Bondo desu, Jēmuzu Bondo

Or 007 Was Here

 ジェームズ・ボンド

March 1, 2004

Nishinomiya, Japan

If you are a real 007 fan, dear reader, you can easily disregard Connery, Moore, Brosnan or the latest movie Bond, whoever he or she may be.  Forget for the moment all those bloated Hollywood travesties.  They had little to do with Ian Fleming and his immortal hero, the real James Bond.  He was here in Japan, in the early sixties, though you would not have recognized him.

Fleming at Oniyama Jigoku, Beppu, Kyushu

Nineteen sixty-four was a big year for Japan.   The Tokyo Olympics put Japan on the world stage again, this time as a friendly, progressive power, going places.   Massive construction projects raised dust-clouds in the metropolis.   In June, the Beatles arrived: Yeah, yeah, yeah!.   Japanese culture and technology were showcased at the New York World’s Fair.  The Hanshin Tigers (my team 38 years later) won the Central League Pennant for the second time in three years.  At the time, perhaps just as important in terms of world recognition, was the publication of Fleming’s You Only Live Twice, the twelfth and last complete Bond novel and the only one set in Japan.

Fleming with the first movie Bond.

“What the f*** am I doing here?”  It’s a question maybe every expatriate asks.  Easy enough to trace the chain events which put me here:  Quit the stateside job, look for another one, stumble upon an attractive opening, apply, interview, receive a nice offer, etc.  Well, maybe too easy.  The Law of Cause and Effect always applies, but usually the principal (ultimate, remote) cause lies farther back than we can explain or even recall.  

            Read this novel and you might argue its literary merit.  This reader (me) cannot because it has too much personal significance, the awareness of which came only recently, in quite a casual way.  Home for the winter holidays, I was relaxing in a hot tub with two male friends.  All three of us had spent time abroad and were speculating on why we had decided to go where we’d gone.   Without any conscious thought, it just came out: “Maybe it was that damned James Bond book I read when I was a kid.”  

             It’s true.  Rewind to 1965.  I read You Only Live Twice at the age of fourteen.  I’d started Fleming the previous summer, with Live and Let Die.  Boredom and prurient curiosity made me lift the paperback, dog-eared by both parents, from their bedstand.   I’d heard of 007 but had never been interested.  My mother caught me reading it, but her admonition, “Oh, dear, I think that might be a little old for you,” only provoked my interest. That Bond book was the first modern novel I’d ever read.

                                                                                                     

By the summer of ’65, I’d read several more: Casino Royale, Thunderball, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.   By the time I picked up YOL2, I was a buff.  I knew Bond, his appetites, vices, strengths and weaknesses.  The paperback’s cover was unusual, as indeed the novel proved to be.  Exotic, enigmatic—it appealed to something other than my intellect (such as it was).  It heated and stirred the adolescent stew of imagination, hormones and boredom.  The first sentence was a grabber:  “The geisha called “Trembling Leaf” on her knees besides James Bond, leant forward from the waist and kissed him chastely on the right cheek.”  I was hooked.  That was it, the first link in the chain that dragged me to Japan so many years later.

             Before graduating high school, I’d read all twelve original Bond novels.  Twice.  I saw all the movies, too, at least the Sean Connery ones.  By then I was enough of a Bond aficionado to separate the Connery-Bond, however entertaining, from the real Bond.  I’d always refer to my dog-eared paperbacks to get the “true” version.

In high school, college, and later, I took up with the heavyweights-- Joyce, Mann, Dostoievsky, Faulkner, et al., But none of those worthies inspired me to make a pilgrimage.  It was to Japan, almost forty years later.  For that long, the book, a “fairy tale for grown-ups” as Fleming admitted, had submerged and lived as myth in my subconscious.  Bond was right down there with Ulysses, Oedipus, Raskolnikov, Hans Castorp, and Huck Finn.

