After botching a suicide attempt, salaryman Hanio Yamada decides to put his life up for sale in the classifieds section of a Tokyo newspaper. Soon interested parties come calling with increasingly bizarre requests and what follows is a madcap comedy of errors, involving a jealous husband, a drug-addled heiress, poisoned carrots—even a vampire. For someone who just wants to die, Hanio can't seem to catch a break, as he finds himself enmeshed in a continent-wide conspiracy that puts him in the cross hairs of both his own government and a powerful organized-crime syndicate. By turns wildly inventive, darkly comedic, and deeply surreal, in Life for Sale Yukio Mishima stunningly uses satire to explore the same dark themes that preoccupied him throughout his lifetime.
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A terrific example of Mishima’s fecund imagination at its most free-wheeling and unfettered best, teeming with complex ideas about the paradoxical nature of existence, delivered with trademark panache and a winking smile. . . . Wildly comedic and filled with picaresque flights of fancy. . . . There’s more than a touch of James Bond about Life for Sale.
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The Japan Times