Inspirations The novel contains a fictional obituary of Bond, supposedly published in
The Times, which provided the first details from Fleming of Bond's early life. Many of the traits were Fleming's own. This included Bond's expulsion from
Eton College, which was akin to Fleming's withdrawal from the college by his mother, according to the journalist
Ben Macintyre. As with a number of the previous Bond stories,
You Only Live Twice used names of individuals and places that were from Fleming's past. Bond's mother, Monique Delacroix, was named after two women in Fleming's life: Monique Panchaud de Bottens, a Swiss girl from
Vich in the canton of
Vaud, to whom Fleming was engaged in the early 1930s, with Delacroix taken from Fleming's own mother, whose maiden name was Ste Croix Rose. Fleming named Bond's aunt "Charmian Bond": Charmian was the forename of Fleming's cousin who married his brother Richard. Charmian's sister was called "Pet", which, when combined with a play on words from Monique Panchaud de Bottens, gives Pett Bottom, where Charmian lives. Pett Bottom is also the name of
a real place which amused Fleming when he stopped for lunch after a round of golf at
Royal St George's Golf Club, Sandwich. In the summer of 1963, shortly after completing the book, Fleming went to
Montreux to visit the writer
Georges Simenon; he tried to see Monique to reveal her part in his new book, but she refused to meet him. Blofeld's name comes from Tom Blofeld, a Norfolk farmer and a fellow member of Fleming's
gentlemen's club Boodle's, who was a contemporary of Fleming's at Eton. For Blofeld's
pseudonym in the novel, Dr. Guntram Shatterhand, Fleming uses the name of an old café he had seen in Hamburg in 1959, "Old Shatterhand". The café was named after
a fictional character from a series of
Western stories by the German writer
Karl May. In his first draft, Fleming named the character Julius Shatterhand, but subsequently crossed it out in favour of Guntram. The characterisation of him dressed as a samurai was taken from the sketch Fleming had come up with thirty-five years earlier for a character called Graf Schlick. Much of the background material for the novel—particularly the description of the country and Japanese culture—Fleming obtained during his two visits to Japan. So much of the book is taken up with the description that the literary analyst LeRoy L. Panek considers the work to be a "semi-exotic travelogue". Fleming's two companions on his trip, Richard Hughes and Tiger Saito, became Dikko Henderson and Tiger Tanaka in the book. Fleming described Saito as "a chunky, reserved man with considerable stores of quiet humour and intelligence, and with a subdued but rather tense personality. He looked like a fighter—one of those war-lords of the Japanese films". When planning the 1959 trip, Fleming told Hughes: There would be no politicians, museums, temples, Imperial palaces, or Noh plays, let alone tea ceremonies. I wanted, I said, to see Mr
Somerset Maugham, who had just arrived and was receiving a triumphal welcome; visit the supreme judo academy; see a sumo wrestling match; explore the
Ginza; have the most luxurious Japanese bath; spend an evening with geishas; consult the top Japanese soothsayer; and take a day trip into the country. I also said that I wanted to eat large quantities of raw fish, for which I have a weakness, and ascertain whether sake was truly alcoholic or not. They managed to undertake all the events, except the
sumo match. On a trip to a
geisha house, Fleming's attendant geisha, Masami, served as the inspiration for Trembling Leaf, a geisha in the novel. As Fleming noted when he visited a geisha house in
Thrilling Cities, "Most foreigners do not have a correct understanding of the geisha. They are not prostitutes".
Characters The central character in the novel is James Bond. He begins
You Only Live Twice in a disturbed state, described by M as "going to pieces", following the murder of his wife Tracy eight months previously. He has visited doctors,
hypnotists and therapists and told them "I feel like hell. I sleep badly. I eat practically nothing. I drink too much and my work has gone to blazes. I'm shot to pieces. Make me better." The historian
Jeremy Black points out that it was a very different Bond to the character who lost
Vesper Lynd at the end of
Casino Royale. Given a final chance by M to redeem himself with a difficult mission, Bond's character changes under the ministrations of Dikko Henderson, Tiger Tanaka and Kissy Suzuki. The result, according to
Raymond Benson—the author of the continuation Bond novels—is a Bond with a sense of humour and a purpose in life. The book's penultimate chapter contains Bond's obituary, purportedly written by M for
The Times. Fleming uses this to provide previously unrevealed biographical details of Bond's early life, including his parents' names and nationalities and Bond's education. The novelist and critic
Kingsley Amis, in his examination of Fleming's stories, finds Bond a
Byronic hero, seen as "lonely, melancholy, of fine natural physique which has become in some way ravaged, of similarly fine but ravaged countenance, dark and brooding in expression, of a cold or cynical veneer, above all enigmatic, in possession of a sinister secret". By the close of
You Only Live Twice, according to Amis, Bond has been transformed and has "acquired the most important single item in the Byronic hero's make-up, a secret sorrow over a woman, aggravated, as it should be, by self-reproach". armour, of the type worn by Blofeld Blofeld makes his third appearance in the Bond series in
You Only Live Twice and Benson notes that on this occasion he is mad and
egocentric in his behaviour; Tanaka refers to him as "no less than a fiend in human form", and the cultural critic
Umberto Eco considers the character to have "a murderous mania". The
Anglicist Christoph Lindner notes that Fleming, through Bond's dialogue, parallels Blofeld with
Caligula,
Nero and
Hitler. Lindner continues that the crimes perpetrated are not against individuals
per se, but entire nations, continents or "the entire human race itself". The literary analyst LeRoy L. Panek considers the character to be a declining force in comparison to his appearance in
Thunderball, and "is a paper figure ... in spite of the megalomaniac speeches". According to Benson, Kissy Suzuki is "a most appealing heroine" who falls in love with Bond. Apart from being the mother of Bond's unborn child at the end of the book, Suzuki also acts as a "cultural translator" for Bond, helping explain the local traditions and customs;
Quarrel had the same function in
Dr. No and
Live and Let Die. The cultural historians Janet Woollacott and
Tony Bennett consider her to be "the ideal Bond girl – natural, unaffected, totally lacking in deference, independent and self-reliant, yet also caring, loving, solicitous for Bond's well-being and willing to cater to his every need without making any demands in return". Eco identifies Tiger Tanaka as one of Fleming's characters with morals closer to those of traditional villains, but who act on the side of good in support of Bond; others of this type have included Darko Kerim (
From Russia, with Love), Marc-Ange Draco (''On Her Majesty's Secret Service'') and Enrico Colombo ("
Risico"). Similarly, Panek considers that Dikko Henderson "serves as an inspiration for Bond" because of what he sees as the character's "robust enjoyment of life—enjoyment of food, drink and women". The
Anglicist Robert Druce finds similarities in characters between Henderson and those of Draco and Darko, and observes that the nickname "Dikko" is a close echo of their names. ==Style==