Fast forward to August, 2003.   Again home on vacation, I was browsing through Powell’s Books in Portland, one of the great bookstores in the world.   Was it just coincidence that I came upon a 1^st edition, 2^nd printing hardcover copy of You Only Live Twice?   The slim black volume, published in London by Jonathan Cape, Ltd. in April, 1964, bears along the spine the English title and the author’s name.  On the front cover, embossed in golden characters, is the Japanese, Ni do dake no inochi (or seimei).  Sadly the paper dust cover, a classic design by Richard Chopping, was not on it.

These days, interested readers will probably wind up with the new Penguin paperback edition, with a sexier cover.   I haven’t seen it yet in any Japanese bookstores, though of course it’s available from Internet book dealers.

        The story is implausible, sure, but incidental to ambience, theme and character.   We find Bond first in London, grieving the death of his wife (yes, wife) Tracey, murdered by Herr Blofeld.  Bond is listless, haunted, and burnt-out:

 

Richard Chopping cover art, missing from my 1st ed.

 “He felt like hell and knew that he also looked it.  For months, without telling anyone, he had tramped…looking for any kind of doctor who would make him feel better…And each man…asked him questions he had answered truthfully, and had told him there was basically nothing wrong with him.  Then he had paid his five guineas and gone off to John Bell and Croyden to have the new lot of prescriptions—for tranquilizers, sleeping pills, energizers—made up.” 

            This is not the bullet-proof super-agent from the movies.  His boss M. in fact was on the verge of sacking him.  But, after a sumptuous lunch and brandy at Blades with his old chum Sir James Maloney, a Nobel-winning neurologist who had previously examined Bond, M. relented.  He’d give 007 one more chance, an assignment that was (naturally) impossible from the start.   In Japan, the job would get even tougher, a little foray into Dr. Shatterhand’s Castle of Death on the northern Kyushu coast.

Bond traveled in fast circles, as did his creator.  By 1964, Fleming had become a world-renowned author.  The first two movies, Dr. No and From Russia with Love, had come out, further enhancing his stature.   He traveled in Asia and elsewhere, as a paid travel writer for the Sunday Times.   (His essays were published as Thrilling Cities, also 1964.)  

In 1962, Fleming had been in Japan and was accorded first-class treatment, chauffeured by Torao “Tiger” Saito and Australian Richard Hughes, who became Tiger Tanaka and Richard Lovelace “Dikko” Henderson in YOL2.  These three aging playboys roosted in fancy hotels, saw the sights, and caroused in geisha (and lower) establishments.  Stoked on sake and Suntory, they mowed a boozy swath through Japan, east to west.

Bond, like Fleming, was at home in Europe, America and the Caribbean, but not in Japan.  An additional kick to this expatriate was reading of Bond’s culture shock, (ameliorated somewhat by his knowledgeable guides, expense account, and alcohol.)   At times he displays fits of pique never exhibited by the movie-Bond:

“It had taken Bond nearly an hour to extract his single suitcase from the customs area, and he had emerged fuming into the central hall only to be jostled and pushed aside by an excited crowd of young Japanese bearing paper banners that said “International Laundry Convention.”  Bond was exhausted from his flight.  He let out one single four-letter expletive.”

Japanese food, (only the best for Bondo-san), provided an additional challenge:  

“Lacquer boxes of rice, raw quails’ eggs in sauce, and bowls of sliced seaweed were placed…they were each given a fine oval dish bearing a large lobster whose head and tail had been left as a dainty ornament to the sliced pink flesh in the centre.  Bond set to with his chopsticks. He was surprised to find that the flesh was raw.  He was even more surprised when the head of the lobster began moving off his dish and, with questing antennae and scrabbling feet, tottered off across the table.  “Good God, Tiger!” Bond said aghast.  “The damn thing’s alive!”…he handed his glass to the kneeling waitress for more sake to give him strength to try the seaweed.”

Bondo-san kept at it though, becoming childishly proud of his skill with o-hashi: “…he had reached Black Belt standard with these instruments—the ability to eat an underdone fried egg with them.”  Oh, well, if everything in Japan were as easy to master as chopsticks…

Like us “real” gaijin, he occasionally reverted to familiar Western fare.  Here’s a basic Bond meal: “Bond ordered a pint of Jack Daniels and a double portion of eggs Benedict to be brought up to his room.”  Hardly a training meal for his rendezvous at the Castle of Death, what?  He was staying at Miyako Hotel in Kyoto, by the way, part of a brief stay in the Kansai. Next day he sailed to Kyushu from Osaka on the Murasaki Maru.

