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).
Kojima distinguished in Hyoryu between passive survival and regaining a human goal: returning home. He was struck that the shipwrecked men combined physical strength, artisan memory, and cooperation to make, from driftwood and remnants, things as basic as a reservoir and ultimately a ship, and that when they left they left tools and instructions for future castaways. He saw in that two meanings of survival—enduring adversity and making it back alive—and the passing on of something human beyond mere genes.
Kojima said he loved the work of Teru Miyamoto and had read his novels exhaustively during his adolescence. While seeking escape in fanciful translated books, those novels helped him come to terms with his real, true-to-life self; he placed Kinshu as his favorite, followed by Haru no Yume and Ao ga Chiru.
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.
After returning to Japan following the freight-elevator incident, Kojima bought the DVD of Elevator to the Gallows and watched it for the first time in about forty years. The film proved different from his childhood impressions: he felt sympathy for Jeanne Moreau and realized it was not film noir to him but a hymn to love. He concluded that he had been trapped inside that movie for decades and that the real elevator accident had set in motion again the elevator that had long stood still in his heart.
During his creative work, Kojima said he sometimes suffers intense feelings of isolation, stress, and doubt. He is saved by knowing that writers, directors, artists, or other people committed to creating connections exist; their struggles become stories that relieve his loneliness. Likewise, an extraordinary work produced in a faraway country shows him that he can still keep trying.