Kissy Suzuki is a fictional character in Ian Fleming’s 1964 James Bond novel, You Only Live Twice. In the 1967 film adaptation, she is played by Mie Hama. The treatment of Kissy varies greatly between the novel and the film. In the film, she is never identified by her name, no family name appears in the closing credits; and the film ends in the usual Bond-style happy ending. In the book, Bond sustains amnesia in the aftermath of his attack with Ernst Stavro Blofeld and is believed dead by his superiors; in reality, he comes to believe he is a fisherman and lives with Kissy for several months. When Bond decides to leave for Russia, believing the answers to his identity are there, Kissy does not follow; unknown to Bond, she is pregnant with his child.

Kissy Suzuki and James Bond in ‘You Only Live Twice’.

Biography: In the book, Kissy Suzuki is an Ama diver (and former Hollywood actor), distantly related to an agent of Tiger Tanaka, head of the Japanese secret service, and is therefore asked to assist Bond. In the film, Kissy is an agent working for Tanaka.

Bond marries Kissy in an arranged ceremony in order to better establish his cover and they then investigate a nearby island where the evil organisation SPECTRE and its leader, Blofeld, plot to start World War III; in the novel, the target is a castle on a peninsula where Blofeld maintains a “suicide garden” where people come to die (and are killed by the “gardeners” if they change their mind), and Bond is seeking revenge for the murder of his wife at the conclusion of the previous novel, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Bond enters the castle alone and succeeds in killing Blofeld and Irma Bunt and then destroying the castle.

In the film version, Bond and Kissy eventually find Blofeld’s lair, hidden inside a volcano; with Tanaka’s help the trio overthrow Blofeld’s lair, thereby averting war.

Kissy Suzuki does not appear again in the Bond canon, and Bond’s child does not appear until Blast From the Past, a short story published in 1996 by Raymond Benson as a direct sequel to You Only Live Twice. By the time of this story, Kissy is deceased (having died from ovarian cancer a few years before the story’s timeline) and Bond is contacted by his Anglo-Asian son named James Suzuki (of whom he has evidently learned in the interim.)

Although Bond knows of the birth of his son early on; he has not apparently paid much attention to his duties as a father; save for paying for the tuition and expenses when his son was a college undergraduate. In this novelisation, it also somewhat retcons the novel by saying that Bond failed to murder Irma Bunt. She survived (barely) and was hospitalszed for an extended period of time and having to have artificial body parts implanted.

The short story does however, confirm Bond’s success in murdering Blofeld with the statement “You left poor Ernst in a heap on the floor.” The story also states that James Suzuki graduated college and found work as a banker. The Secret Service seemed to know more about James Suzuki than Bond himself, as children of Secret Service personnel had to fill out annual forms. Bond also experiences regrets over the loss of “the son he never knew”, implying the fact he was not a good father is weighing heavily on him.

Since Fleming did not write this sequel, and had been dead more than 30 years when it was published, it represents another person’s use of Fleming’s characters.

Despite Bond’s womanizing, Kissy Suzuki (at least the literary version) remains the only character known to the reader who bears a child by him. She is also one of the only known Bond girls (also in literary) to have died as a result of a non-violent, natural death.

See also:

• Bond girls