Life for Sale

Hanio Yudo is tired of his life. More precisely, he is tired of being himself — of carrying the weight of an identity he did not choose and cannot escape. So he places an advertisement: he will live anyone else’s life, for a price. The clients who respond bring him into a world of Cold War espionage, criminal conspiracy, and sexual obsession — and each role he inhabits threatens to become more real than the original.

Written in 1968, Life for Sale is Mishima at his most playful and most darkly comic — a satirical novel that reads like a spy thriller with existentialist undertones, light-years from the tragic grandeur of the Sea of Fertility tetralogy. It is also, beneath its entertaining surface, a serious inquiry into the nature of identity: what remains of the self when you strip away everything that seemed to define it?

Newly available in English for the first time and an essential addition to the Mishima shelf — proof of his extraordinary range, and of his ability to make even his lightest work carry genuine philosophical weight. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.