Hanio wakes to find that he's still alive after attempting suicide. Too bored to try again, he quits his job and advertises a life for sale. What follows is his being hired for increasingly odd tasks, beginning with being asked to sleep with the paramour of a jealous mob boss and culminating with him being targeted by a secretive international cabal. But no matter how dangerous the job, he can't seem to find a way to die.

This is old school noir. First published in Japan in 1968, Yukio Mishima has his too-cool-to-care protagonist sleep with the ladies and impress mobsters and spies with his sang-froid. Even vampire like him. This is a weird story, but also a lot of fun, despite the dark premise. ( )

This was a funny story about a guy who unsuccessfully tries to kill himself, and then decides to put his life up for sale because he no longer cares whether he dies. People answer his newspaper ad and get him into precarious situations with mobsters, vampires, espionage, and international drug traffickers. Lot of hijinks. Mishima is concerned with finding meaning and value in life through action. The guy comes to value his life through living as though he did not. Sort of forgettable though, to me. It was a little too silly and fable-like for my tastes.

AB ( )

This is a fast-paced and entertaining read. The book was being passed around our book club and, at first, I thought it would come under the heading of Japanese crime or mystery but it is more than that. It is also a societal critique of Japan in the 1960s, when it was written, and that is also interesting but when I learned more about Mishima himself and what his views were it kind of spoiled the book for me a little. ( )

Hanio Yamada wakes up in a hospital bed after an unsuccessful attempt at ending his own life. He does no soul-searching though, has no regrets—if anything, the experience seems to have swept away all his anxieties and left him absolutely clear-minded, with no feelings at all. But what next, what to do with his life now? Then it comes to him: he’ll put it up for sale—literally. He places the following ad in the Situations Wanted section of one of Tokyo’s tabloid newspapers: ‘Life For Sale. Use me as you wish. I am a twenty-seven-year-old male. Discretion guaranteed. Will cause no bother at all.’
   It’s an interesting idea, but the resulting procession of women, crooks and creeps who turn up at his door doesn’t live up to it. The Independent described this as ‘funny, horrific, curious and thoroughly entertaining’; The Spectator as ‘exhilarating, surreal and downright silly’. I’ve got to say, it didn’t strike me as any of those things; just dull mostly and, by the end, boring. Even the possibility (which occurred to me early on and is probably wrong anyway) that Hanio’s suicide attempt hadn’t failed and that what has been happening to him since is some sort of weird afterlife, still wouldn’t rescue the book itself.
   True, it was written in 1968, and in Japan, so perhaps it seemed pretty daring at the time. To me though the invention, the humour, all felt rather forced. Turns out it was originally published in a weekly magazine, serialised over months in twenty-one instalments, so perhaps it was squeezed out, with a series of deadlines looming one after another, purely for the money. In fact, having read a bit about him, Mishima himself sounds more ‘curious’ than anything in this novel: during the early Sixties he was a Nobel (Literature) nominee with a huge reputation in his home country; but a decade later, two years after Life for Sale was published, he tried to lead a military coup (!) intended to restore Emperor Hirohito’s status as a divinity—and this attempt having failed miserably, he committed ritual hara-kiri (self-disembowelling) before dying, messily (at the fourth attempt, his ‘seconds’ having botched the first three swings of the samurai sword) by decapitation. ( )

An absurdist take on an obsession with suicide/death, this is a tale of man hellbent on dying. If you have read any of Haruki Murakami's novels, this book resembles them in pacing, themes and surreal aspects. We also get a glimpse of Mishima's fascination with his own demise and his debt to Kafka. Not exactly sure where it all leaves the reader, but perhaps in the same country as _The Trial_. ( )