Agatha Christie

After Publish or Perish, Kojima began slipping away alone to the bookstore opposite the tutoring school and felt that spending time among the books meant he had entered the adult world. He awaited each monthly Columbo novelization and went to the bookstore weekly even when no new book had come out, to the point of wondering whether he was really attending the tutoring school or the shop. There he discovered Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen, which opened the way to mysteries, science fiction, adventure, and his future profession.

Kojima said that as a child he did not read and that he rejected reading without having tried it. In fifth grade he picked up Murder on the Orient Express because there was a film adaptation and he only wanted to see what the book was like; the novel struck him, sparked his curiosity, and led him to read almost all the Agatha Christie he could find before reaching middle school.

In 2010, a display in a bookstore marking the 120th anniversary of Agatha Christie’s birth re-hooked Kojima and led him to reread her major novels to find out what had fascinated him as a child.

If he had to preserve a single Agatha Christie novel, Kojima would choose And Then There Were None. He admired that a locked-room mystery in which everyone dies could work and that its premise, its misdirections and its final twist still surprised contemporary readers.

Kojima compared Christie’s novels to quiz shows and video games: brisk reads of precise length and density that focus on dilemma and deceit rather than leaving a depressive social or emotional burden. He argued that, as with action or puzzle games, readers learn her patterns with practice and engage in an intellectual contest with the author, though Christie will defeat them again if they become complacent.

Kojima ended his recommendation of And Then There Were None with a joke: he claimed there were eleven victims, not ten, because after “there were none” Christie killed another person — the reader — with her charm. He named himself as that victim and concluded that the Kojima who hated books had thus disappeared.