I've read a few James Bond books...not a lot, just a few. Usually I only pick them up when working on a reading challenge. They seem to land between 3 and 4 stars for me.

In this book, I liked the last half infinitely better than the first half. It started off super slow, it was close to the halfway point before the story actually started...then at the ending, it felt like it needed more enlightenment.

I liked the humor in this one too. That's when I see the movie version of James Bond in these books. The books and the movies are very different, but they both can be appreciated for what they are.

AKA "I'm turning Japanese, I think I'm turning Japanese, I really think so"

And so I finish the last of Fleming's full length Bond novels, and while it wasn't as cringeworthy as I'd feared vis-à-vis its treatment of the "Exotic East" it did really let me down in the plot department which took a decided turn for the soap operatic in the final chapters.


Bro you're not fooling anyone. Just...stop.

As always Simon Vance does yeoman's work with the source material to elevate it, "Bondo-san's" conversations with the dogged head of the Japanese Secret Service "Tiger" Tanaka in particular were fun, particularly when Fleming makes the Japanese spy the mouthpiece for what one suspects were his own political views re: the decline of British world influence and mores. It must have been a very strange experience growing older as one of the author's generation and class, born into a world where, right or wrong, the sun never set on the British Empire only for it to more or less evaporate completely over the course of two world wars in order to be completely eclipsed by two new very ideologically minded Superpowers. It definitely feels like the frequently flailing adventures of Cmdr. Bond, RN, reflect a quixotic attempt to keep up the British End in spite of overwhelming evidence that its day had passed.


It is a deadly habit, they say...

On to some 007 short stories soon, also narrated by Vance, to finish the my survey.

I expected very little from this, the penultimate trial in my read-through of the complete Fleming James Bond series. I'm sure my ambivalence is showing given that I'm now an older, punk, confirmed intellectual who considers such good guy/bad guy drivel suspect at best and fit only for the dung heap most of the time; but, well, childhood nostalgia and laziness catch up with the best of us and once in a while I need to read something silly alongside the great books even if only to remind myself why the great books are great. Anyway, back to my expectations--the movie is one of the worst, certainly Connery's worst, so I thought perhaps the flaw was here. Lo and behold this is so far I think the very best Bond novel by Fleming. The ubiquitous sexism is here relegated to a kind of childish desire rather than out and out slander, the racism tempered by the novel's obsession with all things Japanese, and the fairy-tale elements actually make this particular version of what can only be the same old formula for all such heroic tales, a tad more interesting than the previous ones. I enjoyed it actually.

I returned to the film to see what went wrong there and, while I agree that all of the cultural banter between the Japanese secret service agent and Bond about all that is right and wrong with both of the cultures (with a few random digs at the USA) wasn't going to make for a great action picture, I discovered that it was all Roald Dahl's fault. Oddly, with the then usual screenwriter on another project they turned to Dahl simply because he was a friend of Fleming's. Granted they hobbled him as the plot of this novel hinges upon the denouement of the previous novel, On Her Majesty's Secret Service in which supervillain Ernst Stavro Blofeld kills Tracy, Bond's wife of a few hours. For the perverse reason that they didn't want to seek locations in snow (I guess in the wrong season?) the filmmakers decided to switch the order and film this one first, thus destroying the linchpin of its plot, leaving poor Dahl at a loss. He proclaimed the novel to be plot-less, which is absurd. The superhero seeking revenge on the supervillain is the only plot all such tales have and it's as old as Gilgamesh. Actually Gilgamesh is better than most as, like the very great Count of Monte Cristo it's more about how pointless such revenge seeking actually is.

Anywho, the film sucks because there's literally no dialogue except for three or four of Bond's bad puns after a bland action sequence filmed, oddly, with no rhythmic excitement. They blew all their money on one very impressive set and the only real joy of the film is watching them blow it up.

