Book Review: You Only Live Twice (1964) by Ian Fleming

“You only live twice:
Once when you are born
And once when you look death in the face.”
-After Basho, Japanese poet (1643-1694)

Part III of Ian Fleming’s informal “Blofeld trilogy” sees our famed Saint George-styled assassin in the midst of a difficult year after the death of his wife, Tracy, at the end of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. However, in You Only Live Twice, James Bond is surprisingly given a second chance and a promotion as the Secret Service whisks him off to Japan where he becomes embroiled in a mysterious plot concerning his infamous arch-nemesis… As a historical note, during Ian Fleming’s global travels for The Sunday Times, he visited Japan in 1959 and subsequently wrote a variety of articles along the way that were eventually published in 1963 as a literary travelogue entitled Thrilling Cities. He later organized another trip across Japan in 1962 with journalists Richard “Dick” Hughes and Torao “Tiger” Saito, both of whom later became the basis for characters in the novel You Only Live Twice (Dikko Henderson and Tiger Tanaka). In fact, Fleming dedicated You Only Live Twice to both men: “Richard Hughes and Torao Saito but for whom etc…”

The story for You Only Live Twice is broken into two parts –Part I: “It is better to travel hopefully…” and Part II “…than to arrive.” This is a two-part quotation borrowed from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers. The full quote reads, “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive and the true success is to labour!”

After the extraordinary tragedy of losing his wife in the previous book, we first encounter James Bond binge-drinking in Tokyo, ensconced in an intimate moment with a “pillow geisha” named “Trembling Leaf” alongside her madame named “Grey Pearl.” It has been eight months since Tracy died, and Bond is now concerned about his health (at this point, Bond is apparently in his mid-thirties).

One month prior, it was the annual closing of the famous club Blades in London (the club was previously featured in several Bond novels, perhaps most memorably in Moonraker as the reputable gentleman’s club frequented by M). Here, we find M with Porterfield, M’s chief petty officer, and Sir James Moloney, a Nobel Prize-winner “the greatest neurologist in England” (who previously appeared to assist with Bond’s poisoning in From Russia, with Love). M confesses that he’s worried about 007, particularly his heavy drinking, laziness, tardiness, absences, gambling, and so on. Currently, Bond is likely still in “shock” and blaming himself for the death of his bride Tracy (as featured at the end of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service). Bond has been considering quitting the Service and becoming a chicken farmer. He has lately been accident prone and clumsy, bungling on two of his recent assignments, and M is considering firing him, however Moloney encourages M to give 007 one more chance, to offer Bond a new mission, “something that’s desperately important but apparently impossible. By all means give him a kick in the pants at the same time if you want to, but what he needs most of all is a supreme call on his talents, something that’ll really make him sweat so that he’s simply forced to forget his personal troubles. He’s a patriotic sort of chap. Give him something that really matters to his country” (15).  

Thus, after a few quick run-ins with recurring characters at headquarters, like Miss Moneypenny and May Goodnight (Bond’s new secretary as introduced in the prior book), as well as Bond’s friend and M’s chief of staff, Bill Tanner (who remarks that the CIA is now under the purview of McCone not Dulles), M angrily summons Bond to his office and surprisingly promotes Bond from the double-0 section to the Diplomatic Section, a highly classified section with only two other members. Bond is given a new title –“7777” (while undercover as Second Secretary in the Cultural Department of the Australian Embassy) — and he is dispatched to Japan for an off-the-record reconnaissance mission concerning intercepted Soviet communications. At this point, the Japanese are wary about sharing secret information with the British, but hopefully Bond can persuade them.

Upon arrival in hot, sticky, dull Tokyo (which is currently under occupation by the United States), Bond meets with his counterpart, Richard “Dikko” Henderson, a member of Her Majesty’s Australian Diplomatic Corps as well as Tiger Tanaka, head of the Japanese secret service with golden teeth. Over the course of a month, Bond gets to know Tiger Tanaka quite well. Tanaka is a former Japanese spy who once trained as a kamikaze but never fulfilled his mission because Japan surrendered and World War II ended. He and Bond play an amusing game of rock-paper-scissors –but can Tanaka be trusted? Tanaka is described as “in fief with the CIA” and is wary of the British Secret Service, but he is mostly resistant to American influence (imagine that –an anti-American subtext in a Fleming novel!) In his internal monologue, Bond’s trademark casually racist, condescending view of Japan comes to light:

“But then the Orientalists had their own particular drawbacks – too much tied up with tea ceremonies and flower arrangements and Zen and so forth” (26).

