The Hitman's Sales Technique is not a hitman story but a sales textbook
Introduction
Hi, I’m kittchy.
I’m bad at choosing books. Even when I stop in front of the display tables at a bookstore, every blurb looks interesting, so I end up going home without buying any of them.
What moves me most is a single “that was good” from someone I know. That’s what happened this time: I saw a coworker post on X that Koroshiya no Eigyojutsu (The Hitman’s Sales Technique) was great, and bought it on the spot. I read it around May 2026.
It’s a full-length novel by Yu Nomiya and won the 71st Edogawa Rampo Prize. It also placed sixth in the 2026 Japan Booksellers’ Award.
Up front: I keep spoilers in this article to about 20 percent. I’ll cover how the story opens and what the ending felt like, but not what happens there.
It starts with a sales pitch for his life
Kazuki Torii, an ace salesman, runs into two hitmen and is about to be killed. Then Torii sees that the murder-for-hire company the hitmen work for is in financial trouble and will go under unless it repays 200 million yen within two weeks. He starts selling himself: “I’m the only one who can solve that problem for you.”
It’s a book that does exactly what the title says. That’s all the plot I’ll give.
Surprisingly, it really is full of sales advice
I assumed the title was a hook and the content would be hitman entertainment. It turned out to be the other way around.
Torii’s sales talk is brilliantly fun, of course, but there’s far more explanation of sales technique itself than I expected. If he’s turned down, he’s killed, so every word weighs more than in a normal business meeting. I bought it as a hitman novel, and it felt like I was being told an entertaining story about sales the whole time.
I had never even thought hitmen might have a sales side. To me a hitman was someone who takes a job and acts on it, and the question of how that work gets sold just wasn’t in my head. Because of what’s being sold, the objections and the pricing are different from normal products, and reading it felt new.
That said, I’ve never worked in sales, so I probably only think I understand it. Feeling like you get it from reading and actually selling to people are completely different things. Still, it’s true that I enjoyed a story about a job I knew nothing about this much.
Even so, what stayed with me most were the killings
After saying you can read it as a textbook, I have to admit that when I look back on it, what stuck in my head were the scenes of people being killed. They’re just so raw.
Obviously, I’ve never seen anyone get killed. Yet while reading I could picture the scene, and I was honestly moved by the sense of something I’d never seen rising up in my mind.
Strong, yet still human
I don’t think the rawness comes from the amount of blood.
The characters standing in those killing scenes are mentally tough. Their hands don’t shake and they don’t freeze. But their humanity hasn’t vanished, and an awareness of death seeps out of the struggle between that toughness and the heart they still have.
That sense of being conscious of death came through strongly in the writing. It was strongest in the scenes that move along calmly, and I think that’s why I could imagine sights I should never have seen.
If the killers had simply been written as strong people, it wouldn’t have stayed with me like this. Keeping them strong while leaving them a human heart is the scariest part of this book.
The battle of wits at the end is intense
Here I’ll say a little about how it feels, without saying what happens.
Toward the end it turns into a battle of wits, and it’s really intense. While reading I kept thinking of the TV drama VIVANT: reading the opponent’s move, factoring in that they’ve read yours, and striking back. That back-and-forth is close.
I thought I was enjoying a sales explainer, and I never expected to be carried to this level of heat by the end.
Closing
I started it as a hitman novel and finished it as a sales textbook, and what I still remember is the feel of death. For a book I bought because of one line I saw on X, it took me a long way.
The sequel, Koroshiya no Shussejutsu (The Hitman’s Promotion Technique), came out on July 29, 2026. This time Torii, now a salesman at the murder-for-hire company, apparently gets caught up in office politics and a race for promotion. That’s what I’m reading next.
See you.