whazzle

I had been wanting to get ahold of one of Yukio Mishima's novels for Pride month and it was only recently they came in. For those who don't know, Yukio Mishima is a... divisive figure, and is memetically used as the example of how being gay does not automatically put one on the left of the political spectrum. So, I put in a bunch of holds on Libby, and Life For Sale was the one that came back first. I might have skipped reading it but I was at a music festival with no internet service for hours so I started reading, and then I realized the book was expiring today so I figured I'd better finish it. So I read it quickly, and it's an easy book to read quickly.

As I was reading the book, I was trying to put together some semblance of his political stance, and wondering, how, perhaps, a young man who puts his life "for sale" with the intent of dying by it being used by buyers, and all these women keep dying in his stead, would relate to fascism as a misogynistic death cult, but... it was quite hard to make anything coherent from it, though the character obviously had opinions that "traditional" culture was better and had a low opinion of westerners and foreigners. When I couldn't make much sense of it having any kind of stance, thought the plot was totally coherent, I tried looking it up on Google and immediately find "Life For Sale is widely considered to be one of Yukio Mishima's worst novels..." and more information, that it was serialized in a men's magazine in 1968 is generally not like anything else Mishima has written. So, I might get around to reading another book by him, but maybe not for a while.

I think this quote I found on Wikipedia probably summarizes it up best: