Unfortunately Mishima gives the impression [in The Temple of the Golden Pavilion] of striving to be simultaneously a very Western novelist (philosophical disquisitions and conscientious documentation) and a very Eastern novelist (symbols galore) … But this novel is a caricature of post-war Japanese fiction. Mizoguchi is the typical hero; unhealthy, nastily conscious about his perversities, alternately arrogant and self-abasing, an inveterate intellectualiser yet contemptuous of reason. The incidents are similarly typical….

Despite its nominally powerful incidents, I would say that the novel is conspicuously lacking in power—and precisely because it is devoid of moral sensibility (which, by the way, is not exclusively a 'Puritan,' or even Western, accessory). Consequently nothing really matters: the trampling of the prostitute is unpleasant, not powerful; the burning of the Temple is shocking and ridiculous (in the way that the price of tobacco is), not powerful; the hero could eat his mother raw and we should only feel a faint disgust with the author. We have established no moral connection with Mizoguchi; as a character he is rather less 'powerful' than Alice's Red Queen. The episodes are gratuitous, just as the recurring 'symbols' omit to symbolise.