This existential crime novel has an arresting premise and Mishima plays it for all it’s worth. Quotidian reality has no place here. You know this is going to be fun when, after his suicide attempt almost on the first page, Hanio sees the days that now lie ahead as ‘a row of dead frogs with their white bellies exposed’. His perspective on life is a constant pleasure...So too is his jaundiced view of Westerners with their ‘hairy knuckles’ and their ‘gaseous smell, redolent of chives’ ... There is a place in life for the exhilarating, surreal and sometimes downright silly. This novel ticks all the boxes.
... a sexy, camp delight. Beneath the hard- boiled dialogue and the gangster high jinks is a familiar indictment of consumerist Japan and a romantic yearning for the past ... As mass-market fiction, Life for Sale works a treat; Hanno, dreaming of the 'sweet bath of death', is clearly a veiled self-portrait of Mishima ... replete with Tarantino-like scenes of smuggling and murder, as well as philosophical musings on Japanese attitudes to the sword, the warrior and honour.
Mishima may have held Life for Sale in contempt, and it doesn’t rise to the level of those novels by Graham Greene that Greene once called his own 'entertainments,' but it’s a propulsive, madcap story with echoes of the deeper concerns that interested and plagued its author ... has a serial’s episodic rhythms, a string of scenes in which Hanio encounters and manages to survive new misadventures ... Mishima brings to these set pieces a colorful imagination ... It’s the book’s looseness and weirdness that provide its appeal ... It would have been helpful for this book to include an introduction or some other explanatory material. Those who don’t know Mishima, and even those who do, could use some context.
... racy and pacy ... yields a rare glimpse of the pulp-fiction flipside that partnered the rhapsodic and mystical Mishima of important works ... repeats in a consciously trashy key the themes that had bewitched this proud, gifted and hard-working dandy and aesthete since his debut in the 1940s ... At the same time, glimpses of more authentic despair break through these lurid manga surfaces.
... the first English translation of a piece of engaging pulp fiction, first published in 1968 in Japanese Playboy, by one of the country’s literary greats ... It may be only a footnote in his career, but this surreal tale offers a trenchant critique of a city that has misplaced its soul.
... not a great work of fiction, but it succeeds in capturing vividly the bathos of the self-pitying modern nihilist ... Mishima’s work continues to be of interest because it deals with a dilemma that has not been resolved. His abiding preoccupation was with what being modern meant for Japan, but in pursuing it he opened up a question that resonates everywhere.