The novel, however, gives us the damaged Bond in dire need of repair. He's enlisted in diplomacy, which seduces him, and then roped back into his role as good guy assassin and, lucky for him, his victim turns out to be just the man he's been dying to kill for some time. This is actually a perfectly serviceable story for such books and I actually found Fleming's ultra-conservative alternating bitching and defense of the Occidental way of life compared to what I guess he's researched or discovered of the Japanese way of life kind of engrossing. I mean, take it with a grain of salt, the speaking characters are spies for fuck's sake, they're bound to be conservative, opinionated, and mostly sloshed. But it's kind of a hoot and falls into Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the novel form as producing a dialogue between characters, here standing for whole cultures, East and West, and it's interesting to see them compare, contrast, and argue about all of the ways and means of cultural traditions and their two points of view.

Then the suspense of the chase, the love story, the action: all the requisite elements for such rubbish. And the ambiguous ending was both unexpected and wonderfully fairy-tale-esque. I almost wish it was the last Bond novel and that Fleming had left the hero here, happy for once. Seems to me all these violent men, those supposedly on the side of good and those supposedly on the side of evil, are only trying to kill something inside themselves by enacting the law of retribution and death upon others, no? Thus the creepy and also unexpected suicide theme here works as well, even if Fleming wasn't thinking of it in that way. It's kind of a haunting story in the end, like all good fairy tales.

Ian Fleming often teased readers in earlier James Bond novels by including scenes where James Bond fantasizes what his life would be like if he retired from the Secret Service. Bond often discusses quitting with his friends in almost every book in the series, too. The ending of ‘You Only Live Twice’, number twelve in the series, leaves readers wondering if Bond has really come to the end of his career! The tone of this book is elegiac, and the story seems more of a funeral plot (pun intended) for the series as well as for many of the characters.

Bond is coming to work at his London desk late and leaving early. He is drinking a great deal, including at lunch. He is doing no paperwork, rarely responding to work-related questions. He totally screwed up his last two field assignments. Bond wonders whether he should resign before he gets fired. Finally, M summons him to his office. Bond is certain he is finished.

Instead, M ‘promotes’ Bond to the Diplomatic Section, giving him a new higher salary and a number: 7777. Is it the old scam of promoting a failing employee by bumping him up in title and salary? Maybe. M has been consulting the Service’s psychiatrist, Sir James Molony, who has recommended an extended vacation at minimum in the past for Bond. This time, though, Molony has recommended giving Bond a hopeless assignment without any dangers, something to ignite Bond’s patriotism and ingenuity. So, M tells Bond he is getting an undercover assignment without any gunplay. M wants Bond to somehow encourage Japan’s secret service department head, Tiger Tanaka, to give over its intelligence reports on the Soviets. England no longer has levers of influence, or even offices, in Japan. The CIA has taken over the region. Bond’s cover will be as the Australian’s embassy number two under Richard “Dikko” Lovelace Henderson of Her Majesty’s Australian Diplomatic Corps.

Dikko introduces Bond to Tiger. Tiger and Bond spend much time together, sizing each other up. Bond learns a lot about Japanese customs, does a lot of traveling around Japan. Finally, Tiger says he will give Bond important secrets the Japanese have gotten from spying on Soviet communications IF he does a favor for them. It seems there is a rich European in Japan the Japanese authorities would like to kill...



Japan is sometimes called “The Land of the Rising Sun”. From Wikipedia:

"The Japanese names for Japan are Nippon (にっぽん) and Nihon (にほん).They are both written in Japanese using the kanji 日本. Both Nippon and Nihon literally mean "the sun's origin", that is, where the sun originates, and are often translated as the Land of the Rising Sun. This nomenclature comes from Imperial correspondence with the Chinese Sui Dynasty and refers to Japan's eastern position relative to China."


However, after World War II, many Japanese were not feeling it. A book, ‘The Setting Sun’, was written (from Wikipedia):

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_S...

“The symbolism of the book: "The Setting Sun refers to how Japan, the "Land of the Rising Sun" was in a period of decline after World War II. In her last letter to Mr. Uehara, Kazuko says that Japan is struggling against the old morality, "like the sun"."