“The American occupation and the American influence here look like a very solid basis for a total American-Japanese alliance. But once a Jap, always a Jap. It’s the same with all the other great nations – Chinese, Russian, German, English. It’s their bones that matter, not their lying faces. And all those races have got tremendous bones. Compared with the bones, the smiles or scowls don’t mean a thing” (35).

Also Dikko says to Bond, “For God’s sake, get it into your head that the Japanese are a separate human species. They’ve only been operating as a civilized people, in the debased sense we talk about it in the West, for fifty, at the most a hundred years. Scratch a Russian and you’ll find a Tartar. Scratch a Japanese and you’ll find a samurai – or what he thinks is a samurai. Most of this samurai stuff is a myth, like the Wild West bunk the Americans are brought up on, or your knights in shining armour at King Arthur’s court. Just because people play baseball and wear bowler hats doesn’t mean they’re quote civilized unquote” (37-38).

Bond tries to persuade Tanaka to hand over soviet radio transmissions codenamed “Magic 44” in exchange for access to the British Secret Service’s Macao “Blue Route” intelligence network, however Tanaka’s agents have already penetrated the Blue Route. They do not need access. Instead, Bond and Tanaka drink sake and jointly bemoan the Americanization of the globe. In the same way that Bond regards Japan as a mostly backward and uncivilized country, Tanaka regards the United States’ presence in Japan as excessively hostile, arrogant, and culturally vapid. It has brought countless foreigners, or “gaijin” who are mostly “inoffensive eccentrics,” to the Japanese shores. Bond and Tanaka are both elitists and imperialists (Bond is an austere, conservative Victorian whereas Tanaka is opposed to the Meiji restoration era) and they lament the rise of the post-war Pax Americana. Tanaka comments on the “repugnance” of the occupation of his country, and his contempt for all Texas millionaires who import fully-grown palms and tropical shrubs from Florida into Japan, a disruption to native life.

Tiger Tanaka reveals to Bond: “Ever since the beginning of the era of the Meiji, who you will know is the Emperor who fathered the modernization and Westernization of Japan from the beginning of his reign nearly a hundred years ago, there have from time to time been foreigners who have come to this country and settled here… The Oriental way of life is particularly attractive to the American who wishes to escape from a culture which, I am sure you will agree, has become, to say the least of it, more and more unattractive except to the lowest grades of the human species to whom bad but plentiful food, shiny toys such as the automobile and the television, and the “quick buck”, often dishonestly earned, or earned in exchange for minimal labour or skills, are the summum bonum, if you will allow the sentimental echo from my Oxford education… we are being subjected to what I can best describe as the ‘Scuola di Coca-Cola’. Baseball, amusement arcades, hot dogs, hideously large bosoms, neon lighting – these are the part of our payment for defeat in battle. They are the tepid tea of the way of life we know under the name of demokorasu. They are a frenzied denial of the official scapegoats for our defeat -m a denial of the spirit of the samurai as expressed in the kamikaze, a denial of our ancestors, a denial of our gods. They are a despicable way of life’ – Tiger almost spat the words – ‘but fortunately they are also expendable and temporary. They have as much importance in the history of Japan as the life of a dragonfly… Our American residents are of a sympathetic type on a low level of course. They enjoy the subservience, which I may say is only superficial, of our women. They enjoy the remaining strict patterns of our life – the symmetry, compared with the chaos that reigns in America. They enjoy our simplicity, with its underlying hint of deep meaning, as expressed for instance in the tea ceremony, flower arrangements, NO plays – none of which of course they understand. They also enjoy, because they have no ancestors and probably no family life worth speaking of, our veneration of the old and our worship of the past. For, in their impermanent world, they recognize these as permanent things just as, in their ignorant and childish way, they admire the fictions of the Wild West and other American myths that have become known to them, not through their education, of which they have none, but through television” (58-59).

