Nichibunken Evening Seminar

　The Japanese novelist, Yukio Mishima (1925-1970), is perhaps best known for his dramatic suicide. In 1970, with a group of fellow right-wing nationalists he raided a military base in Tokyo, and encouraged the soldiers to rise up in revolution in the name of the Emperor. When the coup d’état failed, Mishima committed ritual suicide by disembowelment (seppuku).

　Only two years before, he had written a popular novel, Life for Sale (Inochi urimasu, 1968), first serialized in the Japanese version of Playboy magazine. The novel depicts a man who, having failed to kill himself, puts his own life up for sale in a newspaper advertisement, and it traces his ensuing adventures with several clients. The novel may be described as bleak, trashy, kitsch, camp, shallow and sexy.

　However, I argue that Mishima employs these ‘frivolous’ qualities as a way of carrying out a perceptive critique of the breakdown in human relations following Japan’s wartime defeat. For example, sado-masochism appears in the novel as a means to resist what Mishima saw as the trivial and anodyne fantasies of post-war consumerist domestic life in Japan.

　This paper describes my experience of translating this novel into English, in particular as I tried to highlight both the sense of superficiality as well as deeper layers of meaning within the text.