LIFE FOR SALE - YUKIO MISHIMA

Mishima is really a best case scenario for fascists. He made good, weird art, he seemed to focus a lot of his mental and physical efforts into body fascism applied to himself, he was deeply homoertotic and ended up killing himself, and no one else, in a spectacular failed coup. If only other fascists would follow suit. I’ve been aware of Mishima for a while. I've seen his weird art movie, “On Patriotism: the Rite of Love and Death” which is mostly just a sequence of a character played by Mishima committing seppuku (which, again, Mishima ended up doing later in his life for real). It really lingers on his muscles and flesh, playing into the gay themes that are also apperent in the only book of his I’ve read, THE SUN AND STEEL which is about bodybuilding and his relation to his body. He’s most famous (outside of the details of his death) for a tetralogy that I hope to read at some point. All that's to say, this is the first novel of his I’ve read and it was quite good. It reminded me of Walker Percy or Nathaniel West in that it sort of has a hook-y premise and explores themes of modern alienation and ennui. The book is about a man named Hanio who tries to kill himself and when he wakes up in the hospital, decides to put a sign on his door advertising that his life is for sale. After that the book is mostly a series of vignettes where someone hires him to undertake a task that will probably kill him while he just sort of maintains a passive, bemused distance. It makes sense that this book was serialized in a magazine before being published as a novel, the whole book feels pretty episodic, especially at the beginning. Hanio is asked to sleep with the wife of a mobster to instigate a murder, he’s asked to test poisons, he lives and acts as a sort of living livestock for a vampire, all sorts of absurd scenarios. He also gets laid a lot, presumably since his devil-may-care attitude makes him really sexy, and decides he sort of enjoys life when he’s just drifting around, going on adventures and not worrying about death. Ironically, this leads him to enjoy his life more and not want to die. There’s a subplot involving a spy showdown between “Country A” and “Country B” that seem clearly to be the USA and the Soviets, as well as a shadowy organization of intelligence goons that clearly seems to be the CIA or KGB. Likewise, you can tell he wrote this thing in the 60’s and what side he was on during the cultural upheavals; there are lots of shots at the hippies and acid and the whole counter-cultural milieu. Overall the book was much funnier and lighter than I had expected from Mishima. There are at least two points in the book where he complains about the way Westerners smell. Besides Percy and West, I also felt a lot of Kafka or Murakami swirling around in the mix. I think I’ll stick with his “lighter” works for a while before really tackling his super famous stuff. 1 life