Published: 1968 (Shueisha)
Yukio Mishima’s novel, Life for Sale, is a rollicking surrealist novel that follows a young salaryman, Hanio, who fails to commit suicide and then turns to an ad in the paper to do the trick. Hanio, nihilistic and without family, decides that he will sell his life to anyone by any means and for any price. He attempts to sell his life via this method to a host of oddballs, secret society types, even vampires who are looking for the answer to life’s mysteries, revenge, or just a cure to their loneliness, and Hanio holds the key.
Hanio first meets a man who asks Hanio to sleep with his estranged, younger wife, named Ruriko. Hanio is supposed to sleep with Ruriko to get caught in the act with her and subsequently killed alongside her by a mob boss. Hanio executes this first mission right away, going to Ruriko’s apartment, where he engages her in conversation and learns about the ACS (Asian Confidential Service). Ruriko bluffs that she is herself a member of this group who murders for hire and smuggles drugs. Hanio has relations with Ruriko while being caught by a mob boss wearing a beret, but he lets them off scot-free. The purpose of Hanio’s mission is fulfilled the next day, when Ruriko ends up found dead in the Sumida River, but Hanio still has his life. This will not be the first time a woman is discarded during one of these transactions. His second attempt at death for hire involves a librarian who sells a stolen book about insects to a shady group of foreigners who wants to use crushed up beetles to make a poison. Hanio ends up going to the foreigner’s hideout with the librarian to be a guinea pig for the beetle poison experiment, but as the poison is taking effect which is supposed to make Hanio want to kill himself, the woman kills herself in his place because she loves him. Hanio leaves in a hurry as do the foreigners who clean up the mess and abandon the hideout. Hanio’s third attempt involves a young boy named Kaoru, who recruits Hanio to help his anemic vampire mother bloodlet Hanio to keep her strength up. Hanio obliges and eventually falls in love with her as he is slowly being drained of life over the course of months. When the time is up for Hanio and he hardly has any strength, he passes out on a walk, is taken to the hospital, and the vampire burns herself in a fire in the attic of the house they lived in, having found peace in a meaningful relationship. Hanio just can’t catch a break in his quest to die at this point, and although he isn’t questioning whether he should die at this point, he is getting rather tired of trying.
Hanio’s fourth attempt involves government agents at two ambassadorships in Japan, where he is tasked with breaking into one of the embassies and stealing a decryption key, only to solve the decryption issues the agents needed by smearing carrots on the message to reveal the clue. This part of the story is the most confusing and most out of place to the story on the surface, but it actually reveals that Hanio is starting to value his role in these excursions enough to want to stay alive to complete them. The riddle of life has started to pique Hanio’s interest. Lastly, Hanio decides to move, so as not to meet these government agents again, and stumbles upon a realtor’s office where a drug-addled young hippie heiress to a dying families estate, Reiko, wants to play house with Hanio long enough to kill him and her in a murder-suicide. Hanio initially goes along with Reiko’s plans and they get together, only for Reiko to attempt to poison Hanio, who snuffs it out and finally declares that he wants his life in his own hands and does not want to give it up to the highest bidder. Hanio escapes Reiko and gets sent on a wild goose chase, where members of the ACS he met before, including the foreigners with the beetles who have been monitoring all of his various “Life for Sale” activities, believe he is a police officer himself sent to infiltrate and destroy the ACS. Hanio cannot convince them otherwise, but in preparation for meeting these members he fashions a stopwatch in a box that looks like a bomb, and escapes to a local police station. At the station, the detectives do not believe his story about the ACS and decide to throw him out on the street, where he awaits his fate as a newly free man whose life is not for sale.
Some final thoughts:
- Within this novel, Mishima describes many of the issues he had with modern Japan at the moment, meaningless opulence, decaying moral values in a quest for money, and a lack of control of their own fate vis-a-vis the United States. I think Hanio is the embodiment of Mishima’s vision of Japan, who through the years lost its way via blood-sucking westerners and drug-addled hippies only to stand up to all of these forces (which Japan/Hanio itself invited) to be reborn with meaning and purpose. Mishima, famously an ultra-right conservative who wanted to see Japan returned to its patriotic pre-WWII status as a rising cultural and imperialist power, seems to flirt with modernity but ultimately rejects it. I see this most in Hanio’s disdain for Reiko.
- There were quite a few times where I questioned what was going on in the book because it is a bit trippy and odd to read in a certain mood, but I read this cover to cover in one day and suggest whoever read this do the same. If you think about it too much it loses its effect, it is best digested in one sitting as a pulpy thrillride.
Rating: 4.1/5
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