Life for Sale: The Life and Work of Yukio Mishima
By George Menz
On November 25th, 1970—over fifty years ago, now—the writer Yukio Mishima entered the Ichigaya military base in the heart of Tokyo. Accompanying him were four young men, trusted members of his Shield Society, a paramilitary group founded by Mishima in 1968 which recruited from Japanese universities. Mishima carried with him his antique sword, and, in a small briefcase, a dagger. The visitors were warmly received by General Masuda, the commander: the right-wing views which Mishima had endorsed during the past decade of civil unrest in Japan had led many conservatives to view him as a useful pawn, not least because he was considered, in Japan and the world, to be the finest living author of the Japanese language.
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Mishima, born Kimitake Hiraoka in 1925, made his literary debut with the novella, The Forest in Full Bloom, in 1944, when he was only nineteen. At that age he was the darling of a small literary coterie who fetishized the ancient Japanese way of life, with its emphasis on tradition, duty, and sacrifice. At the time, the Empire of Japan, which had only a few years before dominated East Asia and the Pacific Rim, was besieged by the American military, whose nightly raids devastated Japan’s cities (with the exception of Kyoto, which was specifically declared off-limits by an American general who had visited before the war and was overwhelmed by its ancient beauty). Mishima himself never fought in the war. At his draft examination he claimed that he had tuberculosis and was declared unfit for service.
Physically slight, the young Mishima had been affected his whole life by a sense of fragility imposed upon him by his paternal grandmother, Natsu, who raised him in seclusion away from his mother, alternately coddling and tormenting the child. Although Natsu died when Mishima was twelve, the shadow of her influence would haunt him for the rest of his life. His father was a civil servant and strict disciplinarian who considered his son’s literary hobbies effeminate. Only his mother supported his writing. He had a younger brother, Chiyuki, and a sister, Mitsuko, who died in 1946 during the serialization of his first novel.
After the war ended with the vaporization of two cities, the literary circle which had celebrated Mishima as a prodigy faced dismemberment at the hands of the new American-supported literary establishment. Between his friends and his career, Mishima chose the latter, and disaffiliated with his former supporters. He found a new mentor in Yasunari Kawabata, the future Nobel Prize winner, under whose tutelage Mishima emerged as one of postwar Japan’s foremost writers with his novels Confessions of a Mask, Thirst for Love, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, and The Sound of Waves. His first novel to be translated was The Sound of Waves in 1955, swiftly followed by Confessions and Temple. These works—only the proverbial “tip of the iceberg” with regards to Mishima’s full Japanese bibliography—quickly earned him countless western admirers.
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Life for Sale, first serialized in 1968 in Japanese Playboy and out last April from Vintage International, is the latest of Mishima’s novels to be translated into English. It is one of Mishima’s “minor works”, borrowing the term used by biographer and translator John Nathan.1 These books were produced quickly, sometimes in a few weeks, in contrast to the months-long gestation cycles of his more serious novels. Their primary purpose was to make money. Under such circumstances, the author’s id takes over, undiluted by the constraints of form or artistry.
The novel begins with an attempted suicide. Hannyo, a 27-year-old copywriter, sits in a restaurant reading the evening paper. Each headline contains a catastrophe, but these have no effect on Hannyo until the paper slips from his grasp and, stooping to pick it up, he sees a cockroach running over the pages. Like Lispector’s G.H., Hannyo is moved to an epiphany. The utter nullity of his life suddenly reveals itself. For a few hours he tries to distract himself, moving from a cinema to a bar to a pachinko parlor. Nothing works. He tells a complete stranger that he is going to kill himself, and receives an uninterested reply.
Hannyo takes a fistful of sleeping pills and boards the subway. He wakes up in the hospital, having failed even in death. This moves him to attempt suicide by other means. After leaving his job, he places an ad in the newspaper offering to sell his life to any interested parties. This sets in motion the plot proper, as various characters—marked by gluttony, madness, and sadism—purchase Hannyo to fulfill their urgent and deadly desires. Each time, Hannyo resigns himself to death, and each time, by authorial fiat, he emerges alive.
