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The Temple of the Golden Pavillion
- Narrated by: Brian Nishii
- Length: 9 hrs and 59 mins
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Publisher's summary
A hopeless stutterer, taunted by his schoolmates, Mizoguchi feels utterly alone until he becomes an acolyte at a famous temple in Kyoto. But he quickly becomes obsessed with the temple's beauty, and cannot live in peace as long as it exists.
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Who Else Laughed, Cried, and Shuddered?
- By Jennifer Chichester on 09-16-22
By: Freida McFadden
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Technically Speaking
- By: Michael Elliot
- Narrated by: Coco Jones, Keith Powers, Queen Latifah, and others
- Length: 1 hr and 50 mins
- Original Recording
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Oakland-bred LaVeesha “Vee” Gilliam (Coco Jones) is a determined single mother of an autistic son and a gifted aspiring coder. When Vee loses her job as a food-services worker at the onsite restaurant at Grapengine, a large Silicon Valley tech company, she’s unable to pay for her son’s much-needed specialized education. By a twist of fate, mistaken identity, and her tech skills, Vee meets Troy Wilson (Keith Powers), the company’s wealthy founder and CEO and a wunderkind in the tech industry, who believes that Vee is a college-educated techie who works at his company.
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Overdue Diverse Representation in Tech!
- By Jatai Pollock on 09-26-24
By: Michael Elliot
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Frankenstein
- By: Mary Shelley
- Narrated by: Dan Stevens
- Length: 8 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Narrator Dan Stevens ( Downton Abbey) presents an uncanny performance of Mary Shelley's timeless gothic novel, an epic battle between man and monster at its greatest literary pitch. In trying to create life, the young student Victor Frankenstein unleashes forces beyond his control, setting into motion a long and tragic chain of events that brings Victor to the very brink of madness. How he tries to destroy his creation, as it destroys everything Victor loves, is a powerful story of love, friendship, scientific hubris, and horror.
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ARE WE ALWAYS TO BE UNHAPPY?
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 01-28-16
By: Mary Shelley
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The Strange Case
- By: Derek Kolstad, Mitali Jahagirdar, Laurie Kirwan-Ashman, and others
- Narrated by: Vanessa Kirby, David Oyelowo, Sofie Gråbøl, and others
- Length: 4 hrs and 9 mins
- Original Recording
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Dr. Jekyll (Vanessa Kirby) is an elite international specialist in energy systems, working closely with her handler Louis (David Oyelowo) in a career that takes her across the globe to politically volatile territories such as Iran and North Korea. But when an arms dealer accuses her of having killed his family, Dr. Jekyll begins to question details of her life, who Louis really is, and whether her strange recurring dream has a greater meaning. She enlists the help of psychologist Sigrun (Sofie Gråbøl), and together they delve into Dr. Jekyll’s darker other side, a brutal assassin named… Hyde.
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Love the Originals !!
- By r2coder on 08-04-24
By: Derek Kolstad, and others
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Fahrenheit 451
- By: Ray Bradbury
- Narrated by: Tim Robbins
- Length: 5 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television "family."
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Wish I Hadn't Cliff Noted This in High School
- By Joel on 03-27-17
By: Ray Bradbury
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Unsettling writing, flawed reading
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Set in a remote fishing village in Japan, The Sound of Waves is a timeless story of first love. A young fisherman is entranced at the sight of the beautiful daughter of the wealthiest man in the village. They fall in love, but must then endure the calumny and gossip of the villagers.
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In this fascinating document, one of Japan's best known - and controversial - writers created what might be termed a new literary form. It is new because it combines elements of many existing types of writing, yet in the end, fits into none of them. The road Mishima took to salvation is a highly personal one. Yet here, ultimately, one detects the unmistakable tones of a self transcending the particular and attaining to a poetic vision of the universal.
