“My dear Tiger, you’ve thought of everything. But I’d much rather have just one little gun.”
At the end of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, James Bond’s new bride was brutally murdered by his arch nemesis, Ernst Stavro Blofeld. As You Only Live Twice begins, Bond is reeling with grief over his loss (never mind that he had slept around just prior to his marriage and was likely headed for a breakup in the near future anyway). His job performance has steadily declined and his spirits have diminished. He drinks heavily and gambles erratically, finding no zest in life. M, his no-nonsense boss, settles on a last resort for Bond on the recommendation of the agency’s nerve specialist. He decides to send his languishing agent on an impossible mission—the arduous operation will either force Bond back into shape or prove once and for all that he is no longer fit for service.
His mission has a very simple aim: convince the head of Japan’s secret intelligence service, a man named Tiger Tanaka, to hand over the contents of radio transmissions intercepted from the Soviet Union. To this end, Bond is reassigned to the diplomatic branch and left in the care of an Australian intelligence officer, Dikko Henderson, who introduces him to the Japanese way of life before handing him off to Tiger. In the course of their discussions, as Bond learns about the act of seppuku and how to properly wrap a kimono, eats live lobsters and mimes a prayer at a shrine, the agents realize that Bond’s bargaining chip—a bit of British intelligence—is already known by Tiger. And so Bond finds himself taking on a mission much more dangerous than a tricky discussion. In exchange for the Soviet communications, Bond is commissioned to infiltrate the compound of Dr. Guntram Shatterhand, an eccentric European who rebuilt an ancient castle on the island of Kyushu and surrounded it with all manner of exotic and lethal plants and animals. The man wears samurai armor to protect himself, but an alarming number of depressed Japanese youngsters have found the strange garden an ideal place to end their lives; an embarrassing problem for the Japanese authorities.
Oh, right—upon seeing a picture of “The Death Collector” (as Tiger calls him), Bond realizes that Dr. Shatterhand is none other than his good old buddy Blofeld. Which means this mission is personal; a chance at revenge for dear Tracy’s murder. Posing as a mute Japanese coal miner—yes indeed, by darkening his skin with walnut dye and trimming his hair, “Bondo-san” is able to pass as Japanese—and aided by a former film star named Kissy Suzuki, Bond infiltrates Blofeld’s castle, escapes an execution attempt, duels with his rival, and blows up his castle; suffering a head injury in the process that renders him amnesiac.
The final novel of the “Blofeld Trilogy,” the first released after Bond made his silver screen debut in Dr. No, and the last one released during Fleming’s lifetime, You Only Live Twice finds the author grasping for new ideas and failing to find any. It’s mildly interesting to find Bond retreat into his brooding melancholia, to witness a man so broken he must use “pillow-books” during his sexual flings, and to experience the surface level curiosities of Japanese culture via Fleming’s travalog journals. However, it’s clear that at this stage the author’s spirit is not in his work. Consider how he orchestrates a game of rock-paper-scissors in a manner that reads like self-parody. Or how his passion for sightseeing, massage girls, and sake flasks overshadows the convoluted spy thriller that only ramps up well past the halfway mark. Or how Blofeld’s character is wildly inconsistent from book to book, and even chapter to chapter.
In the end, it’s the utterly moronic, nonsensical, and implausible plot—as silly as it is needlessly complex—that undermines whatever mojo Fleming had worked up with his Japanese tourism, which wasn’t much to begin with.