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Although a celebrity, Mishima kept his personal life largely a secret from the Japanese public. He was homosexual, and his breakout Confessions of a Mask discussed the anguish he felt at having to conceal his inner self from the rest of the world. More specifically, he was fascinated with the intersection of sexual ecstasy and violent death, exemplified by the figure of Saint Sebastian. In his fantasies, however, Mishima could only occupy the position of destroyer: only a beautiful death had merit, and he was far from beautiful. His grandmother had instilled in him the fear that he was too frail to face the outside world. Beginning in 1955, he sought to prove her wrong. He took up bodybuilding.
With his success overseas, Mishima was able to travel to Europe and America, where he enjoyed the intellectual fêting of western critics and the physical affections of young western men. Everywhere he went, he continued his intense workout regimen. In 1958 he returned to Japan and married. A year later he published Kyoko’s House, his longest novel. The four protagonists are a painter, a boxer, an actor, and a salaryman, all representing different aspects of Mishima’s psyche. Over the course of the narrative, two of the men faced destruction. The boxer, his hand shattered, switches his attention from athletics to politics. The actor, having achieved physical perfection through bodybuilding, joins an older woman in a lovers’ suicide. The salaryman, a world-weary nihilist, offers this analysis:
Death confronted him wearing a variety of masks. One by one he took them off and put them on his own face. When he removed the final mask, death’s real face must have been revealed, but we cannot know whether even that was terrifying to him.2
Such an idiosyncratic work from an already acclaimed writer would undoubtedly provide an opening for critics who had been sharpening their knives. Kyoko’s House faced a cool reception as reviewers accused Mishima of solipsism. Stung, Mishima would work on a different tack for the next decade of his career. Beginning with the short story “Patriotism”, written after the assassination of Japanese leftist Inejirou Asanuma in 1960, his work began to introduce elements of far-right ideology which complemented his earlier fascination with ecstatic destruction. Among his notable works of the sixties are After the Banquet, an almost documentary account of an aging politician’s campaign to become mayor of Tokyo, and Silk and Insight, which describes a strike at a silk factory. In 1968 he began publication of a tetralogy, the Sea of Fertility, describing the history of twentieth-century Japan through the eyes of a man who witnesses his successive friends and idols descend into madness, decay, and death.
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The picaresque plot of Life for Sale is driven by arbitrary yet amusing contrivances. In terms of genre, Mishima draws upon the detritus of contemporary pop culture: yakuza films, James Bond-style spy thrillers, tawdry sex comedies. Linking these disparate elements together is the same philosophy which motivates the Sea of Fertility: the sense that modern life, divorced from the ecstatic reality provided in earlier ages by the thrill of battle and the terror of death, has no meaning.
The Tokyo of Life for Sale is submerged in western-influenced pop culture. The characters he encounters are anesthetized against philosophical or aesthetic contemplation—against any deeper feeling, really, beyond the drive towards death. Death itself appears to be the ultimate high. In this world, money is the only god—the emperor’s name, if it appears at all, slips by as background noise. Untethered by any sense of higher purpose, Hannyo and others find their desires turned inside-out. At one point, the string of drool hanging from a woman’s lower lip takes on an erotic quality. What was repulsive becomes beautiful, and beauty becomes hateful.
As he boards a train out of Tokyo, trying to escape the clutches of an international crime syndicate (which may only exist in his mind), Hannyo reflects that his adventures have changed him in one way: he no longer wishes to die. Only by placing himself in the hands of death does he develop the desire to live.
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In General Masuda’s office, Mishima struck up a friendly conversation with the older man, who suspected nothing of his guests’ intentions. At a signal from Mishima, the four recruits bound and gagged the general, then barricaded the doors. A skirmish ensued; a shattered window offered a means of negotiation. Speaking with the lieutenant commander, Mishima demanded, in exchange for the general’s safety, the assembly of the garrison to bear witness to a speech he had prepared. With a knife to the general’s throat, the lieutenant commander agreed.
