The Temple of Dawn by Yukio Mishima
Published 1970 · 95,000 words · about 9 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction, Philosophical Fiction
How hard is The Temple of Dawn to read?
The Temple of Dawn scores 78 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 74 out of 100
- Substantial Buddhist and Hindu doctrinal vocabulary — alaya consciousness, Yogācāra, samsara, the Mahayana schools — plus Thai and Indian proper nouns and Japanese legal terms, all used technically.
- Sentence structure: 68 out of 100
- Long ornate periods in Mishima's late manner, with the doctrinal chapters running to sustained expository paragraphs of considerable density.
- Abstraction: 86 out of 100
- An entire section is a treatise on the metaphysics of rebirth, and the novel's events are staged to test a philosophical proposition about whether consciousness can transmigrate without a self.
- Information density: 78 out of 100
- Comparative religion, Thai court protocol, occupied-Japan property law and the internal history of the tetralogy all press on the reader at once, with the doctrinal chapters extremely dense.
- Narrative indirection: 74 out of 100
- Honda has replaced Kiyoaki as the centre and he is a watcher rather than an actor, so the novel's events reach the reader through a man who is systematically excluded from them and who may be inventing the pattern he claims to see.
- Symbolic density: 82 out of 100
- The burning ghats, the peephole, the emerald ring, the three moles, the Wat Arun at dawn and the pool at Gotemba are worked continuously against the tetralogy's larger figure of the moon's dry sea.
- Ironic distance: 78 out of 100
- The seeker after transcendence is a peeping tom with a drill; the reincarnation of a beautiful boy is a girl who ignores him; the reward for a lifetime of law is a fortune that arrives by accident.
- Resolution withholding: 82 out of 100
- Ying Chan's identity is never confirmed, her death is reported at second hand and years late, and the volume ends with a fire and an unresolved question about whether Honda saw the moles at all.
- Structural complexity: 76 out of 100
- Two halves separated by a decade and by a war, one of them largely doctrinal exposition, inside a four-novel cycle whose meaning depends on volumes published before and after it.
How The Temple of Dawn is regarded
The Temple of Dawn holds a literary regard score of 73 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.