Fleming died shortly after ‘You Only Live Twice’ was published. The book takes several feints towards the death of Bond, or of his career, and especially at Bond’s purpose in life, highlighting Bond’s death wish. The setting in another country destroyed by World War II, with a plot about an insane Edenic garden of deadly plants for Japanese people intending suicide, created by Bond’s old foe Blofeld, a Polish-German madman, adds up to a literary scream of despair. I believe Fleming set the final (?) book about Bond in Japan (the novel is a travelogue about Japan for 2/3rds of the book) because Japan was another country which was seemingly in its sunset years of influence, power and wealth in the world.

I think Ian Fleming was emotionally done in for real when he wrote 'You Only Live Twice'. The novel has many references to the diminution of England - financially, and in its political influence on the World. There is a thread of sadness and a sense of loss over the overall decline of manners and customs and class throughout the story. Although two more James Bond books by Fleming were published after his death from draft manuscripts and notes, I think if it wasn’t for the Hollywood deals, Fleming was ready to stop writing about James Bond. Fleming seems awfully embittered? angry? in the books through the cartoon character he made to represent England’s tired masculinity - a spy suffering from a lot of PTSD. (Hollywood turned Bond into a wise-cracking psychopath.) I believe Fleming was truly soul-sick. I do not have the sympathy for him that maybe some do, since I think his despair was mostly from the blurring and degrading of male class-structures and mores after WWII. He equated nobility and patriotism as weft and warp of upper-class values, so the ongoing growing disrespect of the upper-classes around the world meant the concurrent degradation of country and social life to him, I think, thus his resulting angst and depression. As an underclass woman who grew up a little later in the twentieth century, my sympathy for the death of toxic masculinity, whether upper class or no, must remain rather with the hopeful blooms in a feminist poison garden.

I’ve noted many times before the way Ian Fleming enjoyed and excelled at experimenting with structure in his Bond novels. You Only Live Twice, the last novel he actually lived to see published, may be the subtlest but most dramatic departure from the usual forms of even his own thrillers.

Bond, still reeling from the death of his wife Tracy in the final pages of the previous novel, is a wreck—distracted, late to or absent from work, turning sloppy at the job he used to excel at. It is apparent to M and everyone around him at Bond is used up. But upon the counsel of one of the secret service’s psychologists, M decides that rather than fire Bond and release him, broken and helpless, to civilian life, he will snap him out of it by giving him a simple but impossible assignment: convincing Japanese agents to give them access to classified decrypts of Russian ciphers.

I think. Magic 44, the intelligence that the British want, functions almost as a MacGuffin and recedes in importance as the novel goes on as Bond grows closer to his Japanese handler, his original mission drifts toward other objectives, and Bond is drawn deeper and deeper into Japanese society.

Every Bond novel has an element of travelogue, but this one is almost half about what begins as a rather low-key travel story. Fleming devotes a great deal of time to explaining mid-century Japan and its fascinating blend of the modern and the traditional, and Bond and his handler, Tiger Tanaka, have many spirited conversations about culture, history, and life. Bond is both impressed and shocked by what he encounters in his travels, but it’s apparent that Fleming had a great respect for Japan and that seeps through in many ways. Fleming draws attention to the differences between Bond’s and Tanaka’s cultures, but Tanaka is often given the last word and it’s clear that Bond grows to respect him more and more.

This is especially interesting because of Fleming’s continued hostility toward the Germans and Swiss. Especially in the early books, Germans or people with German connections are either suspicious or overtly sinister, often still seeking revenge on Britain for their loss in the war, and exceeded in their villainy only by the Russians. The Swiss are portrayed pretty consistently as morally compromised by their neutrality, especially since they do not scruple over illicit money. Note that, in the novel directly before this one, Blofeld sets up a comfortably secure hideout in Switzerland and is only rooted out by a coalition of Bond and mobsters working outside the law.

In these ways Bond’s war experience looms large over the first several books but returns in a surprising form here. For all the German evil in other novels, Bond and Tanaka, a former spy and kamikaze trainee, find common ground in their memories of war and reach a quite poignant understanding of each other across the lines not only of culture but the Allies and Axis. That Bond had to go to Japan to find a former enemy he could respect is interesting indeed.

