You Only Live Twice (novel) the previous novel, "On Her Majesty's Secret Service". James Bond is drinking and gambling heavily and making mistakes on his assignments when, as a last resort, he is sent to Japan on a semi-diplomatic mission. Whilst there he is challenged by the Head of the Japanese Secret Service to kill Dr. Guntram Shatterhand. Bond realises that Shatterhand is Ernst Stavro Blofeld and sets out on a revenge mission to kill him and his wife, Irma Bunt. The novel deals on a personal level with the change in Bond from a depressed man in mourning, to a man of action bent
You Only Live Twice (novel) Muggeridge, writing in "Esquire" magazine disagreed, writing that ""You Only Live Twice" has a decidedly perfunctory air. Bond can only manage to sleep with his Japanese girl with the aid of colour pornography. His drinking sessions seem somehow desperate, and the horrors are too absurd to horrify ... it's all rather a muddle and scarcely in the tradition of Secret Service fiction. Perhaps the earlier novels are better. If so, I shall never know, having no intention of reading them." Maurice Richardson, in "The Observer", thought "You Only Live Twice" "though far from the best Bond, is really almost as