Source of book: Audiobook from the library
It is impossible to separate the works of Yukio Mishima entirely from the man himself, and particularly the trajectory of his life toward the end.
Mushima is best known for his second novel, Confessions of a Mask (which is on my list), a semi-autobiographical account of growing up as a repressed homosexual. This repressed and redirected sexuality pervades his work, for good and ill. He himself noted that his feelings of insufficient masculinity drove him to a fetishization of war and violence, and his books show a disturbing difficulty in seeing women as individual humans with dreams of their own.
But it was after the end of World War Two that Mishima went pretty sideways. Always a traditionalist, he slid further and further to the right wing after the perceived humiliation of the surrender and the transition to representative government rather than monarchy.
Mishima was hardly the only Japanese author to give into nostalgia for an imagined past - everything from the intentional isolation of the nation from the world through the ongoing conflict between patriarchal norms and modern needs is a part of this.
In 1968, Mishima took part in the formation of a private militia group, intent on revolution. And by revolution, they meant the restoration of the monarchy by a military coup, and the purging of “Western” influences.
In 1970, they took action: five members including Mishima entered a military base, took the commander hostage, and attempted to kick off the coup. Mishima’s stirring speech to the army resulted, not in revolution as he hoped, but in derisive laughter. The attempt had failed, and Mishima committed seppuku - suicide by ritual disembowelment.
A sad and pointless end for a brilliant writer. To me, it is also a reminder that you can’t go back to a non-existent past. And all idolized pasts are phantasms. They never really existed except in fantasy - or on television.
I have been playing a lot of gigs lately, some with a bit of a commute, so I have filled the gaps with audiobooks - that’s one reason for all the reviews lately. Confessions of a Mask wasn’t available, but Life For Sale was, and the premise sounded interesting.
The book is a dark comedy. Hanio is a 20-something copywriter, stuck in a soul-sucking job. He has no family, no friends, and no purpose in life. On a sudden whim, he ducks into a pharmacy and attempts to overdose himself on the subway. He wakes up in a hospital, all too alive.
From there, deciding that his life is worthless anyway, he takes out an ad in the paper, offering to sell his life.
At this point, a succession of odd characters come to buy his life. Except that, despite his full intention to die, he somehow ends up living. And the women involved in these escapades tend to end up dead, either of suicide, or maybe a mob hit.
The situations go from implausible to outright fantastic: an old man wants to provoke his unfaithful wife into being killed by her new lover. A professor wants to test a beetle that supposedly can turn a person into a zombie. A vampire needs fresh blood. An international incident involving stolen codes turns on the question of poisoned carrots. A young woman is convinced she has congenital syphilis, and expects to go insane - so she wants to live richly, then go out in a suicide pact.
And running through much of this is the Asia Confidential Service, a mysterious multinational organized crime and spy ring.
Don’t expect this book to be “realistic” in that sense. If nothing else, the ACS seems to be a shockingly incompetent organization, only marginally better than the police. And Hanio is a seriously unreliable narrator.
By the end of the book, I was seriously wondering if the ACS actually existed, or if it was all in Hanio’s increasingly paranoid imagination.
As I noted, the book does tend to treat women as expendable, which was noted even at the time it was published - as a serial in the Weekly Playboy, kind of an upscale Japanese combination of smut and literature.
To say that the book is cynical is an understatement. The only remotely likeable character is the young son of the vampire, Kaoru - he is just looking for some sort of family normalcy, which is pretty impossible when your mom is a vampire.
Hanio is definitely an unpleasant sort. A nihilist who seems to care about exactly nothing, he sees other lives as having the same zero value as his own. That said, he is in some ways sympathetic, and he has a point about one key thing:
Working in a pointless job is a form of selling one’s life. It is done on the installment plan, but it is the same thing. This is a problem of industrial and post-industrial society generally. Most “jobs” are doing fairly meaningless tasks in order to enrich the capitalist class.
That is what the book ultimately invites the reader to contemplate. Is there any meaning to our lives in the society we are in? Are our lives treated as valuable, or just as meat robots to enrich others?
The book also, unsurprisingly, contains some pointed dislike directed at outsiders. All of the “westerners” are villains, and villains with terrible taste. Hanio expresses contempt for “western style” houses, with their carpet and lack of ventilation and utter lack of any sense of beauty.
To the extent that Hanio actually enjoys anything, it is always connected to the past, to traditional Japanese art, or housing, or ways of being.
Of course, this is both the promise and the delusion of nostalgia. If we just went back to “the old ways” (whatever version of that we envision), we could find meaning and belonging and purpose in life.
Which is bullshit.
There is no past in which utopia existed. Was your “golden age” the 1950s in America? Yes, there were some good things - strong unions, government that built infrastructure and taxed the rich. But also Jim Crow, high rates of depression and suicide by women, the threat of nuclear annihilation.
Was it the 1800s? How about those low lifespans for most people, the deadly factory and mining jobs for the lower classes? How about the constant threat of bankruptcy among small farmers - and famine for that matter?
Was it the Middle Ages? When Europe was locked in centuries of near-constant warfare, serfs were essentially slaves tied to the land and the nobility?
At best, times in the past were “great for a few people.” If you just happened to be rich, yeah, life was probably pretty good. Except for the diseases and stuff. And wars.
But most of us would not have been rich in the past. Or even middle class. And being poor sucked just as much back then.
Nostalgia always comes down to something like that. A delusion of a magical golden age where meaning and purpose were clear, and suffering was somehow pleasant or noble.
Hanio’s rejection of the pointlessness of his life is fully justifiable. But he also finds he really hasn’t found meaning in dying either. It just makes him feel more alive. At the end of the book (and the ending is definitely ambiguous), he still hasn’t found a purpose beyond trying not to die, and he may have wrecked what little mental health he had.
Ironically, the closest he gets to a life with purpose that satisfies him is when he is literally getting his blood sucked by a vampire.
There is plenty of this existentialist crisis going on, but the book is also quite funny at times. Even if you haven’t read much Japanese literature and are unfamiliar with the culture, much of the satire carries over fairly well to American life. The silliness of social conventions, particularly surrounding consumerism, is on full display.
I listened to this on audiobook, which has Kotaro Watanabe as the narrator. This was a weird experience. English is clearly not Watanabe’s first language. It’s not that he is bad at it, but the cadence is off. You would never mistake the rhythm of the words for a native speaker. This means that you really have to pay attention, because you will miss things otherwise. There are also numerous instances of completely mispronounced words. This happens in audiobooks read by native speakers too, of course - I have noted it a few times. But there is a lot of this in the audiobook. Just something to consider.
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