A lot of this is down to Bond’s state at the beginning of the novel—ageing, traumatized, purposeless. Japan, especially in the form of the primitive, pious islanders with whom Bond hides out before setting out to infiltrate his final target, offers Bond a vision of custom and community that he is decidedly lacking, and the return of Blofeld, living in disguise in a literal fortress on a volcanic island, is a surprise that galvanizes him. Blofeld, posing as an eccentric gaijin who collects deadly plants and animals in his garden, relishes the attraction of his castle to the suicidal and takes satanic delight in the petty destruction he wreaks. His elaborate, gleeful evil is pointless. And it’s this as much as his murder of Tracy Bond that gives Bond purpose.

So not only is there a lot of the travelogue in You Only Live Twice, there’s a lot of character-driven story—a unique combination in the Bond canon, I think. And of course it’s elegantly written.

This is the novel that has risen most in my estimation upon revisiting it. I barely remembered anything about it from my first reading a decade or more ago, so it was a pleasant surprise. However, when Fleming had to pivot from character-driven to plot-driven story in the final quarter or so, I felt the novel dropped off a bit. Bond’s infiltration of Blofeld’s fortress is excellently written, but it feels like a foregone conclusion that he will be captured and tortured and, when it happens, it feels perfunctory, like going through the motions.

Nevetheless, the climactic action is harrowing and Bond’s killing of Blofeld is rightly both disturbing and without the closure one might have expected. One trauma is ended by another, and the novel recovers its footing by returning to Bond’s character. Were it not for the famous ending of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, this would almost certainly be the most poignant ending in the series.

There’s more—I’ve barely even alluded to Kissy Suzuki, who, despite arriving late in the novel, is one of the most convincing and moving female characters in the series, and whose story adds a great deal of pathos to the end—but I’ve got on quite long enough.

This time through the novel I listened to the audiobook narrated by Martin Jarvis. Jarvis is a prolific and talented voice actor, but I thought his performance here veered a smidge too close to the cartoony. His Bond is also more ironical and sarcastic than I think is called for. But overall the performance was excellent and Jarvis was especially good at narrating action and differentiating voices during conversation—an important skill, as this is probably the talkiest Bond novel.

I’ve only got two more of these audiobooks to go—the final novel, The Man With the Golden Gun and the short story collection Octopussy—and I’m feeling poignant about completing another trip through the series.

Recommended, especially if you’ve traced Bond as a character through the preceding books.

This Bond novel is arguably the best in the Fleming series. Not only is it an excellent spy and revenge story, it's also a chilling account of the human condition in post-war Japan. The fact that Blofeld sets up base in a country that (at the time) had the highest suicide rate in the world is no simple super-villain plot device.

The Japanese have a strong sense of honor and shame and they lost the war at a terrible cost. As a result the suicide elements in the book are very emotional; all of this in concurrence with Bond's own emotions, having just lost his wife, and now given a chance for revenge.

You Only Live Twice was supposed to be Fleming's last Bond novel yet (unfortunately) was not. But that's another story. The film version (also supposed to be Sean Connery's last) bore little resemblance to the book, except for the Japanese setting and supporting character of Tiger Tanaka. Interesting that one of Fleming's best books became one of the worst Bond movies. But none of that changes the fact that this book is a gem among gems.

With the popularity of the Bond 007 series on screen, I forget that Ian Fleming's books were hugely successful in the days before they made it to Hollywood. I stumbled across a copy of You Only Live Twice, in which Bond is dissolute after the death of his wife in Casino Royale, and M puts him off on a mission to eliminate the evil Blofeld. The book is richer in narrative than the movie, and therefore not duplicative. Now, I've ordered a couple others in the series.

This was the last James Bond novel written fully by Ian Fleming. Any Bond novel published after 1964 was either finished by editors or written by other authors. It took the #8 spot on the 1964 bestseller list.

I did not know this when I began to read the book. I saw most of the movies over the years but the only other Bond book I have read is On Her Majesty's Secret Service, back in February. Everything about You Only Live Twice is so different from the other book that I wondered if I was reading the same author.

