Kissy rescues and conceals the amnesiac Bond on Kuro

Kissy Suzuki’s rescue of James Bond becomes an act of concealment as well as survival: she brings him from the sea to Kuro Island, where he wakes without a name or a past and is given a new identity. The people of the island protect him from outside inquiries, while Kissy tries to preserve the life they can share. His body recovers; his memory does not, leaving rescue poised between care and the deliberate withholding of truth.

The Rescue and the Loss of Identity

When Kissy sees a black-winged figure in a kimono fall into the sea, she recognizes Bond and swims roughly two hundred yards from the foot of the wall to reach him. The impact has winded him, and pain from his head wound has nearly extinguished his will to live. He struggles to free himself from the kimono; when Kissy approaches, he mistakes her for Blofeld and tries to strike her. Her voice and name do not restore recognition. Bond remembers no one, and his remaining awareness is fixed on the face of an enemy and the urge to attack it.

Kissy tells him to follow her and offers to pull him when he tires, but he cannot swim purposefully. Instead, he circles weakly like a wounded animal. She stops him, speaks softly, and supports him beneath the arms, cradling his head against her as she swims backward with him. The rescue demands more than half a mile of swimming against currents, guided by moonlight and occasional glances over her shoulder. She finally hauls him onto the flat stones of her cove and collapses beside him.

When Bond wakes, he has been sick and sits staring blankly out to sea. He asks who Kissy is, how he arrived, and where he is; then, without recognizing her, remarks that she is pretty. He can offer only a fragment about a man’s face, whom he thinks was dead and bad. His questions make clear that the rescue has returned him to life without returning him to himself.

A New Life in Hiding

Kissy answers his confusion with an invented biography. She says her name is Kissy Suzuki, that Bond is her lover named Taro Todoroki, and that they live on the island and fish together. She attributes his injuries to a fall while climbing cliffs for seagull eggs, tells him he needs food and a doctor, and guides him toward the Suzuki house. Instead she takes him beyond it, through dwarf maples and camellia bushes, behind the Shinto shrine and into the Cave Behind the Kuro Island Shrine. There she tells him that it is his home and that she lives there with him. Bond accepts her guidance and falls asleep.

Kissy’s deception is purposeful. She gathers bedding, food, her father’s best kimono, and washing things for Bond, taking care not to provide reminders of his former life. Her parents know her as independent and accustomed to her own decisions; her father says only that the arrangement will be all right if the Shinto priest gives his blessing. Kissy’s determination is at once practical and intimate: she has recovered the man she loves, but the man in her care cannot remember loving her or choosing this island.

The priest recognizes the larger circumstances. He says that the devil’s offspring and his wife are dead, that Death Castle has been destroyed, and that these events fulfil what the Six Guardians foretold about the man from across the sea. Kissy tells him Bond is gravely wounded and asks to keep him, explaining that he remembers nothing and that she wants them to marry and make him a son of Kuro. The priest warns that Bond will recover and leave for the world he came from, and that inquiries may arrive from Fukuoka or Tokyo. Kissy proposes that the elders answer those inquiries with Shiran-kao: they will say they know nothing, and that Todoroki swam for the mainland and was never heard from again. She promises not to hinder Bond if he eventually wants to leave, but asks for time to care for him.

The priest agrees to do what he can. He summons the doctor and instructs Kissy to keep Bond hidden for many weeks; only when things are quiet may Bond return to her parents’ house and be seen. The doctor cleans the bullet cut across the swelling caused by Bond’s fall into the Oubliette trap, treats the head wound, and dresses the cut on his ribs. He expects Bond to live, but warns that recovering his memory could take months or years because the temporal lobe has been damaged. An X-ray in Fukuoka would be advisable, but the priest’s order to keep Bond on the island and secret rules out that course. The doctor instead gives Kissy detailed instructions for feeding and nursing him, and visits by different routes and at night.

The Island’s Secret and Bond’s Recovery

The concealment lasts through repeated visits from police from Fukuoka, followed by an official from Tokyo, Tiger Tanaka, and a large visitor claiming to be from Australia whom Kissy finds particularly difficult to shake off. Kuro’s people maintain their silence, and the island keeps Bond’s presence secret. Meanwhile, his body gradually mends. Kissy takes him on walks at night and swims with him in the cove, where they play with David. She tells him about the Ama and Kuro, but deftly parries his questions about the world beyond the island.

Winter brings a change in the island’s routines. The Ama remain ashore, mending nets and boats and working smallholdings on the mountainside. Bond returns to the house, helps with carpentry and other odd jobs, and learns Japanese from Kissy. His glazed expression fades, yet his eyes remain remote. Each night he is puzzled by dreams of white people, large cities, and half-remembered faces. Kissy dismisses these as meaningless nightmares, and Bond gradually accepts the stone-and-wood house and the sea’s unbroken horizon as the limits of his world.

That apparent contentment does not persuade the doctor that Bond’s memory is returning. Surprised by the lack of progress, he concludes that the amnesia is total. Because Bond’s physical health and satisfaction with his life seem complete, the doctor has no further reason to visit. The distinction is central to the episode: recovery of the injured body proceeds, while the past remains inaccessible, and the secret that protects Bond also keeps him separated from the people and places that might help him recover it.

The Unresolved Future

Kissy knows that her arrangement cannot be guaranteed indefinitely. She keeps Bond away from Kuro’s south coast and dreads the end of May, when fishing will resume and he may see the great black wall across the straits. That familiar sight could bring his memory flooding back. The island’s concealment therefore depends not only on the elders’ silence but also on controlling what Bond sees and learns; the landscape itself may undo the story Kissy has made for him.

The event ends with Bond alive and at home on Kuro, but not restored to his former identity. Kissy’s care gives him shelter, food, companionship, and a daily life, while her false account and the community’s secrecy postpone his access to his own history. Her promise to let him go if he wishes leaves that conflict unresolved: she wants to keep him, yet the man she is keeping cannot remember the life or attachments that would make his choice fully informed.