You Only Live Twice

You Only Live Twice is a novel by the English writer Ian Fleming, published in 1964 and the eleventh in his James Bond series.

The book opens with Bond in poor shape: after the killing of his wife he is drinking, gambling and failing at work, and his superior sends him to Japan partly to keep him occupied. There he is introduced to Tiger Tanaka of the Japanese secret service, who wants a favour his own organisation cannot carry out openly and offers information in exchange. The target is a foreigner who has built a castle and a garden where people come to die, and Bond works out that the man is the head of the criminal organisation responsible for his wife's death. Fleming had travelled in Japan, and the novel spends a great deal of its length on the country, its customs and its language rather than on its plot.

It was the last of the Bond novels to be published during the author's lifetime, and the series was continued by other writers afterwards.