The Bond whom M. sent to Japan was stripped of his familiar accessories: No Bentley-Rolls, no.25 Beretta, (no guns in Japan, sorry,) no briefcase packed with (then) high-tech gadgets.  No custom-made cigarettes from his London tobacconist.   (He had to smoke (Shinsei = “new life" or "rebirth" for Bond) cigarettes).  Not once in the novel does he quaff a vodka martini, shaken, stirred or otherwise.  For this caper, Bond was deprived even of his number and his “license to kill.” M. explained before his departure, “None of the gun-play you pride yourself on so much.  It’ll just be a question of your wits and nothing else.”  (Trivia question:  What was Bond’s official number in this novel?   (*See end.))

Later, his identity, his name, and his appearance are changed from British to Japanese.   Finally, he loses even his memory, who he is and why is where he is.  Again the old question:  Who am I and what the f*** am I doing here?  As a final piquant irony, especially for those accustomed to his priapic tendencies in the books and films, Bond becomes impotent!  (Something Fleming no doubt experienced as his health failed.) Bond is neither Bond nor not-Bond.

YOL2 is laden with death-imagery, no surprise given the premise, locale, and the physical condition of both Fleming and his hero.  Several years earlier the writer had suffered a serious heart attack.   By Fleming's own admission, he had been consuming a fifth of gin and three and a half packs of non-filtered cigarettes daily. 

                Add to this his fondness for butter-rich food.  Though warned by his doctors, he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, let go of his vices.   Awareness of imminent death inevitably came through in the book.  Both Fleming and Bond had become fey.  

The book’s title comes from a poem--of sorts.  During a dinner of ham omelets and sake in the ship’s first-class dining room, Tanaka is lecturing Bondo about the revered poet Basho, and recites several of his famous haiku (in English, from memory).  Egged on by Tiger, Bondo-san succumbs to the old gaijin temptation of composing his own original haiku.  Here’s what he comes up with:

You only live twice:

Once when you are born

            And once when you look death in the face.

Not bad, though, as Tiger points out, it exceeds the allowable number of syllables.

In August of ‘64, after attending the funeral of his mother in England, Fleming collapsed and died of massive heart failure.  He was fifty-six.

Well, Fleming didn’t live to see the Olympics.  How about Bond?  Did he survive The Hassle at the Castle?   An additional treat for buffs is his obituary near the end of the book, including a summary of his early life, education and war career.  Especially amusing is Fleming’s tongue-in-cheek evaluation of his own work and the 007 phenomenon:

“The inevitable publicity…made him, much against his will, something of a public figure, with the result that a series of popular books came to be written around him by a personal friend and former colleague…If the quality of these books, or their degree of veracity, had been any higher, the author would certainly have prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act.  It is a measure of the disdain in which these fictions are held at the Ministry that action has not yet…been taken against the author and publisher of these high-flown and romanticized caricatures…”

To answer the question above, earlier in 1964 Fleming had begun another novel, The Man with the Golden Gun, unlucky number thirteen, later finished by another writer.

Rereading You Only Live Twice now, after forty years, is to encounter again the living mythos in my own pubescent subconscious.   Since it carries so much personal meaning, it’s exempt from objectivity.  But even the critical reader will agree that Fleming, a trained traveling journalist, wrote with exceptional skill.  The little fishing island of Kuro is one the most beautiful locales I’ve ever seen in fiction; it remains an ideal, the Japan I’ll never see.  Kissy Suzuki, (never mind Ms. Wakabayashi in the movie, though she was fetching), with whom James “bonded” on Kuro, was the loveliest and most graceful of all his consorts.  She’d be about 65 now; I hope she’s still diving for awabi. 

*Trivia Answer:  7777.

REFS:

https://literary007.com/2016/06/16/bondo-san-in-japan-interview-with-graham-m-thomas/