Kokoro

Kokoro by Natsume Soseki, translated by Meredith McKinney

A student meets an old man. The man becomes his Sensei, who he looks up to. The end of life is approaching for the student's father and the old man. The student graduates before his father's death. He doesn't feel graduation is important, but does realize where is father's view is coming from. Later the student grows up and gets married and learns more about himself. He also explores the relationship between the death of he emperor and death of people. How is Japan changing? The tale of personal relationships during times of societal change feels current even 100 years later.

Life for Sale

Hanio Yamada is a single man living an anonymous life as a white color employee. One day, through some fluke circumstances, he decides to commit suicide. However, he fails in the process. Since he is unable to kill himself, yet feels his life has no value, he decides to sell his life. He puts up an ad, and waits for customers. Somewhat surprisingly, they start to come. The first is an old man that wants revenge on his much-younger wife that left him for another man. He wants Hanio to become involved with her so that the new boyfriend will find them in the act and kill them both. Since Hanio sees no value in his life, he goes along with it. However, instead of being killed on the spot, he is discovered and chased out. Later, he hears of the girls' death.
Later clients ask him to take part in potentially deadly experiments. In each case he is perfectly willing to lose his life. However, in all cases, others end up dying, while he continues to live. This seems to show the strength in putting down one's guard. Ironically, by paying no head to the value of one's own life, he can live the life in a much fuller way. This even helps in some diplomatic actions, as two agents from one country have been killed supposedly eating poisoned carrots. He, however, hates carrots, but goes along with it because he is employed. He discovers that regular carrots were what was needed to break the code, and that the poison was just a ruse. This is perhaps the least convincing of the escapades. (However, he does mention that for this case, he actually loathes carrots, and was only willing to eat one because he had sold his life.)
Eventually a secret spy organization is convinced he is an undercover police agent. They threaten to kill him. This is not something that he wants. While it was ok for him to sell his life, he does not feel ok with somebody taking his life from him. They are convinced he must be a master agent. They don't see how somebody could not be part of an organization. He does eventually manage to elude them, but finds things more challenging now that he has placed value on his life.