Mizoguchi tells her about his experiences. In the spring of 1948, Kashiwagi mentions that he is being taught ikebana by the woman Mizoguchi saw. That evening, Mizoguchi becomes aware of Tsurukawa's death in an accident. He realises that the woman is one he saw two years before. When left alone with the other girl, she tells him a story about a woman who lost her lover during the war. In May, Kashiwagi invites him to a picnic at Kameyama Park, taking two girls. Kashiwagi seduces women by making them feel sorry for him. He starts to drift away from Tsurukawa, befriending Kashiwagi, a cynical clubfooted boy from Sannomiya. The Superior gives her money, but rumours of her claims spread. A week later the girl visits the temple and demands compensation. Father Dosen thanks him, and tells him he will attend Ōtani University. The Temple is visited by a drunk American soldier who orders Mizoguchi to trample his pregnant Japanese girlfriend's stomach, giving him two cartons of cigarettes. In May 1945, he and Tsurukawa visit Nanzen-ji and witness a woman giving her lover a cup of tea with her own breast milk. During the 1944–5 school year, he works at a factory, where he comes to hope that the Golden Pavilion will be destroyed by the firebombing. He meets his first real friend, Tsurukawa there. After his father's death, Mizoguchi becomes an acolyte at the temple. His ill father takes him to the Kinkaku-ji in the spring of 1944, and introduces him to the Superior, Tayama Dosen. After she is killed by her deserter boyfriend, Mizoguchi becomes convinced that his curse on her has worked. A neighbour's girl, Uiko, becomes the target of his hatred.

His stammering and poverty cause him to be friendless. Throughout his childhood he is assured by his father that the Golden Pavilion is the most beautiful building in the world, and the idea of the temple becomes a fixture in his imagination. As a child, the narrator lives with his uncle near Maizuru. The protagonist, Mizoguchi, is the son of a consumptive Buddhist priest who lives and works on Cape Nariu on the north coast of Honshū.

The pavilion, dating from before 1400, was a national monument that had been spared destruction many times throughout history, and the arson shocked Japan.

The novel is loosely based on the burning of the Reliquary (or Golden Pavilion) of Kinkaku-ji in Kyoto by a young Buddhist acolyte in 1950. It was published in 1956 and translated into English by Ivan Morris in 1959. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion ( 金閣寺, Kinkaku-ji ) is a novel by the Japanese author Yukio Mishima.

Beautiful star by yukio mishima