After returning to Japan following the freight-elevator incident,…

One year after March 11, Kojima remained distressed by the earthquake and radioactive contamination: he feared that Japan could disappear as a nation and that he could lose his sense of belonging as a Japanese person. That anxiety led him back to Ágota Kristóf’s trilogy to ask what it means to lose one’s homeland.

Kojima’s first memory associated with an elevator is not an actual ride but a black-and-white image: when he was in preschool his father made him watch Elevator to the Gallows on television. Because there were few high-rises then and he may not yet have ridden in an elevator, the film’s immorality and mystery lodged more strongly in him than any physical memory of the device.

Upon learning that Yuriko Hishimi would attend the premiere of a Mamoru Oshii film, Kojima wrote to Kenji Kamiyama pleading that he introduce him to her. Onstage at the premiere, Oshii confessed through a megaphone his own youthful love for Anne, and Kojima felt relieved, as if Oshii were speaking for him; although Kojima did not get to speak with Hishimi backstage, after forty years he saw his first love as a real woman, and at age forty-four he wrote the essay as the love letter he should have mailed forty years earlier.

Kojima began by identifying with the climber Joji Habu, who selects dangerous, untried routes and turns into reality what no one else has done. However, the cameraman Makoto Fukamachi’s monologue shook him: Kojima recognized that his older self was no longer the pioneering leader but the one who follows behind, returns alive, and goes back to the mountain again and again because it is all he can do.

Kojima said he had a particular fondness for true escape and survival stories and recalled rewatching The Great Escape and Papillon in theaters, as well as seeing 127 Hours. He came to Hyoryu because novelist Naoki Hyakuta had read Kojima’s essay on Papillon and recommended Hyoryu and Hagoku (Prison Break).