Joy Division

Kojima always answered Joy Division when asked his favorite band and Closer when asked which album was most important. He listened to the band when life or work got him down, but also on sunny days—not to cheer up or relieve stress, but to enter their melancholy, reaffirm his place in the face of loneliness and death, and return to an inner, tranquil space he considered his bedrock.

Kojima encountered Joy Division after Ian Curtis’s death, probably around 1983, prompted by a line in the Japanese liner notes to the first Tears for Fears album. This timing coincided with the Japanese success of New Order’s “Blue Monday,” and he bought Japanese editions of Joy Division LPs and twelve-inch singles; paradoxically, he did not become genuinely interested in New Order until their album Low-Life in 1985.

Kojima described his college years as a dark period in which he could not let go of his dream of making films nor find his break, and had no one to turn to for advice or to talk to. He chose to converse through his work with two young people who had died by suicide, Ian Curtis and the writer Etsuko Takano, rather than with living people who did not understand him; he called Joy Division his silent confidant and said they helped him hang on to life and saved his life.

The premiere of Control turned the city, for Kojima, into a Joy Division festival. He bought the soundtrack and Paul Smith T-shirts, several photobooks, remastered reissues, compilations and rarities; thanks to contacts at Konami’s London branch he also secured two UK-exclusive editions. Seeing posters, shops and cinemas full of the lost band felt like a day he had never imagined, and he expressed the desire to visit Ian Curtis’s grave someday.