The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima

ours, and the Golden Temple sank into it like a great anchor of pure gold that has become entirely black with rust.
    Father Tayama Dosen, the Superior of the temple, had been a friend of Father's when they had studied at a certain Zen temple. They had both spent three years at the temple and during this time had lived together. The two young men had attended the special seminary at the Sokoku Temple (which also was constructed under the Shogun Yoshimitsu) and, after going through certain ancient procedures of the Zen sect, they had entered the priesthood. Apart from all this, I learned much later from Father Dosen, one day when he was talking to me in a good mood, that my father and he had not only shared rigorous days of training, but that on some evenings after bedtime they had climbed over the temple wall together and gone out to buy women and enjoy themselves.
    Father and I, having finished our tour of the temple, returned to the entrance of the Main Hall. We were ushered down a lengthy, spacious hall and shown into the office of the Superior, which was in the Great Library, overlooking the garden with its famous old pine tree.
    I sat there straight and stiff in my school uniform, but Father suddenly seemed to be at ease. Although my father and the Superior had been trained at the same Zen school, they could Hardly have been more different in appearance. Father was emaciated from his illness, he looked poor, and his skin had a dry, powdery quality. Father Dosen, on the other hand, looked just like a pink cake. On his desk lay piles of unopened pareels, magazines, books, and letters, which had been sent from various parts of the country, and which seemed to bespeak the prosperity of the temple. He picked up a pair of scissors with his plump fingers and adroitly opened one of the pareels.
    â€œIt's a cake that someone's sent from Tokyo,” he explained. "You don't see such cakes very often these days. I'm told they don't distribute them to the shops any longer, but send them all to the forces or to government offices.”
    We drank delicate Japanese tea and ate a sort of dry Western cake that I had never tasted before. The more tense I became, the more the crumbs dropped from the cake onto my shiny, black-serge trousers.
    Father and the Superior were expressing their resentment at the fact that the army and the officials were only giving consideration to the Shinto shrines and were looking down on the Buddhist temples—not only looking down on them, in fact, but actually oppressing them; then they discussed how it would be best to handle the admihistration of the temples in the future.
    The Superior was a plump man. His face was wrinkled, to be sure, but each of the wrinkles looked as if it was thoroughly washed out. His face was round, but he had a long nose, which gave one the impression that the resin which flowed from it had somehow become solidified. Though his face looked easy-going enough, there was a stern air about his shaven head. It was as though all his energy was concentrated in that head: there was a terribly animal quality about it.
    The conversation of the two priests now turned to their days in the seminary. I was looking at the Sailboat Pine Tree in the garden. It had been formed by lowering the branches of a great pine and coiling them together in the shape of a boat, with the branches at the prow all trained at a higher level than the rest. A party of visitors had evidently arrived just before closing-time and I could hear a hum of voices from the direction of the Golden Temple on the other side of the wall. Their footsteps and voices were absorbed in the air of spring evening: the sound they made was soft and rounded, without any trace of sharpness. Then as their footsteps receded like the tide, they seemed to me to be truly the footsteps of human beings passing over the earth. I stared up at the phoenix on the summit of the Golden Temple; it was absorbing all that remained of the evening