You only live twice:
Once when you are born
And once when you look death in the face

Bond writes this haiku during a mission to Japan, but I'm afraid the novel does not bear this one out. Published in March of 1964, You Only Live Twice was Ian Fleming's final novel and he wrote it while looking death in the face. He'd already had a heart attack but I don't think he'd let up on smoking and drinking. In August of 1964, he died, at age 56, of a final heart attack. You Only Live Twice begins with Bond completely worn out. His wife is dead, murdered, and he reflects that

the state of your health, the state of the weather, the wonders of nature—these are things that rarely occupy the average man's mind until he reaches the middle thirties. It is only on the threshold of middle-age that you don't take them all for granted, just part of an unremarkable background to more urgent, more interesting things. Until this year, James Bond had been oblivious to all of them.

Bond cannot focus on his work and expects to be let go from the service. M, instead, promotes him and sends him on an impossible mission in Japan in the hope that looking death in the face will reinvigorate 007. Bond does heal in the exotic locale, suggesting that maybe sometimes the right thing to do is to step back and try something completely different. But Fleming at the end of his life wrote another Bond novel, and it is dour. Bond studies suicide, kamikaze pilots, and the Castle of Death. Even the Bond girl's name, Kissy Suzuki, seems uninspired. And what lies within the deadly castle? Sadly, "worn out" describes not only Bond but also the villain, who doesn't even have a plot for world domination. He's mostly bored and alienated from the feeble minds of humanity. I actually find these feelings of sadness and disappointment unusually affecting for a Bond novel. It's hard to escape the sense that Fleming looked at the Second World War, won, and the British Empire, fading, and wondered what it was all for. I note that Fleming wrote a travelogue in 1963, Thrilling Cities, and perhaps these thoughts are explored in more detail there. They unfortunately don't quite work in a Bond novel.

Among Fleming’s better efforts. Some plot elements are totally implausible, though not always for obvious reasons. The conclusion is particularly unusual for a Bond story and leads directly into The Man with the Golden Gun which, unfortunately, runs out of steam after its first few pages resolve the ‘cliffhanger’ of the earlier novel. An infinitely better story than the screen version, at least as I see them.

After the death of his wife, at the hands of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, James Bond understandably has little interest in his work or life. M, head of the Secret Service, sends 007 on a seemingly impossible mission that will make or break him.
Ian Fleming's penultimate Bond novel is populated with some of the author's best creations, especially Tiger Tanaka (Head of the Japanese Secret Service) & the foul mouthed & incredibly amusing Dikko Henderson. Bond's arch enemy Ernst Stavro Blofeld is perhaps a little too crazy for my liking this time around. The only real issue I have is when Ian Fleming mentions that James Bond features in "a series of popular books" which seems absurd considering his job!!
That aside, this 1964 novel is still a great read & was good enough for screenwriters Neal Pervis & Robert Wade to use parts of it in the 2021 James Bond film No Time To Die.

Not very happy with this offering from Fleming. Especially given how I enjoyed the last two Bond novels. Essentially, Bond is still reeling from the death of his wife in the previous book, and needs a difficult mission to snap him out of his funk. Bond is sent to Japan to investigate the rumours of a Castle of Death only to discover that the head of the evil institution is Blofeld, the man who had his wife killed. Sounds like a great plot. But it flames out for several reasons. It isn’t until page 200 (of 275) that Bond even attempts to enter the castle and the first 2/3 of the book are basically about Japanese culture. Meanwhile, Bond goes through a silly process to look more Japanese which includes skin coloration and avoids learning the language by carrying a letter that he is deaf and mute. What?? Once inside Blofeld’s castle, he is captured and his camouflage partially works until he readily gives it up so that Blofeld can reveal his evil plan of giving people the opportunity to kill themselves at his castle. Such malicious intent. I guess his plan is to take over the world one suicide at a time??? The final ludicrous event is when Bond’s female Japanese liaison finds him barely alive (after his quick battle with Blofeld) and decides to “keep him” as her own as Bond is suffering from amnesia. Then, just to make sure he stays, she goes to the village sex doctor (I am not kidding) who extracts sweat from a toad that will assist in Bond falling in love with her and obliging him to stay. Ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous!

Fun story, probably more like a 3.5. The last five pages are incredibly weird and aimed at the same audience of Maxim magazine.

eponymous sentence:
p104: He read out:
"You only live twice:
Once when you are born
And once when you look death in the face."

le mot juste:
p44: He was considerably overhung.

spelling:
p152: The dremed screams had merged into real ones when, four hours later, Bond awoke.

James finally puts Blofeld to rest. It actually seems like it's his swan song.

3.75 ⭐️

James Bond travels to Japan to get information; but the man he meets agrees to give the information only if Bond will kill someone first. Which leads to a very big coincidence!

Fleming was clearly running out of steam by this time, this is the eleventh novel of twelve – and is possibly the weakest. There really is a heck of a lot of talk in this book; but the irony is, much of this (between Bond and his Tokyo aid, Tiger Tanaka) is the best part. Their verbal sparring, East versus West (in particular tired old Britain), is the only joy in the novel. I get the feeling that some of Tiger’s criticisms of Britain reflect Fleming’s (and many others) own view. Tiger’s following speech to Bond about Britain (which would have been written in 1963) made me laugh:-

“…your governments have shown themselves successively incapable of ruling and have handed over effective control 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 much 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 of 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.”