007 was in a slump after the tragedy that ended On Her Majesty's Secret Service. He had flubbed a few missions and was clearly off his game. M, Bond's boss, decided to shake up his spy and revitalize him by sending the man on an "impossible mission" to Japan. (Is that the origin of the name for the Mission Impossible series?)

Off James went to meet up with the head of the Japanese Secret Service, where he proceeded to languish as he learned Japanese culture. It was literally more than halfway through the book before he saw any action. The mission finally started at about 50 pages from the end. So different, though Bond did finally annihilate his old enemy, Ernst Stavro, in a thrilling and dangerous sequence.

Now that I have combed the internet for background and learned that Fleming died just a few months after the book was released, it makes more sense. The author was giving his summing up, complete with deep philosophical questions about life, love, and happiness. Or was he? The last chapter implies that Bond has a few more adventures. Perhaps he meant to provide a hand off to those franchise authors who would take over? Curious.

The end of Blofeld!

This James Bond novel drags more than I remember when I read it as a teen. It makes sense at the beginning, considering how the last entry in the series ended. Bond is a mess, drinking too much and shirking his duties. But then he gets sent on what is supposed to be a hopeless mission to keep him busy, and he just gets drunk and laid for a while. Boring. Takes a while to finally get to some action.

10/23/2023: Upon rereading, I think my prior review was a bit too hard on this novel. In the novel before this one, James Bond is subjected to a trauma that would destroy most people: Seeing the love of his life murdered in front of him on their wedding day. So he is a mess at the start of this novel, and it takes a while for things to get going as we expect from a James Bond novel. Eventually, you do get action, and it will satisfy most readers.

James Bond's twelfth adventure takes him to Japan, but this is not really a novel involving the usual gunplay & gambling. Fleming creates an excellent picture of a culture far removed from our own & we are introduced to some of his greatest characters. Tiger Tanaka, head of the Japanese Secret Service & Dikko Henderson are two of my favourites. Despite the story revolving considerably around death there is a surprising amount of humour for a Fleming novel. Having read the story quite a few times before I can also recommend two excellent audio versions, an abridged one read by Richard E Grant & an unabridged one read by Martin Jarvis.

This is last fully realized Bond novel from Fleming (he died while revising "The Man With The Golden Gun"). It is also an exercise in Far East exotica as Bond travels to Japan for a mission. Like "Dr. No," the story builds slowly with the Bad Guy (Blofeld, again) appearing towards the very end. Most of the book is taken up with; first, an extended sequence where Bond and the head of the Japanese Secret Service - the inevitably inscrutable Tiger Tanaka - travel around Japan arguing over the merits of Nihon v Old Blighty; and, second, a lengthy sequence where Bond hides out in a Japanese fishing village and falls in love with one of the locals, who just *happens* to be movie star gorgeous and speaks perfect English.

Along the way, Bond samples such delicacies as kobe beef, fugu, ninjas, and of course a couple geishas. There's also a lot of talk about Hari Kiri and suicide among the Japanese. This ties into the mission (remember that?) which has to do with taking out Blofeld who - in addition to killing Bond's wife in the previous novel - has also set up a sort of nature preserve for deadly plants and animals, which the supposedly suicide-prone Japanese have been drawn like flies to honey. Yes, this is a ridiculous master plan. Blofeld tries to explain his diabolical purpose, but fails to make any sense.

This is a book with a lot of exposition with the exciting mission stuff happening only in the last quarter of the book. Nonetheless, this is still an exceptional Bond book. Yes, Fleming overdoes the "fish out of water in Japan" routine, with Tiger Tanaka endlessly chiding Bond for failing some point of protocol. But, much of the exotica is well chosen. The book has more than the usual amount of Cold War and post-WW2 angst which heightens the story's verisimilitude. And Bond's love affair with the impoverished Kissy Suzuki is refreshingly real.

NOTE TO FANS OF THE MOVIE: the movie version took more than the usual liberties with the story. Sadly, there is no climactic attack on Blofeld's volcano headquarters by a Ninja Army in the novel.