The Temple of the Golden Pavilion Read Online Free PDF Page A

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    Looking at these objects that he had discarded, I had the impression that I was seeing a sort of honorable grave. The abundant May flowers strengthened this feeling. The cap, which reflected the jet black of the visor, and the sword and its leather belt, which were hanging there next to it, had all been separated from his body and exuded an especially lyrical beauty. They were themselves as perfect as my memory of him-indeed, they looked to me like relics left by a young hero who has departed for the battle front.
    I made sure that there was no one about. I heard the sound of cheering from the direction of the wrestling-ring. From my pocket I took out the rusty knife that I used for sharpening my pencils; then I crept up to the fence, and on the back of the beautiful black scabbard of the sword I engraved several ugly cuts....
    From a description of this sort, people may judge at once that I must have been something of a young poet. But until this very day, far from ever having written a poem, I have not so much as written a memorandum in a notebook. I had no particular impulse to outshine others by cultivating some new ability and by thus making up for those points in which I was inferior. In other words, I was too proud to be an artist. My dream of being a tyrant or a great artist never went beyond the stage of being a dream, and I did not have the slightest feeling of wanting to accomplish something by actually putting my hands to it.
    Because the fact of not being understood by other people had become my only real source of pride, I was never confronted by any impulse to express things and to make others understand something that I knew. I thought that those things which could be seen by others were not ordained for me. My solitude grew more and more obese, just like a pig.
    All of a sudden my memory alights on a tragic incident that occurred in our village. I hough I was not actually supposed to have been concerned in any way with this incident, I still cannot rid myself of the definite feeling that I participated in it.
    Through this incident, I found myself at a single stroke face to face with everything. With life, with carnal pleasure, with treachery, with hatred and with love-yes, with every possible thing in this world. And my memory preferred to deny and to overlook the element of the sublime that lurked in all these things.
    Two houses away from my uncle's home there lived a pretty girl. She was callcd Uiko. Her eyes were large and dear. Perhaps because hers was a rich family, she had a haughty manner. Although people used to make much of her, one could not imagine what she was thinking when she was all by herself. Uiko was probably still a virgin, but jealous women used to gossip about her and say that her looks betokened a sterile woman.
    Immediately after graduating from the Girls' Secondary School, Uiko became a volunteer nurse at the Maizuru Naval Hospital. The hospital was near enough for her to be able to go to work by bicyele. She had to report very early in the mornings and she left home in the gray light of dawn, some two hours before I set out for school.
    One evening I lay sunk in gloomy fancies, thinking about Uiko's body. I could not sleep properly that night and, while it was still dark, I slipped out of my bed, put on my gym shoes and went out into the obscurity of a summer dawn.
    That night was not the first time that I had pictured Uiko's body to myself. Something that had occasionally passed through my mind came gradually to adhere to it. Uiko's body, as though it were a coagulation of these thoughts of mine, became immersed in a gloomy shadow, which was both white and resilient; it came to congeal in the form of scented flesh. I used to think of the warmth that my fingers would feel when I touched that flesh. I thought, too, about the resilience which would meet my fingers and about the scent which would be like that of pollen.
    I ran straight along the road in the dawn darkness. The