Life for Sale

Literary fiction · Absurdism · Dark comedy · Noir · Picaresque

Print length: 192 pagesPenguin Books, Limited, 2021

Description

Hanio Yamada is a successful twenty-seven-year-old Tokyo copywriter who can no longer find meaning in his comfortable life. After a failed suicide attempt, he quits advertising and places a stark newspaper notice: his life is for sale. Respondents begin hiring him for assignments designed to place him near death, but each bizarre commission draws him into another web of desire, deception, and danger. Hanio approaches these encounters with detachment, treating his survival as almost incidental, yet the repeated failure of death to claim him complicates his conviction that existence has no value. Blending noir adventure, absurd comedy, and existential inquiry, the novel tests whether a man can truly dispose of his life on his own terms.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Conversational · Direct · Witty

Pace

Brisk

Tone

Absurdist · Dark · Detached · Satirical

Structure

Episodic

Focus

Character · Ideas · Plot

Emotional intensity

3 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 3 / 5
Ideas: 4 / 5
Structure: 3 / 5
Background knowledge: 1 / 5

Themes

FreedomIdentityIsolationMoralityMortality

About Mishima Yukio

Yukio Mishima was a major postwar Japanese stylist whose unusually broad career encompassed novels, plays, short stories, essays, film, and a libretto. His writing joins elaborate, often lyrical language to an exacting interest in how people turn beauty, desire, and social roles into private absolutes. He drew on both traditional Japanese and modern Western literary styles, placing formal elegance beside psychological and physical extremity. Confessions of a Mask and Forbidden Colors examine the performance of acceptable identity under the pressure of concealed desire, while The Temple of the Golden Pavilion follows an ideal of beauty as it hardens into alienation and destruction. Across such work, Mishima repeatedly tests the distance between inward life and public conduct, and between aesthetic ideals and the violence they may invite. The autobiographical essay Sun and Steel extends his range beyond fiction. His increasingly visible far-right politics and political activities also made him a controversial figure, complicating the reception of a body of work distinguished by its stylistic control and unsettling intensity.

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion Open Library

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Penguin Books, Limited
Language: English
ISBN: 9780241333150

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