Japanese writer Yukio Mishima. (Photo by Carlo Bavagnoli/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images/Getty Images)

★★★

Yukio Mishima’s name has been appearing on my recommendation lists ever since I started reading Japanese fiction, but this is the first of his books that I’ve read. Newly published by Penguin Modern Classics, in a fresh translation by Stephen Dodd, it tells the story of Hanio Yamada, who is thoroughly disillusioned by the world around him. Having failed in a suicide attempt, feeling crippled by the sheer meaninglessness of existence, Hanio comes up with a plan. He places an ad in the paper: ‘Life for Sale. Use me as you wish. I am a twenty-seven-year-old male. Discretion guaranteed. Will cause no bother at all.’ He simply doesn’t care any more. Let someone else make the decisions for him! He’s prepared to relinquish his entire existence to the whims of another person. His offer leads him into a series of bizarre adventures which foreshadow Murakami’s surreal worldview, and which force Hanio to confront how he really feels about life.

It’s 1968 and so the world in which Hanio moves is poised on the brink between tradition and modernity. His escapades bring him into contact with wealthy old-fashioned families in elegantly faded houses, but also, more frequently, with gangsters, fantasists and an unexpectedly high proportion of women whom he manages to get into bed. I discovered, to my slight annoyance, that the Japanese approach to characterising women – which I like to call ‘characterisation by breast’ – is not unique to Murakami; indeed, we see it in an embryonic form here, all the more irritating because Mishima was gay and you’d have thought he might have embraced a more generous range of characteristics. But ’tis not so. Hanio’s life for sale gets him into bed with voluptuous sex-kittens, psychologically vulnerable young gentlewomen and, if the book is to be believed, an ailing vampire. But as his adventures continue – and as he, quite against his expectations, continues to survive them – he begins to realise that things aren’t quite as simple as they seem. Many of his escapades seem to have some kind of connection to one another. And why does someone seem to be following him? It is not a particularly successful novel by Western standards, but I’ve increasingly come to realise that (as you’d expect) the Japanese approach to fiction can be rather different. And I’m still trying to adjust to its conventions.

I was surprised to find that all of Hanio’s clients expect him to die in the course of fulfilling their commissions. They’re essentially buying his death, not his life. And I thought, several times, that anyone who wants to sell their life would be far better off doing so in the UK rather than Japan, if Mishima’s work is any judge. In the UK you’d be more likely to be asked to spend a month wearing a mascot’s costume, or going to work without your trousers on, or wearing your pants on your head, because we are the people who came up with Boaty McBoatface and, quite frankly, the dark streak in the Japanese psyche is utterly foreign to us. No matter how much we grumble about the world going to hell in a handcart, our first instinct when given power over someone would probably be to make fun of them rather than force them into almost certain death. (I hasten to add that I’m comparing our national sense of silliness to Mishima’s dour characters, rather than to the Japanese people more generally.) It is most odd.

Although I was vaguely aware of Mishima, I didn’t get around to reading anything about him until after I’d finished this novella, which is probably a good thing, because he sounds like a rather unpleasant person, according to what I have now read. Self-absorbed and extremely right-wing, he was obsessed with the idea of Japan’s golden past and loathed the signs of modern progress all around him – especially the hippy culture that’s referenced in this book (Hanio is complimented on being an upstanding, smart young man, not at all like the shameful hippies of Shinjuku). The Evening Standard‘s review of Life for Sale describes Mishima rather memorably as ‘a body-building homosexual narcissist’ and reproduces one of multiple photographic portraits in which he insisted on being represented as St Sebastian, complete with piercing arrows. Although Hanio is clearly some form of veiled self-portrait, as the Standard suggests, Mishima doesn’t seem to have shared the hint of redemption that his young hero finds at the end of the novella. On the contrary, his own misanthropy and contempt for the world only escalated and, two years after this novella was published, in 1970, he committed suicide in the public and dramatic seppuku fashion.

Now, much of my understanding so far has been drawn from the internet, and from short reviews of Life for Sale, so I’d be the first to admit that I might have a skewed understanding of him as a writer. Fortunately, Marguerite Yourcenar (of Memoirs of Hadrian fame) wrote an essay on Mishima, titled: Mishima: A Vision of the Void, which I imagine might give a rather more nuanced portrayal of him as a man and an artist. (Reviews are mixed, as you’ll see if you follow the link.) If I’m going to read more of his work – and I suppose I am, since I already have some on my Kindle – I should try to understand more about him, too… What does everyone else make of him? The other books I already own are: Star; The Sound of Waves; The Temple of the Golden Pavilion; The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea; Thirst for Love; and Forbidden Colours. Which of those do you think would be most accessible to a newbie?

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