There are a lot of authors overseas who are like former Special…

“First was the release of the movie Rising Sun and the outburst of "japan bashing" that it caused, and second was the public debate over organ transplantation and problems associated with people who had suffered brain death injuries.”

“I actually received a message from him on Twitter. […] I can't believe he wrote something this good his first time around.”

Kojima’s aspiration to become an astronaut turned him into an obsessive science enthusiast: he spent his meager allowance on Newton and the Japanese edition of Omni, watched Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and live broadcasts of space missions—which he prioritized even above his favorite movies—and studied biology, chemistry, and geology to prepare. He said he was hopeless at math and that those magazines and TV shows excited him more than Playboy or the late-night program 11PM.

Kojima abandoned the idea of becoming a professional astronaut almost upon entering senior high: Japan’s space agency had no astronauts, becoming a cosmonaut on the other side of the Iron Curtain seemed impossible, and NASA required U.S. citizenship which he was not going to change. He later judged those to be simplistic excuses to force himself to grow up; he did not abandon the desire to travel to space and, as a college student, carried Takashi Tachibana’s Return from Space in his pocket.

When journalist Toyohiro Akiyama traveled to space in 1990 with funding from TBS and Soviet technology, Kojima realized a civilian route existed and reacted with frustration and jealousy for not having imagined it. This made him understand that he did not simply want to reach space but to train and go as an astronaut; for that reason he did not feel the same envy when game designer Richard Garriott paid about $30 million to travel to the International Space Station in 2008.