In response to this blistering indictment of American culture, Bond exclaims, “This is tough stuff, Tiger. I’ve got a lot of American friends who don’t equate with what you’re saying. Presumably you’re talking of the lower G.I.s – second-generation Americans who are basically Irish or Germans or Czechs or Poles who probably ought to be working in the fields or coalmines of their countries of origin instead of swaggering around a conquered country under the blessed coverlet of the Stars and Stripes with too much money to spend…” (59-60)

But Tanaka claims, “… your governments have shown themselves successively incapable of ruling and have handed over effective control of the country to the trade unions, who appear to be dedicated to the principle of doing less and less work for more money. This feather-bedding, this shirking of an honest day’s work, is sapping at ever increasing speed the moral fibre of the British, a quality the world once so admired. In its place we now see a vacuous, aimless horde of seekers-after-pleasure – gambling at the pools and bingo, whining at the weather and the declining fortunes off the country, and wallowing nostalgically in gossip about the doings of the Royal Family and of your so-called aristocracy in the pages of the most debased newspapers in the world” (80).

Once again, in response Bond claims, “Just because you’re a pack of militant potential murders here, longing to get rid of your American masters and play at being samurai again, snarling behind your subservient smiles, you only judge people by your own jungle standards. Let me tell you this, my fine friend. England may have been bled pretty thin by a couple of World Wars, our Welfare State politics may have made us expect too much for free, and the liberation of our Colonies may have gone too fast, but we still climb Everest and beat plenty of the world at plenty of sports and win Nobel Prizes. Our politicians may be a feather-pated bunch, and I expect yours are too. All politicians are. But there’s nothing wrong with the British people – although there are only fifty million of them” (81).

I found this to be a fascinating back-and-forth between two former enemies, now made friends, as both yearn for the old empires of yesteryear before the rise of democracy and international diplomatic organizations like the United Nations. During their discussion, Tanaka refers to Bond as “Bondo-san” rather than “Bond-san” because the latter is too similar to the Japanese words for priest or greybeard. Tanaka tests Bond by sharing a brief but deeply concerning Soviet cable which the Japanese have recently intercepted. The Soviets are in possession of a two hundred megaton weapon with plans to dro it on England, entirely destroying the country. Tanaka was not supposed to reveal this information but he was encouraged to do so by Dikko, however Bond passes the test by not immediately informing England of the impending threat, and the matter is quickly resolved between Kruschev and the United States anyway.

With this in mind, Tanaka feels more comfortable speaking freely with Bond. He says that most foreigners who have taken up residence in Japan are “inoffensive eccentrics” but one man who entered the country in January is of a devilish nature –a “monster,” who is “no less than a fiend in human form.” A scientific researcher and collector in death, a botanist who is encouraging people to kill themselves (thus far, just over five hundred Japanese). His name is Dr. Guntram Shatterhand, who, together with his hideously ugly wife Frau Emmy Shatterhand, came to Japan with Swiss passports and elaborate plans to open an exotic garden for the public. He was granted a rare ten-year residence permit by the government and have taken up residence in a remote, a semi-ruined castle on Kyushu, a southern Japanese island. It is one of a string of castles facing the Tsushima Straits, the scene of the famous defeat of the Russian navy. Tanaka has learned that Dr. Shatterhand has been recruiting from the notorious Black Dragon Society, one of the most feared and powerful secret societies in Japan, of the Soshi, formerly employed samurai, as well as terrorists, gangsters, Fascist politicos, former military men, secret agents, soldiers of fortune and other riff-raff, as well as big men of industry and finance and even cabinet ministers. The Black Dragon Society is significantly more powerful than the Chinese Tongs. Dr. Shatterhand has surrounded his castle with a “garden of death” –the most desirable place for people to be lured into committing suicide in Japan. The castle has a giant hotair balloon looming overheard which points the way to death. The castle grounds are filled with poisonous plants, volcanic soils, piranhas, scorpions, snakes, and so on. Over 500 people have since committed suicide at Dr. Shatterhand’s castle.

“Honour is more important to us than life – more proud, more beautiful.”

Here, Bond and Tanaka engage in an intriguing dialectic on the idea of suicide on the decline of the British Empire. Still, Bond is curious: who is this Dr. Shatterhand? Top secret photos reveal that Shatterhand wears a suit of ancient samurai armor and a long sword whenever he steps outside his castle, but further photos reveal a strangely familiar man to Bond: a drooping black moustache, a repaired syphilitic nose, gold-capped teeth in the upper front of his mouth –“Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Irma Bunt. So this was where they had come to hide! And the long, strong gut of fate had lassoed him to them! They of all people! He of all people! A taxi-ride down the coast in this remote corner of Japan. Could they smell him coming?” (127).

