3.0 out of 5 stars
In case you were wondering what he was thinking
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 2, 2019
If you've read one of the standard Mishima biographies (for example, the one by John Nathan), you might remember the odd claim that Mishima wrote "romance novels" and light entertainment in parallel with his "artistic" work. The biographers never gave an explanation for this, but Mishima always paid careful attention to his image, so to me this always sounded uncharacteristic of him. But then, none of that stuff was ever translated, so there was no way for any non-Japanese speaker to see for themselves.
Well, now we are finally seeing some of this material. "Life For Sale" was originally serialized in Playboy Japan, and at first glance definitely seems representative of this "pulp" side of Mishima's writing. On the other hand, it was written in 1968, and thus was the last of his works before The Sea Of Fertility. His worldview was complete by this point (he had already written, e.g., "The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea") and he was probably already planning his final act. It is a bit hard to believe that, by that time, he would really be interested in spending his time writing cheap entertainment. It's not like he needed the money.
In the opening pages of "Life For Sale," a generic salaryman attempts suicide out of sheer ennui. After he is revived, he decides that he cares so little about his life as to offer it for "sale" in a newspaper advertisement. In a series of bizarre episodes, his life is "purchased" by various gangsters and freaks, and he willingly enters into very improbable deadly situations from which he is even more improbably extricated by pure chance. For about two-thirds of the book, these events only serve to strengthen his apathy, which has a perversely comic effect when combined with their increasingly outlandish circumstances.
This part of the book is written very briskly, with short and largely content-free dialogue and perfunctory description. It feels as if Mishima is deliberately trying to put as little effort into the writing as possible. The culmination is an episode in which the protagonist solves a ridiculously unrealistic spy mystery for a foreign embassy. A secret cipher is decoded by chewing up carrots and spewing them onto a piece of paper, and this nonsensical solution appears magically out of thin air, with no effort made to obtain it. Mishima ramps up the idiocy even further by including a hilarious half-page monologue about how the protagonist has always hated carrots.
Well, now we know where Murakami got the inspiration for all those chatty shaggy-dog stories with no point. Except "Life For Sale" is 188 pages long instead of 600, and Mishima doesn't even pretend to care. The book is full of sex scenes, all of which are deliberately badly written. They are the opposite of titillating, which makes them about as good as Murakami's sex scenes, except that the latter was really trying hard.
So far, the best possible way to spin this is that Mishima was writing a cynical satire of "popular entertainment" and mocking the general public's lack of taste. If so, the joke ran a bit long and doesn't seem to justify the time investment from the author of Spring Snow.
One wonders if that was all, however. Hanio's misanthropic, hyper-detached internal monologues give some pause when you consider what happened to the author just two years later. A central image of the book is established early on: "He picked up the paper nevertheless...and cast his eyes over it again. Suddenly, all the letters he was trying to make out turned into cockroaches. His eyes pursued the letters as they made their escape... 'So the world boils down to nothing more than this.' And it was this insight that led him to an overwhelming desire to die." (5) Hanio returns to this cockroach image many times, as he listlessly drifts into another close encounter with death.
Obviously one should try not to associate characters with the author, but perhaps this image of total disgust with life captures more of Mishima's real mindset at this time than his flamboyant displays of nationalism. Perhaps he understood all along that his militaristic play-acting had a strong element of parody (as does this book). Perhaps he hated the world around him because he felt that it did not make any other kind of expression possible.
Interestingly, after the carrot episode, the book takes a different turn. In the middle of another ridiculous setup, Hanio unexpectedly backpedals away from his death wish. His preternatural cool is swept away by fear, and he wrestles with himself about whether he really wants to live or not. This debate turns him into a paranoid wreck, which is quite unexpected considering the tone of the book up to that point. From the point of view of character psychology, this is not particularly interesting -- Hanio never amounts to anything more than a cipher -- but as a way for Mishima to enter into a dialogue with himself, it has a certain fascination.
The tone of this section is truly strange and sometimes disquieting. Mishima asks, "What exactly was the fear of death?" (171) and it seems like he really doesn't have an answer. Hanio keeps asking himself if he has suddenly discovered a new love of life, or if he still doesn't care what happens to him, but never reaches any conclusion. The only thing the book seems to say for certain is that attachment to life is inseparable (indistinguishable?) from crippling fear, but its attitude toward this statement is weirdly ambivalent.
This is not a masterpiece, and does not add much to Mishima's legacy. But, yes, in this grotesque, crudely comical, cynical farce, you can still hear his distinctive voice, although it shows an unpleasant side of him.
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