Life for Sale

November 18, 2019
This 1968 pulp novel from Mishima (The Frolic of the Beasts) is a slapstick comedy with a complex moral underpinning, and an intriguing departure from his introspective work. Hanio Yamada, a young, handsome Tokyo copywriter, wakes up in a hospital bed after a botched suicide attempt. His plan was rash, hatched when he was reading the evening newspaper and the letters seemingly turned to cockroaches. After his release from the hospital, the nihilistic Hanio places an advertisement that puts his life up for sale: “use me as you wish.” A series of vignettes ensues—Hanio is asked to seduce a cheating wife so she will be killed by the mob; he has to resolve a diplomatic imbroglio involving poisoned carrots and murdered spies; he is hired to be nightly feed for a self-styled vampire. He finally lands in the home of a drug-addicted heiress, where he faces the greatest horror of all: domesticity. The novel handles its female characters poorly, using them in a disposable way that feels dated, but Mishima’s pungent insights into the challenges of postwar Japanese life are threaded brilliantly throughout. This dark, funny social satire feels like something only Mishima could’ve written.

March 1, 2020
Offbeat, sardonic yarn about self-commodification and its discontents. Mishima is best known for brooding, elegant novels such as The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea (1963) and the stories collected in books like Death in Midsummer (1953) as well as his spectacular suicide by seppuku after leading a failed coup attempt in 1970. This slender novel, published two years before his death, sounds his disdain for the capitalism that had replaced traditional Japanese values. Hanio, a young man, awakens in a white room where a nurse and paramedic await him. "It dawned on Hanio that his attempt at suicide had failed," writes Mishima, matter-of-factly. Since clearly Hanio can't pull it off by himself, he takes out an ad reading, "Life for Sale. Use me as you wish." The first response is from an old man who tells him his young wife is sleeping with a gangster, and Hanio dutifully marches off to seduce her with an eye to getting himself and the young woman gunned down by her affronted lover. It doesn't quite work out. Nor does Hanio succumb to the ministrations of a comely young widow whose son hires him to be her boyfriend. There's just one hitch: She's a "very unusual sort of person," as the kid says, in fact a vampire. And so on. Things are never as simple as they seem, and all of his contacts are connected in a strange conspiracy that hinges on the Asia Confidential Service, a spy network that may or may not exist. The one person who seems to get it is a disaffected young woman who's fond of LSD and literature and who tells him, "I know what your problem is. You're tired of trying to die." She's right, but now that others are out to do him in, Hanio no longer has to go to the trouble of finding a way to do it--a nice if bleak twist. An eccentric satire that stands in contrast to Mishima's more formal works and that makes for quick and entertaining reading.

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