Kinkakuji

Kinkakuji 金閣寺, a famous and tourists' favorite destination in Kyoto, Japan. 

When I was back in college, I read the namesake novel by Mishima Yukio (三島由紀夫). It is about the horrifying arson event at Kinkakuji around 1950, committed by a disturbed young monk. Mishima applied his own aesthetic theory to this great fire and infused it into the mind of the monk, providing a poetic reason for burning down the temple. It was something about how the beauty of the temple is best preserved in people's minds and by exiting the stage dramatically. A similar idea was attributed to Mishima's suicide at the age of 45.

Due to Mishima's certain characteristics colliding with my struggles in my youth, several of his books affected me for quite a while and probably nurtured the quieter side of my personality. Although I did not fully understand all the novels I read by him, nor did I systematically analyze his work, I had my own interpretations of the ideas that I seemed to grasp.

Taiwan is very close to Japan, and many of my friends had visited this temple a long time ago, but not me. Finally, I got to see it. The golden rays that the pavilion emitted created an aura as if time and the elements around it were all frozen. The fire that once burned it down seems still to be burning, and the late Mishima's words are like sutras surrounding the pavilion. My youth, however, is in the past, but I seemed to find it somewhere there when I spaced out while gazing at Kinkakuji.