The ideas of beauty, death, happiness and embracing life are so inextricably entwined and together they force individuals to decide what they would do with their own lives. At the centre of the novel of Mishima Yukio, is a young monk whose mind is haunted by the memory of an ugly scene of his childhood, and longing for a shelter in beauty, he finds the image of the Golden Temple permanently etched in his mind as the icon of unsurpassable beauty. But on the other hand, it renders everything that life can offer, too ordinary and even repulsive. Thus the icon of beauty, the Golden Temple always has a shadow of death looming large around it. In this novel, written immediately after the Second World War, Mishima stresses upon the need for unrelenting pursuits of creating beauty and its ever newer icons instead of relying on the memory of the wonder that the beauty of the old relics gave birth to when they were created. This was Mishima’s idea of keeping the heritage of a nation alive.