When asked where the sun rises, Kojima would sing the theme song of…

As head of a household, as a father, and as a person, Kojima aspired to be Akatsuka’s alter ego—Bakabon’s dad. He had already passed Bakabon’s dad’s age of forty-one and still felt unworthy of inheriting the name of “fool”: he wanted to reach a bare self in which genius and fool would no longer be opposites and where he could answer the world’s contradictions with the character’s “It’ll be fine.”

Kojima said he wants to make music because, deep down, he wants to do everything himself, but he cannot get anything to come out. He sometimes thinks he has composed a melody when singing to himself and later discovers, to his disappointment, that it was a song he had already heard.

“You can't ultimately win against that void of nothingness that is space—victory's just not in the cards. And yet still he fights. I think this is actually a pattern that re-appears in all my games, the concept of a battle that's a lost cause. (laughs)”

“I want people to end up liking things they didn't like when they first encountered it, because that's where you really end up loving something.”

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.