temple. His uninhabited structures could forget to sleep. His night totally escaped the laws that apply to men. For the first time in my life, I told him with violence; in a tone close to the curse, I threw it in his face: "One day you will suffer my law! Yes, for you do you Mettes more across my path one day, no matter what, I'll be your master! "Black water pond echoed my voice to the bottom of the hollow night. "