Book Review: “Life for Sale” by Yukio Mishima

Life for Sale (1967) by Yukio Mishima

This is a new translation of the 1967 Japanese novel, which I had never heard of.  Nor was I familiar with the troubled and troubling author, who is apparently resurrected from a highly problematic fascist death to become a gay icon in the US.

The premise in the English title is that the protagonist, Hanio Yamada, is moved to suicide, but his attempt fails and he wakes in the hospital with little damage done.

What next?

In his case, he feels liberated. He is, literally, past caring about living, which frees him to do any ting he wants.  His life is already over, so he can dispose of it any way he wants.

This leads him to the idea of selling his life to someone, to do whatever they want even if it kills him.  And he hopes and expects to die.

He advertises his ‘life for sale’, and waits for a buyer.

What follows is an improbable sequence of adventures, each more absurd than the last, and none of them immediately fatal.  A guy can’t die even when he tries to.

It seems that by letting go, he lives more vibrantly, meets new people, and perhaps find love, however fleeting.

Of course, other people find him hard to understand.

Most people can’t even understand what ‘life for sale’ means.  And in the moments when he really does not care for his own life, he has what looks to others like courage or contempt for them or strange bohemian eccentricity.  But it is mostly just not caring about normal life.

I found the stories strange but surprisingly understandable.  Set in Japan in 1967, this slice of Noir is far, far away from me in time and culture, but oddly, it turned out not so alien as I would have guessed.

OK, I bet I missed some cultural references that would have been obvious to his original audience. (For example, the sex and drugs were probably scandalous or even pornographic to the first readers in Japan.)   But honestly, not getting the ‘clever’ contemporary commentary probably improves the overall story.  The absurdity is all the more universal and appealing out of its original context.

What if we all lived our lives as if they were already over?  That’s a really good question.

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1. Yukio Mishima, Life for Sale. (translated by S. Dodd), New York, Vintage International, 2020.

 

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