You Only Live Twice: Domo Origato!

You Only Live Twice by Ian Fleming

Written during the winter of 1963, at Ian Fleming’s Goldeneye retreat in Oracabessa, on the north shore of Jamaica, You Only Live Twice was the author’s 12th James Bond novel, not counting the short story collection For Your Eyes Only (1960). Ultimately released in March ’64, just five months before the author’s untimely demise, it was the last Bond novel to be completed. (The posthumous 007 novel The Man With the Golden Gun, released in April ‘65, is an essentially unfinished first draft, lacking the rich detail that Fleming usually spent months adding after he got his story down on paper.) The concluding book in what has become known as THE BLOFELD TRILOGY (started in 1961’s Thunderball, in which Bond and archvillain Ernst Stavro Blofeld never meet, and picked up in 1963’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service), it seems to have divided fans and critics alike, primarily due to the travelogue nature of the novel’s initial 2/3, and the fact that the main “action” is largely confined to the final 40 pages. Many fans, however – including this reader – find it to be one of the best of the bunch; a beautifully written book, more symbolic and nightmarish than the others, with its central theme of rebirth (Bond is essentially a new man by the book’s end) a compelling one.

The novel picks up a short eight months after the tragic finale of OHMSS, in which 007’s bride of a single day, Tracy, is killed by Blofeld and his mate, the loathsome Irma Bunt. Now a broken man, in lousy health and having bungled several missions, Bond is given one last chance to make good by his chief, M. His “impossible” assignment, which it is hoped will shake him out of his malaise, is to convince Tiger Tanaka, the head of the Japanese Secret Service, to share with Britain their decoding machine only known as Magic 44. Bond travels to the Orient, gets to know Tiger for a month, and is given an assignment in exchange for the device: travel to Fukuoka, on the southern island of Kyushu, and slay Dr. Guntram Shatterhand, a botanist whose 500-acre garden, stocked with poisonous flora and fauna, has become a mecca for the suicidal. After preparing for his mission on the tiny island of Kuro, and living with Ama diving girl Kissy Suzuki, Bond infiltrates Shatterhand’s compound, only to learn that the botanist, in actuality, is … well, I don’t want to spoil anything, as this great novel approaches its 61st anniversary, but I DID say that this was Part 3 of THE BLOFELD TRILOGY, right?

You Only Live Twice, of course, was the first Bond novel to be completely recast when it was released as a film in 1967. Rather than dealing with Shatterhand’s suicide garden, the film has as its central concern S.P.E.C.T.R.E.’s bid to begin WW3 by hijacking manned space satellites; indeed, the only commonalities between the book and the film are the Tiger, (Australian agent) Henderson and Kissy characters (and they are completely changed and different in the film), as well as the subway office of Tanaka, the bathhouse scene in which 007’s looks are altered, the ninja training school, the inclusion of piranhas and a pivoting trap floor … but everything is in a wholly different context. Don’t get me wrong … I happen to love the film, and find it one of the most exciting and visually spectacular of the entire Bond series (a series that currently extends to 25 official films, as I write this), flubs and all, but always wonder how great it might have been if the producers had cleaved a lot more closely to Fleming’s original conception. Bond’s nighttime investigation of Shatterhand’s compound is a truly nightmarish, borderline surreal set piece, and the suicide deaths that he witnesses are surely not for the squeamish; indeed, offhand, I cannot think of a more grisly sequence in all of Bondom, with the possible exceptions of the genital bashing that 007 undergoes in the initial novel, 1953’s Casino Royale, and perhaps the chapter entitled “The Long Scream” in 1958’s Dr. No. And speaking of that earlier torture: When Bond here learns of the sumo wrestlers’ trick of tucking their genitals “up the inguinal canal” for protection, and Tiger declares “these organs … are most susceptible to torture for the extraction of information,” the reader cannot help but recall that first 007 outing. “Don’t I know it,” Bond replies, and understandably so! Another line that made this old Bond fan (this is my third reading of YOLT, I might add here, in a 50-year period) smile is when Kissy reveals that her pet cormorant’s name is David, named after David Niven, the only man who was decent to her in Hollywood. Niven, of course, was a friend of Fleming’s, and strangely enough, would go on to play Bond himself, in the 1967 spoof Casino Royale. But all joking aside, YOLT is a fairly serious book, a sort of crucible for Bond that sees him emerging wholly changed. The travelogue sections are fascinating, the characters likeable (Henderson’s role is MUCH larger than in the film), the “Bond girl” an appealing one, and the final confrontation between Bond and his archnemesis as exciting as can be (“Die, Blofeld! Die!”). And who could ever forget the scene in which Bond is forced to sit atop an active volcanic mud geyser, as the clock ticks toward its eruption, or the three pages of details that Fleming provides dealing with Shatterhand’s toxic flora, or the revealing obit that M writes in Bond’s memory, or the book’s wonderful final chapter, written in a style unlike anything else in Bondom, that finds the amnesiac 007 living with Kissy and desperately trying to recover his memory? The novel’s last two pages aptly set up the action in the final, unfinished Bond novel, and I cannot imagine any reader not needing to know more. Abundantly showcasing what has become known as “the Fleming sweep” (the author’s knack of sweeping the reader along and engendering a suspension of disbelief by the use of copious and convincing detail), the novel truly is one of the best of the Bonds. To the author, wherever he might be, goes this old fan’s heartiest “domo origato“!