Blofeld is “the great gangster who had founded SPECTRE, the Special Executive for Counter-Intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion, the man who was wanted by the police off all the NATO countries, the man who had murdered Tracy, Bond’s wife for less than a day, a bare nine months ago. And, in those nine months, this evil genius had invented a new method of collecting death, as Tiger had put it. This cover as the Swiss Doctor Shatterhand, as a rich botanist, must have been one of the many he had wisely built up over the years. It would have been easy. A few gifts of rare plants to famous botanical gardens, the financing of a handful of expeditions, and all the while in the back of his mind the plan one day to retire and ‘cultiver son jardin.’ And what a garden! A garden that would be like a deadly fly-trap for human beings, a killing bottle for those who wanted to die. And of course, Japan, with the highest suicide statistics in the world, a country with an unquenchable thirst for the bizarre, the cruel and the terrible, would provide the perfect last refuge for him. Blofeld must have gone off his head, but with a monstrous, calculating madness – the madness of the genius he undoubtedly was. And the whole demoniac concept was on Blofeld’s usual grand scale – the scale of a Caligula, of a Nero, of a Hitler, of any other great enemy of mankind. The speed of execution was breathtaking, the expenditure fabulous, the planning, down to the use of the Black Dragon Society, meticulous, and the cover as impeccable as the Piz Gloria Clinic which, less than a year before, Bond had helped utterly destroy. And now the two enemies were lined up again, but this time David was spurred on to kill his Goliath not by duty but by blood feud! And with what weapons? Nothing but his bare hands, a two-inch pocket knife and a thin chain of steel. Well, similar weapons had served him before. Surprise would be the determining factor” (129).

Bond decides to keep this knowledge of Blofeld and Bunt to himself as he undergoes a rigorous transformation into a “new man” with the help of Tanaka and a geisha. He is given Japanese cultural education –he is informed that women should be disrespected and even ‘pushed’ and ‘trampled.’ He is told not to swear. His skin is died, his hair is cut in Japanese fashion. He is told when to bow as a show of respect. “Be calm, stoic, impassive. Do not show anger. Smile at misfortune. If you sprain your ankle, laugh.” Tanaka speaks poetically in proverbs and haikus, while Bond is introduced to Japanese delicacies like fugu (blowfish), and other customs like Shintoism, calligraphy, combat training, swordsmanship, submission to authority, and Tanaka strangely laments that Bond was not trained as a teenager in these arts because he might have been able to gain testicular muscle control like sumo fighters… I suppose it wouldn’t be a Fleming novel without several bizarre gratuitous images! At any rate, during this training we learn that Bond was born in the year of the rat, he learns to sit in the lotus position, and eventually earns the honor and respect of the Japanese.

Bond and Tanaka travel by train and boat to a remote area in southern Japan (on the train, Bond’s wallet is stolen by a stocky man wearing a mask with an ugly leather hat who is later killed). This is followed by a rollicking car chase in which the culprit is killed, before they arrive at the old Japanese gestapo headquarters in order to develop a plan for Bond to infiltrate Dr. Shatterhand’s castle. Why doesn’t Japan simply send in their own agents instead of Bond? Tanaka says he recently dispatched one of his top agents to castle only for him to return blind and deformed. And the Japanese military or police cannot be informed about this mission because Dr. Shatterhand has technically done nothing wrong.

The plan is for Bond to begin among the Ama, an island tribe whose women dive for shells in the nude akin to “sea-gypsies.” On the island of Kuro, Bond will stay with a friendly family who knows the Superintendent. From here, he will swim and scale the castle wall, donning a ninja outfit, and throttle Dr. Shatterhand with a ninja chain. This is the plan. Notably, Bond will not carry a gun because silence will be essential on this mission.

Upon arrival on Kuro, Bond is struck by the delicate remoteness of this fairyland small fishing village. He ponders staying here because “there would be nothing more wonderful than to spend the rest of his life rowing her out towards the horizon during the day and coming back with her to the small clean house in the dusk.” Bond stays with the Suzuki family, whose attractive daughter, Kissy Suzuki, is one of the Ama divers. Bonds goes undercover under the name of Taro (“first son”) Todoroki (“thunder”). Kissy used to live in the West and work in Hollywood, but she hated it and returned home after being treated like an animal. As is typical in a Fleming novel, all the characters simply ooze with contempt and resentment for America. The only person Kissy had found to be agreeable in Hollywood was actor David Niven (an opinion Fleming apparently shared) and as such Kissy has a pet cormorant bird named after him.

