Kissy Suzuki

Background

In the novel she is a pearl diver and former Hollywood actress, distantly related to a police superintendent working with Tiger Tanaka, head of the Japanese Secret Service, who asks her to assist Bond. He stays with her family on an island near the castle where Blofeld keeps his suicide garden, enters the castle alone, kills Blofeld to avenge his wife Tracy, and destroys it. Left with amnesia and believed dead by his superiors, Bond lives with Kissy for several months as a fisherman named Tado Todoroki; when he leaves for the Soviet Union seeking his identity she does not follow, pregnant with his child. Raymond Benson's 1996 story "Blast From the Past" reveals the son, James Suzuki, raised in the United States after Kissy's death from ovarian cancer and murdered in New York by Irma Bunt in revenge for Blofeld.

In the film she is one of Tanaka's ninja agents, introduced after Aki's death at a mock wedding to Bond, who is posing as a Japanese fisherman; the film never speaks her name and the credits omit her surname. When she and Bond find Blofeld's volcano base she swims to alert Tanaka, diving under for long enough to convince a pursuing SPECTRE helicopter that she has drowned, then joins the raid that foils Blofeld and averts World War III. Akiko Wakabayashi was first cast in the part but swapped with Hama, who struggled with English; Diane Cilento doubled Hama in the swimming sequence and Nikki van der Zyl dubbed her lines.

Kissy Suzuki dolls from 1967 are now valuable to collectors, and Hama's 1967 Playboy pictorial made her the magazine's first Asian woman and stirred controversy in Japan. CBS ranked her the 23rd-best Bond girl and LIFE placed her 18th.