Life for Sale

After botching a suicide attempt, salaryman Hanio Yamada decides to put his life up for sale in the classifieds section of a Tokyo newspaper. Soon interested parties come calling with increasingly bizarre requests and what follows is a madcap comedy of errors involving a jealous husband, a drug-addled heiress, poisoned carrots—even a vampire. For someone who just wants to die, Hanio can't seem to catch a break as he finds himself enmeshed in a continent-wide conspiracy that puts him in the crosshairs of both his own government and a powerful organized-crime syndicate. By turns wildly inventive, darkly comedic, and deeply surreal, in Life for Sale, Yukio Mishima stunningly uses satire to explore the same dark themes that preoccupied him throughout his lifetime.