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SNOOZEFEST
- By Ivan Rueda on 04-17-21
By: Yukio Mishima
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After botching a suicide attempt, salaryman Hanio Yamada decides to put his life up for sale in the classifieds section of a Tokyo newspaper. Soon interested parties come calling with increasingly bizarre requests and what follows is a madcap comedy of errors, involving a jealous husband, a drug-addled heiress, poisoned carrots - even a vampire. For someone who just wants to die, Hanio can't seem to catch a break, as he finds himself enmeshed in a continent-wide conspiracy that puts him in the crosshairs of both his own government and a powerful organized-crime syndicate.
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Book is good - Narration is just terrible
- By Vyacheslav Varlakov on 03-12-21
By: Yukio Mishima
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A beautifully written book
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An extraordinary work.......
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Unsettling writing, flawed reading
- By Erez on 11-22-12
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The Sound of Waves
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Book is good - Narration is just terrible
- By Vyacheslav Varlakov on 03-12-21
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Death in Midsummer: And Other Stories
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Recognized throughout the world for his brilliance as a novelist and playwright, Yukio Mishima is also noted as a master of the short story in his native Japan, where the form is practiced as a major art. Nine of Yukio Mishima’s finest stories were selected by Mishima himself for translation in this book; they represent his extraordinary ability to depict a wide variety of human beings in moments of significance. Often his characters are sophisticated modern Japanese who turn out to be not so liberated from the past as they had thought.
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A Personal Matter
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Oe's most important novel, A Personal Matter, has been called by The New York Times "close to a perfect novel". In A Personal Matter, Oe has chosen a difficult, complex though universal subject: how does one face and react to the birth of an abnormal child?
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Should have been better
- By Erez on 07-24-12
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Thousand Cranes
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With a restraint that barely conceals the ferocity of his characters' passions, one of Japan's great postwar novelists tells the luminous story of Kikuji and the tea party he attends with Mrs. Ota, the rival of his dead father's mistress. A tale of desire, regret, and sensual nostalgia, every gesture has a meaning, and even the most fleeting touch or casual utterance has the power to illuminate entire lives - sometimes in the same moment that it destroys them.
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Painfully beautiful
- By Erez on 12-02-10
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I Am a Cat
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Soseki Natsume's comic masterpiece, I Am a Cat, satirizes the foolishness of upper-middle class Japanese society during the Meiji era. With acerbic wit and sardonic perspective, it follows the whimsical adventures of a world-weary stray kitten who comments on the follies and foibles of the people around him. A classic of Japanese literature, I Am a Cat is one of Soseki's best-known novels. Considered by many as the greatest writer in modern Japanese history, Soseki's I Am a Cat is a classic novel sure to be enjoyed for years to come.
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Great performance!
- By mz on 04-03-20
By: Soseki Natsume, and others
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The Gate
- By: Natsume Soseki, Pico Iyer - introduction, William F. Sibley - translator
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- Unabridged
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A humble clerk and his loving wife scrape out a quiet existence on the margins of Tokyo. Resigned, following years of exile and misfortune, to the bitter consequences of having married without their families' consent, and unable to have children of their own, Sosuke and Oyone find the delicate equilibrium of their household upset by a new obligation to meet the educational expenses of Sosuke's brash younger brother. While an unlikely new friendship appears to offer a way out of this bind, it also soon threatens to dredge up a past that could once again force them to flee the capital.
By: Natsume Soseki, and others
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Beauty and Sadness
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- Unabridged
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Returning to Kyoto, where temple bells announce the New Year, a grave and penitent Oki is drawn to a haunting obsession from his past. Gently lyrical, yet fierce with the stark intensity of passion, Kawabata's last novel tells the story of the lasting consequences of a brief love affair.
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nostalgic literature from Japan
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Kokoro
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The subject of Kokoro, which can be translated as 'the heart of things' or as 'feeling,' is the delicate matter of the contrast between the meanings the various parties of a relationship attach to it. In the course of this exploration, Soseki brilliantly describes different levels of friendship, family relationships, and the devices by which men attempt to escape from their fundamental loneliness. The novel sustains throughout its length something approaching poetry, and it is rich in understanding and insight.