While living among the Ama people, Bond realizes how weak his body has become with poor lungs from all the cigarettes he has been consuming for years. He also learns about the Ama superstitions regarding the castle and prayers to the “six guardian” rock formations. Before long, Bond is ready to complete his mission –Kissy has unsurprisingly fallen in love with him and decides to periodically wait for him at the foot of the castle wall. Thus, Bond makes his moonlit swim through shark-infested waters to scale these enormous, looming Dracula castle walls –his ascent is described as silent like a bat in the night with “the many eyes of the castle” watching his approach. These scenes struck me as extraordinarily tense, offering a captivating climax to the novel. When Bond is finally on the inside, he discovers a lake filled with piranha (he watches a man with a swollen head tumble to his gruesome death, while another man steps into boiling volcanic liquid where he meets his sizzling demise, as well). This ghastly place is rife with horror tropes but ninja James Bond slinks like “a ghost in the garden” until –from a safe hiding place—he spots Blofeld/Dr. Shatterhand in full medieval regalia, with his spiked helmet and closed visor, like something out of Wagner or a Japanese kabuki play.

When it is safe again, Bond emerges and makes the final heart-racing midnight climb into the castle, but this utterly intense covert operation quickly falls apart as Bond accidentally stumbles into a trap while “Flight of the Valkyries” plays behind him. Bond is captured and tortured by goons, like one named Kono (Bond’s true identity is revealed by Irma Bunt) before being placed on a throne-like chair with a circular hole over an exploding volcanic geyser that is controlled by a small wooden box with a crank. It is set to erupt every fifteen minutes and incinerate whomever is seated upon the throne. After finally agreeing to speak, Bond and Blofeld trade threats (since their last encounter, Blofeld has become little more than a cartoonish misanthropic, maniacal villain –“we live in a world of fools in which true greatness is a sin”). He is clearly completely insane, believing his past criminal acts, like his theft of nuclear weapons in Thunderball would have led to international talks for nuclear disarmament, and his plans for biological warfare in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service would have united Britain against a common enemy. Now, he offers the gift of honorable suicides in his castle, but during the course of dialogue, as Blofeld prepares to decapitate Bond, Bond manages to snatch a nearby weapon and he dramatically battles Blofeld, stabbing him and strangling him to death while whispering “Die, Blofeld! Die!” Thus ends the life of Bond’s greatest nemesis.

Next, Bond –in searing pain– heads for the wooden box that controls the volcanic eruptions which he cranks before fleeing the castle which is set to explode, but in the escape, Bond is sent crashing downward into the sea where he is rescued by Kissy. Sadly, Bond is found to be suffering from severe amnesia, and Kissy keeps him hidden on Kuro so that he may one day marry her. To the outside world, Bond is presumed dead. M writes a brief note to the Secret Service announcing Bond’s death, delivering a fond obituary and biography of Bond from his childhood through his time in public service –Bond was born to a Scottish father, Andrew Bond of Glencoe (a foreign representative of the Vickers armaments firm, and a Swiss mother, Monique Delacroix, from the Canton de Vaud. Both parents were killed in a climbing accident in the Aiguilles Rouges above Chamonix, and Bond was then raised by his aunt, Miss Charmian Bond in the hamlet of Pett Bottom near Canterbury in Kent. He was forced to drop out of Eton (much like Fleming, himself) after some trouble with one of his maids, and transferred to Fettes where he became a light-weight and founded the first serious judo class at a British public school. Shortly thereafter, upon graduating around 1941, Bond joined the Ministry of Defence through a paternal connection in the armaments, and ending the war having achieved the rank of Commander.

“But he possessed what almost amounted to ‘The Nelson Touch’ in moments of the highest emergency, and he somehow contrived to escape more or less unscathed from the many adventurous paths down which his duties led him. The inevitable publicity, particularly in the foreign Press, accorded some of these adventures, made him, much against his will, something of a public figure, with the inevitable result that a series of popular books came to be written around him by a personal friend and colleague of James Bond. If the quality of these books, or their degree of veracity, had been any higher, the author would certainly have been prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act. It is a measure of the disdain in which these fictions are held at the Ministry, that action has not yet – I emphasize the qualification – been taken against the author and publisher if these high-flown and romanticized caricatures of episodes in the career of an outstanding public servant” (205). Here, Fleming makes a cheeky wink at the audience as he breaks the fourth wall and gives a meta-acknowledgment to the Bond novels.