Mishima and Morita—his most trusted acolyte and perhaps his lover—climbed onto the balcony outside and unfurled a banner. Standing with his hands on his hips, a hachimaki tied around his head, Mishima began a speech in which he declared modern Japan to be decadent and soft, having traded the Emperor for Mammon. Nothing he said—in sentiment, at least—would have surprised a careful reader of his work. But what he had dressed in glorious clothes by his skill with the pen seemed pallid and crude removed from the pages of a book. The soldiers found it laughable at best and outrageous at worst. The author who had once held the entire country spellbound could now barely be heard over the roars of the crowd. Dismayed, Mishima returned inside.
Stripped to the waist, Mishima knelt by the window. He opened his trousers to reveal the white cloth with which he’d girded his loins. One of his recruits handed him the dagger. Morita took up the katana. Mishima held the dagger with both hands, its blade inches from his belly. (One must imagine that there passed a few moments of reverent stillness.) With a cry, he disemboweled himself. Morita tried to complete the ritual by decapitating him, but his technique was inept. He passed the sword to another recruit, who succeeded in decapitating Mishima and, a moment later, Morita himself. Japan’s greatest author died in a gruesome farce of hollow machismo—helpfully photographed by the reporters who soon burst into the room.
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In the proceedings there is nothing about Mishima that others—who know the man and his work better—have not already written. What more could be said about an author who captured the imaginations even of those who never met him, those who couldn’t speak the language in which he wrote, thought, and dreamed? Fifty years on, perhaps it is better to set him aside. But the literary world continues to look back on Mishima, seeking to unravel the enigma of his tortured life and shocking death.
Even those who don’t share Mishima’s fetishization of death or gratuitous cruelty, nor his right-wing views—anyone who would lionize him for his politics deserves contempt—might still understand Mishima’s intense frustration with the modern world: a world which fails to conform to structured order and narrative beauty. The chaos of modernity obeys no aesthetic law and unfurls no profound truth. This chaos is the heart of Life for Sale.
The world of Life for Sale is a world of billboards and TV jingles, Coca-Cola and Maidenform brassieres. It’s also the world of Jean-Luc Godard and Nagisa Oshima, the Beatles and Serge Gainsbourg. It is a world drenched in irony, a world which has been hollowed out by the death of God, leaving a void in the human spirit which the individual desperately tries to fill with consumer goods and recreational drugs. With the traditional narratives which sustained humanity pulled away, the true face of nature—the crawling chaos—shows itself, and the response is not to confront that horror but to seek distraction in pastel colors and flashing lights.
This retreat from reality horrifies Mishima, as it horrified Western philosophers from Heidegger to Benjamin. The decision to make Hannyo a copywriter is far from arbitrary. On the one hand it suggests he is somewhat an avatar for Mishima, particularly as regards these minor works: a creative soul, a man of the pen, reduced to commercialism. On the other it makes him complicit in the creation of the false and decadent new world. The revelation of this unreality drives him to attempt suicide. He fails and is, symbolically, reborn—as a creature who cannot be overcome by the madness of the modern world. The new Hannyo rushes towards death and cannot reach it, because to live in modernity is to be trapped in an eternal present. Without a past to look back on or a future to anticipate, man is, practically speaking, immortal.
This idiosyncratic novel wouldn’t have attracted international attention if not for its connection to Japan’s most infamous author. For devoted fans of Mishima it will obviously be a necessity, and those interested in 1960s Japanese counterculture will find much to enjoy in the book. However, to a more general audience, it won’t have much appeal, for all its considerable pleasures. One sees in Life for Sale the frenzied inventiveness of a writer pushing forward and refusing to look back—the kind of mad rush towards completion which overtakes participants in Canada’s infamous 3-Day Novel Contest. Writing only for money, Mishima shows in this text little concern for the finer details of plot and craft. His primary concern is keeping the story rolling, and towards this end he brings in whatever details his imagination provides: gangsters, international conspiracies, and borderline-pornographic scenarios. But it is while working under these constraints that the most basic fixations of a writer become apparent. When a writer allows his thoughts to spill unmediated onto the page, the result is an unintentional summation of his worldview and his interests. In the case of Mishima, the essential fact of life is death.
1 Most information on Mishima’s life in this review comes from Nathan’s book, Mishima: A Biography.
2 This translation also comes from Nathan’s book. Kyoko’s House has never been published in an English edition.