Unfortunately, when the book finally gets to the physical part of the story – where Bond moves to an island from where he will base his attack - it all becomes turgid, and even worse, very silly. Fleming has disintegrated to the level of making Blofeld a pantomime villain. He’s become the worst type of parody, not far removed from Austin Powers. He’s literally wandering around his so called “Castle of Death,” which is lit by ‘smouldering braziers,” wearing chain armour and a winged helmet of steel. As he brandishes a sword, he spouts clichéd villain tripe such as, “I have one of the greatest brains in the world, Mister Bond. Have you anything to reply?” And Fleming goes a cliché even further, by telling us Wagner’s 'Ride Of The Valkyries' is playing in the background.

Dear, oh dear…

And the silliness doesn’t stop there. In James Bond’s obituary (this is obviously not a spoiler!) it states that a writer wrote about Bond’s exploits in a series of books. Oh, really! Then he’s hardly going to be much of a spy in the secret service!

Absurd. And I’ve not even got around to mentioning the five page list of poisonous plants.

A tired book, with only the entertaining relationship between Bond and Tanaka - displaying some of Fleming’s best dialogue – preventing a two star marking.

From IMDb:
Agent 007 and the Japanese secret service ninja force must find and stop the true culprit of a series of spacejackings before nuclear war is provoked.

I must've left this out when I added the James Bond books. I'm pretty sure I read them all, though this was a later one. As usual, the date read is a guess.

“(Britain has) not only lost a great Empire, you have seemed almost anxious to throw it away with both hands... You apparently sought to arrest this slide into impotence at Suez, (but) succeeded only in stage-managing one of the most pitiful bungles in the history of the world, if not the worst. Further, 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.”

The reason that international terrorist organisation SPECTRE replaced Russian Spy body SMERSH as James Bond’s main villain was, that as the Fifties progressed, it became increasingly ludicrous to suggest that Britain was at the forefront of the anti-Soviet fight. Philby and his cohorts (who are referred to obliquely in this volume) had proved that British agents were more likely to be hand in hand with the Russians. In addition, the fact that Britain had lost the Empire and the whole country seemed tired and grey – not to mention still bombed out – meant that Britain’s prestige had greatly faded. This then is James Bond, super agent of a failed cause, a man still fighting the fight but unsure anymore what he’s fighting for.

To be fair, the piece of dialogue quoted above is dismissed by Bond when said to him, and yet the sentiment of it echoes throughout ‘You Only Live Twice’. There are numerous references to how Britain needs to buck up her ideas because fings ain’t what they used to be. Newly widowed, Bond is jaded and tired, which undoubtedly suits the downbeat and failing country he represents. And yet, this novel wasn’t published in the Fifties, but in 1964, just when Britain was starting to swing again. Okay, the book was no doubt written the year before, but even then there should have been a sense that all was changing and Britain wasn’t as threadbare as previously supposed. And yet, in the more reactionary and conservative world of James Bond (and Ian Fleming, in the year of his death), Britain was definitely past its prime and destined to be a miserable black and white failure for even more.

(Side note: the Bond film in 1964 was Goldfinger. Isn’t it a jarring moment when Connery suggests that the best way to listen to The Beatles is while wearing earmuffs? That’s one Swinging Sixties icon taking a swing at another, but it does sound like the more 1950’s Bond of the book. He’d have thought the moptops were nothing but tuneless scruffs.)

Divorced from its historical context, this is a fairly dull and uneventful book. Bond goes to Japan on a nebulous mission, then hangs around for a bit waiting for a plot to develop. In the main this is a travelogue, Ian Fleming’s ‘What I Did On My Summer Holiday” essay. It takes a long while for the action to get going, and even then it’s fairly anticlimactic. To be fair the ending is refreshingly atypical, although the suggestion that all these books are real and written by one of Bond’s friends, feels clumsy and self reverential.

In short this is a novel in which Bond is a lot like the country he represents (or Fleming’s perception of it anyway). He was once virile and powerful, but those days have passed.

James Bond is mourning his wife’s death; it is when he is summoned for one last assignment. He is asked to convince the head of the Japanese intelligence service, to provide with radio transmissions from the Soviet Union. Instead of providing the transmission, Tiger Tanaka, the head asks Bond to assassinate Dr. Guntram Shatterhand, a man who operates The Garden of Death, a well-known location where people go to commit suicide.

Bond undertakes training, learning the Japanese culture and etiquette. His appearance is changed, and he is given the name of Taro Todoroki. He then goes undercover as a Japanese coal miner to observe Dr. and The Garden of Death, only to discover that Shatterhand and his wife are the two people, names changed, responsible for his wife’s death – making the mission personal as well.

Sadly, Bond is held captive. The rest of the world believes Bond to be dead – his obituary ran in newspaper followed by the destruction of The Garden of Death.

-The projection of Japanese women are happy submissive slave/objects – is a little disturbing portion of the book.
-It is not a novel involving the usual gunplay and gambling. The plot of The Garden of Death – the garden of deadly plants and creatures for Japanese people intending suicide does not turn out interesting.
-The chemistry build between Bond and Kissy Suzuki is dull, probably an unnecessary plot of the story.
-The pages of the novel wherein Bond is in learning of the culture are pretty enjoyable. It has light humor at places, plus the reader earns insights on the Japanese culture.