M notes that many of the junior staff in the Secret Service feel they represent Bond’s philosophy: “I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time” (a quotation from Jack London).

Before the novel ends, Fleming presents an odd coda to the book in which Bond has recovered from his wounds but is unable to recall his own identity as he lives among the Ama people on Kuro for several seasons (i.e. “The Bond Identity”?). Kissy makes love to Bond but only after visiting an urban sex shop on the mainland, and bringing a strange virility cure using a frog as an aphrodisiac for Bond as well as a “pillow book” before Bond reveals a crumpled bit of newspaper with the word “Vladivostok” written on it, and this word jogs his memory. Kissy hides that she is pregnant with Bond’s child while Bond sails off for Russia in search of his past –“though his life on Kuro, his love for Kissy Suzuki, were, in Tiger’s phrase, of as little account as Sparrow’s tears” (218).

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In my view, the aptly titled You Only Live Twice offers James Bond a second chance at both revenge and redemption. It marks a rebirth for the character since he was falling apart at the start of the novel after the death of Tracy, and the adventure leads him through a disturbing, fetishized interpretation of Dante’s hell in order to exact his deeply personal vendetta on the man who murdered his wife. In the end, he emerges as a blank slate, a new man in search of his true identity. You Only Live Twice marks a unique point of departure and growth for Bond.   

Much of You Only Live Twice reads like a travelogue, with Bond experiencing Japanese culture from his distinctly chauvinistic view, and at the heart of his anthropological analysis is a tension Bond experiences over the notion of blind obedience to authority. And sharing a great deal in common with other fantastical books in the series, particularly Dr. No, wherein Bond penetrates a remote island lair beside a nude diver only to battle a giant octopus, in You Only Live Twice, Bond is trained to be a ninja and invades a remote seaside castle filled with poisonous plants and a large hot air balloon marking the ideal spot for ritual suicide. Here, we are treated to Bond’s final conflict with his arch-nemesis, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, who has devolved into a somewhat untethered misanthrope, a fanatical madman delighting in his role as a purveyor of human death. With his own health rapidly deteriorating by this point, Ian Fleming used this backdrop as a convenient place to ponder the nature of life and death, as well as the decline of the British Empire. In many respects, James Bond –as Fleming’s alter ego—was given the chance at rebirth that Fleming never had. This was the final James Bond novel published while Ian Fleming was still alive, and in my view, it offers a fond farewell for the character.

As with On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, a number of narrative questions emerged for me with You Only Live Twice: Why has Blofeld descended from the fearsome but cautious man behind the curtain in Thunderball, to an erratic botanist and ruler of a horror-show suicide castle in You Only Live Twice? This is quite the downfall for a fearsome international espionage leader. And what happens to Irma Bunt at the end of the novel? Bond leaves her in a drunken state of head injury –does she die in the explosion? And lastly: is a secret infiltration of Blofeld’s castle by a single man (Bond) really the best option for the Japanese Secret Service? At one point, Bond asks it succinctly “Why didn’t the Japanese Air Force come and bomb this place to eternity, set the castle and the poison garden ablaze with napalm? How could this man continue to have protection from a bunch of botanists and scientists?” (165). And what about Tracy’s father, Draco? Wouldn’t he be willing to help Bond, as in the previous book, by mustering his criminal forces to attack the castle and claim vengeance over the man who murdered his daughter?

At any rate, without thinking too deeply, I had a lot of fun with this completely ridiculous James Bond novel, from its travelogue-inspired plot to its Dracula-esque climax. James Bond assuming the visage of a ninja was both amusing and strangely compelling. Admittedly, You Only Live Twice has been my favorite of the “Blofeld trilogy,” though I know it remains controversial among certain fans for its downright bizarre spectacle and sometimes goofy larger-than-life ending. Interestingly enough, while the fifth James Bond film of the same name departed a great deal from the novel, elements of Bond’s backstory, as described in M’s obituary in the book, have since been incorporated into several Bond films, like Skyfall, and the idea of Bond impregnating a woman and confronting a villain with a poisonous garden can be found in the most recent Bond film No Time to Die.

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Fleming, Ian. You Only Live Twice. Thomas & Mercer in Las Vegas, NV c/o Ian Fleming Publications Ltd. 1964 (republished in 2012). Paperback edition.

Click here to return to my survey of the James Bond saga.

Film Review: You Only Live Twice (1967)