The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (金閣寺) is a novel by Yukio Mishima published in 1956, relating themes of obsession with beauty, destruction and death.

Very Mishima-esque, it represents the first period of his work dominated by the failure to get to the end of one's aspirations, and embrace death as the retribution for one's frustrated attempts at fully capturing and possessing beauty. This is inspired from real events, with Mishima even researching the case and personally interviewing the arsonist. As a result, many of the events in the novel actually occurred. The philosophical and spiritual dimensions are, however, little substantiated in the actual criminal act, which has been hijacked to fit the author's worldview.