[1][2] 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.
One day, Heikichi Hisama, one of the temple's patrons, shows up and asks for an anniversary service in remembrance of his deceased father, at the same time declaring that the eldest of his brothers is lying on the deathbed.
In the concluding chapter it is revealed that Jinen murdered Jikai upon his drunken return home, later disposing of the body by hiding it in the coffin of the deceased eldest brother of the Hisama family.
Jinen then announces to the unknowing Satoko that he will follow on Jikai's path and disappears after tearing out a detail from the geese paintings showing a female goose and her offspring.
[2] In his 2004 obituary for Mizukami in The Independent, James Kirkup called The Temple of the Wild Geese a "finely atmospheric" work, whose thriller techniques "are on a par with those of Georges Simenon, Patricia Highsmith, François Mauriac and Leonardo Sciascia".