" Ian Fleming showed his authorial skills when he chose You Only Live Twice over his original title, What I Learned On My Trip to Japan. Easily the first two-thirds of this novel consists of James Bond being schooled (almost literally) in the unique details of Japanese culture. That was all probably quite interesting 50 years ago when the average reader of popular British spy thrillers was unfamiliar with ninja, Kobe beef, fugu, and all the other Nipponese oddities that have now become pop culture staples. In 2013, it just makes you wish 007 would hurry up and chop somebody in the throat. Fleming's plot and characters are little more than elbow macaroni hot-glued to his social studies project, and even the most forgiving teacher would've told him to take a Sharpie to fill in the flimsy lines of the Bond-out-for-vengeance theme. Right near the very end, though, Fleming hands us one of his distinctive bits of ghoulish weirdness: a secret garden of suicide, haunted at night by the shadowy dishonored, looking to secretly off themselves by one of hundreds of means laid out for them. The deaths, playing out with a quiet kabuki pantomime, give this novel its only hint of life. "
— Seth, 2/7/2014