The Temple of the Wild Geese
is an autobiographical novella by Japanese writer Tsutomu Mizukami first published in 1961. It received the Naoki Prize the same year. Plot Shortly before his death, painter Nangaku asks Jikai, head priest of the Kohōan Zen Buddhist temple in the outskirts of Kyoto, to take care of his mistress Satoko. The married Nangaku had once decorated the temple's interiors with his paintings of wild geese and, while working on these, shared a room with Satoko in the temple's facilities. Jikai does as he has been asked and takes Satoko in, immediately making her his mistress and starting a feverish affair with her, although he is 25 years her senior. Meanwhile, Jikai's novice Jinen, an intelligent but disfigured boy, lives an austere life under the head priest's tight rein, who himself leads a mundane life and regularly gets drunk when playing Go with priests from affiliated temples. When Jinen, exhausted from military training at school, oversleeps, Jikai even attaches a rope to Jinen's wrist, waking him up by pulling it. Satoko learns that Jinen had been abandoned by his natural parents as a child and, intending to comfort him, makes sexual advances towards him. One day, Heikichi Hisama, one of the