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The Heart Of Things, Relationships & Feelings
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By: Natsume Soseki
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The Machine Stops
- By: E. M. Forster
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- Unabridged
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"The Machine Stops" is a short science fiction story. It describes a world in which almost all humans have lost the ability to live on the surface of the Earth. Each individual lives in isolation in a "cell", with all bodily and spiritual needs met by the omnipotent, global Machine. Most humans welcome this development, as they are skeptical and fearful of first-hand experience. People forget that humans created the Machine, and treat it as a mystical entity whose needs supersede their own.
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Riveting
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By: E. M. Forster
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Kitchen
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- Unabridged
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Mikage is an orphan raised by her grandmother, who has passed away. Grieving, Mikage is taken in by her friend, Yoichi, and his mother (who is really his cross-dressing father), Eriko. As the three of them form an improvised family that soon weathers its own tragic losses, Yoshimoto spins a lovely, evocative tale with the kitchen and the comforts of home at its heart.
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First Time is the Charm
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By: Banana Yoshimoto
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At the End of the Matinee
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Classical guitarist Satoshi Makino has toured the world and is at the height of his career when he first lays eyes on journalist Yoko Komine. Their bond forms instantly. Upon their first meeting, after Makino’s concert in Tokyo, they begin a conversation that will go on for years, with long spells of silence broken by powerful moments of connection. She’s drawn by Makino’s tender music and his sensitivity, and he is intrigued by Yoko’s refinement and intellect. But neither knows enough about love to see it blooming nor has the confidence to make the first move.
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Platonic relationship at its best
- By Lisa Op on 09-22-21
By: Keiichiro Hirano, and others
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Sanshiro
- Penguin Classics
- By: Natsume Soseki, Haruki Murakami, Jay Rubin
- Narrated by: Andrew Koji
- Length: 7 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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One of Soseki's most beloved works of fiction, the novel depicts the 23-year-old Sanshiro leaving the sleepy countryside for the first time in his life to experience the constantly moving 'real world' of Tokyo, its women and university. In the subtle tension between our appreciation of Soseki's lively humour and our awareness of Sanshiro's doomed innocence, the novel comes to life. Sanshiro is also penetrating social and cultural commentary.
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This story had no point.
- By icelandicponies on 12-30-21
By: Natsume Soseki, and others
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Life Ceremony
- Stories
- By: Sayaka Murata
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller, Jeena Yi, Nancy Wu, and others
- Length: 5 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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With Life Ceremony, the incomparable Sayaka Murata is back with her first collection of short stories ever to be translated into English. In Japan, Murata is particularly admired for her short stories, which are sometimes sweet, sometimes shocking, and always imbued with an otherworldly imagination and uncanniness.
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Interesting concept but boring story
- By Roberta Marques on 09-06-24
By: Sayaka Murata
What listeners say about The Temple of the Golden Pavillion
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- Tom
- 05-08-11
No service
I have read the book and know it;s great. What sucks is that Amazon won't download it to my droid where i already the app. It just downloads to my computer. That's useless to me. Great book sucky service.
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- abbas
- 12-26-20
Simply Amazing...
Mishima has once again show me how much of a great and complex writer he was, with this book.
The form of his narrative is beautiful and thrilling at the same time! A new eye to the actual real life story of the Burning of the Golden Temple, was greatly put into perspective. Although the book might seem to focus on things that might not be relevant to the Temple, but rather the character alone, it always tied back everything very nicely!
If you want to read Japanese Literature and are considering Yukio Mishima, this title is a great place to start with! Then move on to The Sailor who fell from Grace with the sea.
The narrator also did a great job! He knew what the book truly meant to showcase, and read it nicely!
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- Dan Harlow
- 04-18-14
A difficult and disturbing paradox
Any additional comments?
This novel introduces a disturbing paradox: there are many people in this world who, at the very least deserve our empathy yet to actually understand them would actually cause us despise them because how disturbed they are.
I kept thinking of people who commit mass violence, such as school shooters while reading this book. Typically the range of emotion from learning such a tragedy has occurred is first outrage, "Who would do such a thing? Why did they do it? What has the world come to?". When we learn who the culprit was we can then put a face to the crime and we say the person is sick and evil and they should be put to death. We don't see them as human, we see them as monsters who are sick.
But are they monsters? What if we were truly empathetic and tried to get to know these people. What would we discover then?
