The nature of Mishima’s death casts a significant shadow over any reading of his work, and even if “Life for Sale” was written without his deepest attention and intentions, its portrait of the willingness to die is complicated. You have the heart and soul of a warrior,” one character tells Hanio. Those are words that snugly fit what we know of Mishima’s worldview. But Hanio’s quest for death is at best halfhearted, and doesn’t withstand much interrogation. Just two years before his own earnest end, Mishima wrote of his character’s plight as something passive and essentially comic: “There was something inexpressibly funny here.

Source: New York Times May 21, 2020 09:00 UTC