The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [297]
You Only Live Twice is darker than any of the Bond stories which preceded it. For a start, we learn that, before the story opens, the relentlessly promiscuous hero had finally got married; only to see his wife murdered the day after their wedding, by the super-villain who had already emerged in two earlier stories as Bond's greatest shadowy antagonist of all. Blofeld, head of the sinister terrorist organisation SPECTRE, is like a supreme enemy to all mankind. After his wife's death, Bond had gone to pieces: drunk, unreliable, his health failing. But now he is summoned by `M, head of the secret service, to a last great adventure.
On the far side of the world, in Japan, a mysterious figure has appeared, calling himself `Dr Shatterhand. He lives in a huge, remote, impregnable castle, and has surrounded himself with a `Garden of Death, full of volcanic pools and every kind of poisonous and deadly plant, snake, insect and fish. Bond sets out for Japan, where he goes through a long period of briefing and preparation from his old friend Tiger Tanaka, head of the Japanese secret service. He learns that Shatterhand is `a collector of death', and that people are being attracted from all over the world to commit suicide in his gardens. He is described as `an eccentric of the most devilish nature ... a monster ... a fiend in human form ... either a great madman or a great criminal'.
Bond then sees a photograph of this shadowy monster and at once recognises him as his old enemy Blofeld, re-emerged in new guise (as we are told when Sauron reappears at the beginning of The Lord of the Rings, `always after a defeat the Shadow takes another shape and grows again'). Bond travels across Japan towards the distant `dark' fortress, its owner being built up all the time as someone who operates `on the scale of a Caligula, of a Nero, of a Hitler, of any other great enemy of mankind'. Bond sees himself as `David spurred on to kill his Goliath', as `St George approaching the dragon'.
So far, the story is as complete an example of the Overcoming the Monster plot as Fleming ever wrote. But at this point a strange new element intrudes, which will eventually return to take over the final stages of the story. For a last period of preparation for his crowning ordeal, Bond is sent to a primitive Japanese fishing village, to be taken under the tutelage of two figures: a spiritually wise Shinto priest and a beautiful young girl, Kissy Suzuki, once improbably a Hollywood actress but who has now come back to her remote native village to live as a simple fisher-girl. Suddenly looming up in the middle of a James Bond story we see those great archetypal figures, the Wise Old Man and the Anima; enough in itself to warn us that something unusual is afoot. Bond lives austerely in the village, almost like a novice monk, going on diving expeditions with the girl to bring up valuable shells from the seabed. At last she leads him to a local shrine, to ask six ancient stone figures, the Guardians, for their blessing. The girl waves goodbye, and Bond sets off on the last stage of his journey, emerging from the sea to climb into the `Castle of Death.
Hiding in the suicide garden, he witnesses the horrific deaths of several other visitors, being eaten alive by piranha fish or thrown by `Black Guards' into bubbling volcanic pools. He enters the castle where, inevitably, he is captured and brought before the Monster himself for the ritual confrontation. Blofeld first makes sport with his victim,