Unfortunately, I don't think the answer is an easy one because while religious morality tells us to empathize with even the worst people, if we actually could know the minds of such disturbed people we would be even more disgusted and confused. All we might discover is this person who committed such a terrible act is, in fact, a terrible person.
And so how do you empathize for and with a person who is so totally far removed from the rest of humanity, who is so wrapped up in their own delusions, whose point of view on the world is so fractured that you just can't even force yourself to want to care about them?
That's the paradox I discovered because of this book and with the main character Mizoguchi. Mizoguchi is, putting aside his skewed interpretation of humanity, an otherwise rational person. Yet all of his otherwise normal thought processes stems totally from a decayed root that infects the entire tree. His actions, his motives, his opinions seem to make a sort of sense, but only in the context that he is basically a sick person. And everything he decides to do, all his planning and his final actions are because he is sick, because he doesn't care one shred for humanity.
Mizoguchi does not love or does't care about anyone. And so how do we empathize with him? That's a real problem here because it makes for a very difficult novel. On the one hand Yukio Mishima, the author, is giving us an insight into the mind of a person beyond redemption but because Mizoguchi is beyond redemption we have a hard time even liking the novel. This novel is basically a physical manifestation of the character Mizoguchi, or to broaden the scope, the novel is the manifestation of all such people who commit these terrible crimes. And so how can we ever hope to like the book if we hate what the book is showing us? The book shows us true ugliness and so how do we respond to that?
This is a very difficult novel but it is fascinating in that it confronts head on the reality of empathy for another human being and how difficult it really is, or if it's even possible with a person like Mizoguchi.
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14 people found this helpful
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- Ryan-ST
- 07-24-19
mistakes in reading
Laertes doesn't have a son in Hamlet. Good tone, but a lot of reading mistakes.
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- Will Beard
- 06-07-16
Tragedies of a stutterer
Quite a story! That was a geat performance by the narrator. Kudos. The main character is so intolerable yet somewhat fascinating... Worth a listen.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Hazy
- 06-24-21
5 Stars
I without hesitation give this novel 5 stars across the board. Love Brian Nishii the narrator (have listened to 2 other titles and really liked him).
I have wanted to read or listen to Mishima for quite a while now and finally took the chance with Golden Pavillion. WOW! Utterly loved the entire story. I can imagine some listeners not liking this title as much as I did, but there will be some who will absolutely love it.
I really identified with the machinations of the main character's mind and appreciated a couple of the supporting characters.
Loved The Temple of the Golden Pavillion!
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- Palle
- 01-04-17
A "nice guy" in early 20th century Japan
You know those "nice guys" with fedora hats, chain wallets and who call women "m'lady"? The ones who speak of dating as "courting" and who have an interest in Japanese culture and buy themselves a katana sword from Amazon? The type of guys who get angry because women choose the "bad boy Chad" instead of the "nice guy" with the fedora hat? And in the end, the "nice guy" thinks it's all women's fault - and turns his miserably low self esteem into a hatred for the opposite sex? Ok, this book is about that guy. Only it takes place in Japan around the end of World War 2 to the end of the 50s.
The narrator clearly knows Japanese, for all the Japanese places, terms and names are properly pronounced. For all I know, I don't speak Japanese.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Espinals
- 12-15-17
What an ending
Great audio book!! the performance was really well executed and complemented the poetic nature of the book.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Douglas
- 04-29-16
If you liked
Mishima's weirdly oedipal Sailor Who Fell From Grace, this novel will also appeal, although it is more filled with Japanese history and the narrative does not flow as smoothly
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4 people found this helpful
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- Brendan C. Bush
- 11-09-18
the Wacky (citation needed) Antics of a Loony Lad
Mishima delivers again with a protagonist who is as unsettling, as unfortunate, as he is fascinating. In the backdrop of the fall of the Japanese Empire during the Second World War, the voice talent of Brian Nishii effortlessly paints a beautiful picture of spirituality and introspection with the blood and ashes of his Japan's smoldering defeat, on the canvas hung lovingly in a tea room on the mount.
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1 person found this helpful