[whenever] I travel and stay at a hotel I put the TV on as soon as I…

“As soon as I got home, I turned on every light in every room and switched on the TV at high volume—not to watch anything, but to distract from the loneliness.”

“It became a habit which I still have. ... I'd think up stories because I had so much time alone.”

Kojima said loneliness had accompanied him since childhood and reached its worst during his adolescence, even when he was surrounded by family, friends, school and activities. He described how a switch could flip in the middle of having fun, making the feeling stronger the more numerous the crowd was; at the end of the year, when the city was liveliest, he spent sleepless nights fearing that the loneliness might one day kill him.

As a child of working parents, Kojima wore his house key on a cord around his neck like a dog tag; it annoyed him when he did somersaults on the horizontal bar, but he wore it at all times. No one ever picked him up from school—even in rain, during a typhoon, or when he was sick—so he would unlock and enter an empty house, turn on the lights and the air conditioner or heater, and sometimes cry at his mother’s vanity or wander the streets to delay coming home.

Kojima's parents began a nightly tradition of watching a film with their children; the children were not allowed to go to bed until the film had finished.