Getting pretty close to the end of my "read/reread Ian Fleming's Bond books" project. Note: I read the recently "censored" version, that (I assume) removed the racial stereotyping, probably about the Japanese, in the original.
I'll try to keep things spoiler-free: As the book opens, Bond's become a bumbling incompetent, thanks to trauma experienced at the end of the previous volume, On Her Majesty's Secret Service. His boss, M, decides to give him One Last Chance, sending him on a mission to Japan. The odds of success are slim: it involves persuading his Japanese counterpart, Tiger Tanaka, to provide Britain access to a device that will decode Soviet encrypted traffic. In turn, Tanaka makes his own deal with Bond: there's a death-dealing madman on a remote island fortress that needs to be eliminated. Do that, Bondo-san, and the magic decoder ring is yours! But this mission seems even more impossible than the original task.
The book takes a real long time getting to the action. But the climax is pretty slam-bang, marred only by the villain's lengthy monologuing to Bond. Instead of just shooting him in the head. (I believe this was ably satirized in Mike Myers' Austin Powers movies.) And the ending is kind of a setup for the next book.
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